Dear Sisters,
The modern world is hard on marriages, and modern marriage is especially hard on heterosexual women. One result of this is that business is booming for marriage therapists and couples counselors. You may have noticed that your in-boxes and socials are flooded with ads for podcasts by people who call themselves divorce coaches, books about how to convince your husband to “share the load,” and expensive retreats in exotic locations that claim to help couples “realign your hearts and rediscover connection.”
I’ll give you one guess as to which partner in these struggling marriages is reading the book on her lunch break, listening to the podcast while folding laundry, and researching the retreat after driving the kids to soccer practice.
In fact, just about all of these products and services are created by, and marketed to, women. The assumption is always that if a heterosexual marriage isn’t working, it’s on the woman to do the work to fix it.
The books and workshops promise that if you just learn to understand your own attachment style, and also learn to understand your husband’s attachment style, and then ALSO learn to communicate your needs in a way that flawlessly honors both of your attachment styles, your husband may finally be able to love you in the way you deserve to be loved.
Celebrity therapists counsel women to educate ourselves about the psychological and neurological bases of sexual pleasure, become familiar with how our own bodies receive pleasure, learn how to communicate those preferences to our husbands without bruising their egos, and then patiently endure bad or unwanted sex for as long as it takes our partner to get up to speed on the exact location of the clitoris.
Proponents of the Fair Play model, while well-intentioned, seem to honestly believe that asking women to convince our husbands to sort through and fairly distribute ONE HUNDRED CHORE CARDS is somehow going to trigger a wave of enlightenment amongst men that they need to actually participate in the unpaid labor of running a household. Instead, it usually results in more unpaid labor and, ultimately, more disappointment for us.
Do you know one man who has done this amount of unpaid, expensive, time-consuming self-work in order to justify his relationship wants and needs?
Here’s the thing: Women are allowed to just want what we want in our relationships. We don’t have to justify our wants and needs by researching our love language or Enneagram type. We don’t need to become worthy of love and respect by identifying and healing every childhood attachment wound. We are not required to waste our wild and precious lives researching methods of convincing our partners to stop exploiting our time and energy and finally do their fair share.
You already know what your heart, soul, and body want. Reach out if you think it would help to talk about it.
With love and solidarity,
Sheryl