Trying to set things right

The issue of marital stability is an important one but is often treated simplistically on social media. The argument is often that a husband just has to be nice to his wife and she is certain to reciprocate, or else he just has to be masculine and she will revere him for life.

I was reading a particular case study recently, that of Dr Ashley Solomon, an American psychologist. She gave what seems to me to be a more typical account of modern divorce, at least amongst the professional classes: 

A few friends joked that a decade or two beyond the wedding season of life, we were now in the divorce era. As I looked around at the community of newly single women around me, that certainly seemed to be true. We weren’t all the same age, but there were some other obvious similarities. We all had children, mostly ones that were potty trained but still quite dependent on us. We all had careers, not just jobs, and we cared a lot about the work we did. And, with some particular exceptions, we had exes who by and large were decent humans, but were not the right humans for us. And, I realized, we’d all been the person in our marriages to choose to divorce.

Her circle of female friends all chose to divorce largely decent men when the youngest child was becoming semi-independent (toddler/preschool age). That is also the pattern I have observed amongst my own colleagues.

What is particularly interesting about Dr Solomon is that she is determined to make her second marriage more successful than her first, and so she gives an honest account of where she herself may have gone wrong. 

Her first insight is the most significant. She writes of her efforts to improve her own relationship skills that,

I practice seeing my partner as a whole and distinct human being with separate experiences, desires, and needs.

One of the hardest things to acknowledge about my experience of my last relationship was that I struggled significantly to honor the fullness of who he was. I knew conceptually, of course, that he was his own person, but in practice, particularly in moments of tension or intense emotion, that reality could easily disappear.

I’ve had two teachers in this area – the infamous Esther Perel and the wise Jordan Dann. Dann talks often in her work about differentiation – the ability to see our partner as distinct rather than merged. And Perel talks about the importance of holding paradox, the space where two truths can co-exist at the very same time.

If you would have asked me ten years ago if I had skills for both, I would have said yes, and I would have been wrong. When I became triggered through upset or conflict, I’d regress to a place where I could only really see my own truth. I’d need him to understand it, to validate it, and ultimately to hold it up as the final and real truth.

Growing for me has meant being able in the midst of hurt to regulate my own emotions enough to see – fully see – that there is another human on the other side whose thoughts, feelings, and beliefs were valid, even when in seeming opposition to mine. I’ll be honest, it’s annoying AF to do. But it’s been the only way to have a mature partnership.

This is sometimes referred to as solipsism - a difficulty in seeing a reality outside that of your own mind. My own theory is that it is connected to a lack of self-awareness, this being the ability to stand above your own immediate thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites - and to successfully direct and regulate these through the use of our reasoning powers. 

What I suspect is that many women, even obviously intelligent ones like Dr Solomon, can struggle with self-awareness. Their sense of self is centred more in their thoughts and feelings, rather than in the directing power of the mind standing above them, and so it is those thoughts and feelings they need validated to feel secure and "seen" in who they are.

It is not that Dr Solomon does not have self-awareness, but, as she herself puts it, when experiencing "tension" the emotions would take over and she would struggle to regulate them, so that her partner would no longer be perceived to be "distinct" but would be "merged". 

Note too the way that Dr Solomon talks about truth. She talks about "my truth". Even in her attempt to improve her understanding, the best she can offer is to try to balance out her truth with his truth. She is caught in a kind of subjectivism that is different to the way that men generally think about things. Most men would not say "well, this is my truth" - it would not make sense to men to pitch things this way. There is a truth that the reasoning power is trying to grasp, so there is either truth or falsity in doing so. 

What larger conclusion can we draw from this? Well, it is important to recognise that the level of self-awareness that a person has, whether man or woman, will run along a continuum. It will not be the same for each. I think we should acknowledge that when a woman has low self-awareness that this is likely to contribute to the difficulties present within a marriage. If she does not see him as a distinct person, but is caught within her own subjective emotional states and can only frame the marriage through these, then there will be errors in perception that he will have little control over. She might, if she truly merges him with her mind, believe that he is thinking and experiencing the same things that she is - the same unhappiness or discontent or anxiety or doubt.

I think this is why it is so important for a girl to have a loving upbringing in a stable home and with a close and supportive relationship with her father. If she is subject to her flow of emotion, then a marriage is more likely to succeed if these emotions are mostly warm and positive ones, and if there is less of the "tension" that moves a woman away from self-awareness.

The second relationship skill that Dr Solomon is working on is not expecting a husband to read her mind:

I make direct requests rather than expecting him to read my mind or anticipate my needs.

Smart people and relationship experts have been proclaiming this forever, but it took me a while to get over the hump. Writer Anne Lamott said, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.” And therapist Terry Real says, “Great relationships mean more assertion up front and less resentment on the backend.”

When I got messily honest with myself, I realized how little I actually communicated my needs to my first partner, passive aggressiveness notwithstanding...

Relationship books will tout this one often, reminding us to ask for what we want. But I want to go a layer deeper. Because for me, acknowledging the need to ask was part of the challenge. And that was hard for me – and, I believe, for many of us – because I was holding on to a fantasy in which my partner was supposed to be so attuned to me that he could know my needs without me having to make them known. We could think of this as the fantasy of having a fully emotionally available parent, someone who not only meets our needs, but anticipates them. For those of us who didn’t have this, which is perhaps most of us, this need can feel unresolved, and we might be seeking it in our partner. But, of course, because they are human and in fact, not our parents, they will stumble even with the best of intentions.

Resolving this means, to me, acknowledging the wish for a fully mind-reading, selfless partner who will meet every need before I know I have it, and then turning to my real partner and thanking him for just doing his best.

Many married men will have experienced this. The idea is "if you were the right one, you would know what I need even before I do". It does significant damage, because when the husband inevitably fails, the wife then draws the conclusion that he is not the right one after all. 

Where does this come from? Dr Solomon puts it down to a need for reparenting, and that is a very reasonable explanation. Another possible explanation is that the husband is being subject to "apotheosis". Just as men sometimes see the transcendent through the form of an actual woman ("you are an angel"), women can see men as representing some aspect of the divine. The problem is when the balance between the real all too human man and what he represents of the transcendent is lost, and he is expected to become something like a divine therapist who can wash away the sins of the world for his wife. A real husband cannot be omniscient (knowing her wants or needs before she does) or omnipotent (having the power to heal all hurts even those stemming from childhood traumas). 

Again, a woman who grew up in a loving, stable family home and who had a happy childhood will be less likely to need either reparenting or to vainly seek trauma healing from her husband. It might possibly help as well if a woman is brought up with a sincere religious belief so that she places the omniscient and omnipotent power where it truly belongs rather than with her husband.

What I'd like to finish with is the importance of men learning to harness their self-awareness in order to take control of a culture and guide it toward the good.

When we look at a workplace culture it is considered acceptable for there to be a mission for that company, and for there to be professional standards for all employees to respect and adhere to, and even consequences for those employees who act in ways that damage the company and its mission. There exists, in other words, a "form" or "shape" to the company and its culture that people who sign on to that company, and who expect to benefit from it, must adhere to.

I don't think it's surprising that women are, in modern life, often more successful in their role of employees of a company than of being wives. It is because there is a clear form to workplace life, one that gives external direction to what must be done to succeed within that culture. In a corporate culture it is expected that we self-regulate our thoughts, emotions and actions to serve the larger mission of that company.

But in modern family life? This is now understood to be the realm of pure emotion. And so a lack of self-awareness becomes fatal, because there is no external form or shape to keep things in check. It becomes a more chaotic and unstable realm, despite its importance to the good of the individual and the good of the larger community.

How can the family have better shape? Well, we could re-emphasise the significance of the mission of each family. Part of that would be a more positive view of the "offices" of husband and wife and father and mother, i.e., an understanding that these roles allow us to express aspects of our manhood and womanhood that then fulfil a part of our telos in life - our ultimate purposes. 

It would help also if men were encouraged to make the best use of their own faculty for self-awareness, so that they could assume some degree of leadership within the family, one which requires a level of maturity and wisdom to truly achieve.

A genuinely religious dimension might also help. If we are motivated in our duties to other members of our families by a love of God and a desire to serve God, and therefore a deeper sense of doing what is right, then there will be a more stable form to family life.

Finally, it would help if some of the politically motivated attacks on men were to cease. A woman with low self-awareness is always going to have problems with authority because she doesn't have the sense that there is a logos embedded within reality, and she will not then see that a vision of the good might be based on objective reality. And so any assertion of shape or form might seem to her an external imposition rather than something she can discern as an aspect of her own reality. So low self-awareness women have a choice. They can rebel along Jezebel lines or they can submit to something despite it seeming to be external to them. 

Of course, it matters that what they submit to represents a genuine good. And, if it is a genuine good, it matters that these women can respect the men who attempt to lead with it. That is made difficult when there is a "man bad, woman good" narrative, as we currently have, or when there is an assumption that all social interactions are based on the pursuit of self-interest. Men need to act for the good of the communities they belong to, including their families, and to be respected for doing so, if we wish to give family life a shape that pure emotion cannot achieve. 

Self-awareness: an Achilles heel of liberalism?

The sociologist Robert Nisbet, writing in 1953, blamed much of the decline in the 1900s on the liberalism inherited from the 1800s. He characterised this liberalism as a belief that "natural" man, once shorn of conventional morality, had the "innate resources" as an atomised individual to pursue truth, happiness and justice.

Nisbet noted that this is in contrast to the philosophy of Edmund Burke, who famously wrote in criticising revolutionary France that:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.

I agree with Burke but would like to sketch, rather tentatively, an argument that this Burkean position can be taken much further.  It is not just the private stock of reason that is too small in each man, but even more significantly the stock of self-awareness. Liberalism, in other words, assumes that each individual has sufficient self-awareness to successfully pursue an autonomous life course. I think this assumption needs to be, at the very least, questioned.

What is self-awareness? I consider it to be that quality of mind that allows us to step outside of and observe our own fleeting thoughts, feelings and impulses. 

Self-awareness is a significant attribute to possess because it allows us to have a stable sense of self. Imagine if all you are conscious of are your immediate feelings and thoughts. You could still respond to these, but they would continually change and you would not have a strong sense of an overriding stable centre of who you are.

Are there people who lack a sense of self? Yes. As strange as it may seem, I have known people who were curious that I had a sense of self, given that they lacked one. They wanted to know what it was like.

Self-awareness also seems to be part of what allows us to be aware of others as distinct entities with distinct perspectives. After all, if I myself lack a self-directing oversight of my own mental processes, then it will be difficult to see others as having this quality of personality. It is possible that I will become solipsistic in the sense of seeing the other person only in reference to the state of my own mind. 

Ashley Solomon is an American woman whose first marriage failed and in attempting to think through how to make her second marriage a success she identified solipsism as a problem she had to overcome:

I practice seeing my partner as a whole and distinct human being with separate experiences, desires, and needs.

One of the hardest things to acknowledge about my experience of my last relationship was that I struggled significantly to honor the fullness of who he was. I knew conceptually, of course, that he was his own person, but in practice, particularly in moments of tension or intense emotion, that reality could easily disappear.

I’ve had two teachers in this area – the infamous Esther Perel and the wise Jordan Dann. Dann talks often in her work about differentiation – the ability to see our partner as distinct rather than merged. And Perel talks about the importance of holding paradox, the space where two truths can co-exist at the very same time.

If you would have asked me ten years ago if I had skills for both, I would have said yes, and I would have been wrong. When I became triggered through upset or conflict, I’d regress to a place where I could only really see my own truth. I’d need him to understand it, to validate it, and ultimately to hold it up as the final and real truth.

Growing for me has meant being able in the midst of hurt to regulate my own emotions enough to see – fully see – that there is another human on the other side whose thoughts, feelings, and beliefs were valid, even when in seeming opposition to mine. I’ll be honest, it’s annoying to do. But it’s been the only way to have a mature partnership.

What I suspect is that self-awareness is not given to everyone equally. There is an ascending order that perhaps goes something like this:

a. The lowest level are those who have no sense of self. Such people struggle to direct their thoughts and impulses and so can be either impulsive or subject to thinking errors. They will tend to have unstable relationships of all kinds.

b. The next level up are those who do have a sense of self but tend, to some degree, toward solipsism. They struggle to connect to an external reality outside of their own mind. They therefore lack an orientation toward objective truth, using language more to manipulate toward self-chosen ends. They tend to "externalise" in the sense of having an external locus of control - they will not think of themselves as being able to successfully self-direct, nor to be accountable for what happens to themselves or to the communities they belong to. One expression of this inability to self-direct will be a reliance on, say, therapists for external guidance, even when not in a crisis. 

c. At a higher level of self-awareness are those capable of rationally self-disciplining the processes of their own minds - their impulses, drives, thoughts, appetites and feelings. Here there is an internal locus of control, and some ability to direct the self toward higher ends. There is a beginning of self-knowledge at this level.

d. The highest level is a metaphysical awareness of the place of the self within a cosmic order. It requires a sincere effort to understand the truth of the reality we inhabit, & is helped by a careful reading of a wisdom literature inherited from past generations. 

Where do most people sit in this hierarchy? I am going to bring down fire upon myself for saying this, but a significant number of women seem to sit at Level B, whilst many men are attempting to make progress at Level C. However, this is very much a generalisation. There do exist women at Level C, but they fall into two groups. There are those who adopt a kind of masculine life path requiring self-mastery and self-discipline. This can have the negative consequence of a loss of feminine identity, which then undermines the self rather than raising it. There are other women, however, who seem able to hold the two things together: an orientation toward their own feminine self that includes prudential self-direction.

I would suggest as well that more is expected of men when it comes to self-awareness, as men are more specifically tasked with representing logos within human life (by logos I mean something like the principle of divine order that can be discerned within given reality). Men too are more expected to act for the larger good, i.e., to find a point at which things can be harmonised within a common good, which itself requires a higher level of accountability and self-awareness. It is also difficult to see any civilisation prospering without a certain number of men operating, at least partially, at Level D. 

So, to bring this back to my starting point, the issue then is whether those "optimistic" nineteenth century liberals were correct that natural man has the innate resources to successfully and rationally pursue truth, justice and happiness at a purely individual level.

I don't think so, in part, because the level of self-awareness is unevenly distributed and without it there is a difficulty in operating as a self-directing, autonomous agent. Furthermore there is an entropy written into reality that tends to draw things apart rather than organising them into integrated wholes. So even the best individuals will struggle at times to maintain an integrity of self.

What this means is that the natural man with his innate resources will most usually not be adequate to the task. Not only will he need grace, but some level of external discipline, guidance and exhortation, provided for instance through social norms, i.e., the "conventions" so looked down on by the nineteenth century liberals, as well as by the influence of culture, custom and education.