Example

My wife today pointed out, much to the surprise of an acquaintance, that she was getting plenty of sleep despite the recent addition to the family since I give all the incessant care.

This exchange when relayed to me made me happy for some reason, a reason I didn’t realize the significance of right away, but embedded in there my wife was giving (granted not directly to me, but still there it was) some recognition of my help in making her life somewhat easier.

On one hand it’s true I enjoy being a stay at home father and despite the stresses and occasional sleepless nights, it’s something I believe well worth while and something I do in life that’s me being me for me for my sake and my life lessons. 

Yet on the other hand, I also realize that sense of happiness, well being and fulfillment was partially from hearing her recognition of my doing what I can to help her to her happiness and help her learn her life lessons, the same uxorious frame of mind that’s part of my erotic truth.

Admittedly, this is more confluence and overlap of life lessons one and two than learning to strike a balance between them, but I also think it illustrates another facet of the ‘for you is for me‘ dynamic that’s common to relationships.

Uxorious, Female Led, Other

All animals are equal – but some animals are more equal than others.
~George Orwell, Animal Farm 

I have somewhat discussed before how ‘uxorious’ is different than ‘submissive’ (on basis of ‘passion’ versus ‘power’ and on basis of ‘my disempowerment’ versus ‘her empowerment’), yet neither word seems to quite be adequate or accurate to my experience and even ‘female led’ in many ways doesn’t seem to be a very accurate symbol for our relationship. Now over the past few days I have been having an unprecedentedly wonderful conversation with my wife about a great deal many things I discuss here – mostly on the themes of differing interests and differing love symbols in our relationship and love symbol negotiation.

On one level it’s unprecedented because my wife is a very holistic, compact and immediately experiential person, that is to say not even remotely close to as unendingly reflective, introspective, philosophic and differential as I am (see compact and differentiated). She likes enjoying her relationship rather than constantly talking about it and reflecting on it – she certainly is not interested in a forum on relationships (such as She Makes the Rules) or anything else (books, CDs, other websites) about relationships of any kind, and even regarding my own blog, she perfers I engage her in (the ‘higher’ experience) of artful conversation about anything important to our relationship rather than (the ‘lower’ experience of) simply reading my opinionated monologues. (Though I honestly do not think experiencing enjoyment and reflective communication are necessarily mutually exclusive, I know there are downsides to my point of view, and since her viewpoint well suits her I naturally respect her wishes as a matter of general course.)

But on another level it’s unprecedented: Whenever I have broached the subject of a ‘female led’ relationship, she has from the very beginning maintained a fairly skeptical or even negative attitude since she prefers the way experience works things out rather than resorting to any sort of systematic set of ideological rules. And, even though I have often thought the female led symbol and dynamic could work well for me, I also know how I would need to be selective and limiting in its application and so I often hesitate to use it for us. And hesitation is not only where we agree, for my wife also admits of her dominant personality, of my deferring personality and that she does like me the uxorious, doting, and ‘foolishly fond of’ her way I am. But she appreciates that my deference is aimed at her and her happiness rather than merely at an (eroticized) power differential, or even at just the (eroticized) power dynamic, and ‘uxorious’ does not differentiate well enough between power (possibly tending as far as ‘obsequious sycophancy’) and emotion (say, the happiness ‘doting’ is ‘foolishly’ aimed at).

And so the surprising part to me is that we also agree about the lack of available accurate and adequate symbols and the cause of this lack. The labels and phrases generally used (especially on the internet) such as “female led”, “wife led”, “submissive,” “dominant”, “topping from the bottom” etc. all have the feel and indication of an inequity of personhood; they focus on gender and the relative position of power within the relationship – or the (agreed upon) restriction or enlargement of ability to directly exercise power within their relationship. (Not that I think there’s anything necessarily wrong with those who do kink on power. And as a side note: the freewill option of kinking on power is different than Orwell’s piggish cooption of power. )

My wife and I feel it’s a more holistic (and possibly a more romantic) perspective to view a relationship, regardless of the ‘dynamic’, as an emotionally functional single unit. A unit comprised of two individual parts, granted – but on the basis of emotional functionality neither is whole without the other and the two people are as equal when together (one ‘half’) as when apart (one ‘half’). Thus we want relationship symbols that are focused on this ‘equality of emotional functionality’ rather than the ‘unequal distribution of power’, and want labels and phrases without any feeling or connotation of inequity of personhood.

Even though we’re left wondering the answer to something like, as ‘submissive’ is to ‘dominant’ and female led, ‘doting’ is to _____ and _____, I do think we surely still have, and will continue to have, a relationship dynamic others are going to label ’female led’. And if in many instances the differences won’t even be worth noting or significant enough to point out – I’m also sure these are labels and phrases we just won’t be using ourselves. And lest this brouhaha over labels seem either overly exacting or too intensely important, I attach here my very first post for some fascinating perspective; perhaps like everyone, I not only want the relationship I want but also the symbols I want to represent it with.

 

Why Female Led?
December 2, 2009

They call it a female led relationship, or wife led marriage, or who knows what by someone else – I’ve seen enough terms, phrases and acronyms to realize there is no hard and fast codification. Sometimes when I think about all this, I just end up wondering why all the descriptive baggage. Let’s face it, it’s only called female (or wife or woman, or whatever) for the contrast with traditional ‘male led relationships’, or ‘husband led marriage’. Yet making either distinguishment, male or female, has always seemed unwieldy to me, perhaps because when it comes to what I want to do in my personal relationship I just don’t really care so much what is or isn’t ‘traditional’ by the majority or what even what the rest of the minority might be doing. I just want what I want. 

And as far as names go, I want to believe this defies perfect codification precisely because there are more shades, tones and variables within what people want for their personal relationships than can be accounted for in the base ideology and gendered stereotypes that lie behind such a woefully inadequate grouping of words. That is rather than simply believe it’s because so few people have ever heard ‘female led’ differentiated from the leather clad dominatrix before. Perhaps I’m really bothered by how lackluster ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ seem as excuses for the false dichotomies used to represent human experience.

And of course on the other hand, sometimes a label is just a label, just a temporary net designed to catch just enough meaning and haul it across the void between persons and sometimes what we receive isn’t quite what was sent. After all, although it is something slightly different for me, when I start describing what I want with the one I love, I still start with this thing, this concept, however it is people name it.

Fragmentation

Modern contemporary life is not conducive to being a ‘whole person’; work life, home life, and social life, must all be kept certain distances apart. And while this principle is nowhere more evident than with social networking media (e.g. people getting fired for their comments on facebook), it is also noticeable at the level of how many email accounts we have, rss readers, even how many phone numbers we can be reached at by various people for various reasons. And though  it’s my guess I live with less technology than average, I know I still keep many of my social circles separate. And that’s three different family circles, a preschool social circle (which includes more adults than children), my wife’s work circle, my old college circle, my hometown circle, an online female led circle – is it any wonder a person begins to feel… well, fragmented?

I used to think honesty was the best policy, simplicity the best fashion, spartan the best lifestyle, and by and large I still do. And though there are some people who kink on outing their private erotic lives for example, I’m not one of them; I know there are always good reasons for these sorts of separations, reasons ignored at risk of social peril, and only some perils are obvious or clearly labeled. And of course while I don’t want ‘fear of peril’ to be my primary motivating force in life, I neither want to overreact in going for greener grass, make life more whole by ‘outing’ more of it but then regret it.

My wife, when I talked to her about this, reminded me of her holistic worldview defense (mechanism) against fragmentation: ‘I tend to present as many of my worse features as I can when I first meet people, because I don’t want them to later feel as if I gave them a false bill of goods.’ I know she doesn’t exactly let all herself hang out there, all the time, everywhere, and I am fairly sure this advice isn’t going to work as well for me as it does for her, but I know also know she is more social than I am and isn’t bothered by fragmentation as much as I am either.

I know what I want is a measured response that’s tenable for me and not just a thoughtless reaction; I want a positive, life affirming and accurate guideline for me. Of course, I don’t have much luck with guidelines, so I think the only way to find adequate adjustment is slow change. And I have already begun.

Friend, Lover, Other

I was recently musing on the only opportunity I’ve ever had to make a lover out of a friend, back in high school’s dark ages, a girl who to this day I somewhat regret never having the experience of dating. Only ‘somewhat regret’ because certainly I don’t want to be anywhere other than where I am now – with who I am with now, but I liked this girl in high school, had fun with her and – and I always dated someone else.

It is commonly said one should marry their best friend, and I have alluded to this motif in thinking about the intimacy of symbols between two people in a relationship. Of course, there’s then also the ‘falling in love’ trope and the ever present theme of ‘love at first sight’. Yet I think all these guidelines exist to help assure people of some long term intimacy, viability and love symbol compatibility. And while on one hand it’s perhaps easy for me to make a straw man of the ‘marry your best friend’ idea because my wife is only my best friend now (we did not start this way) and I think we turned out wonderfully, on the other hand, neither was it love at first sight for us or any other ‘traditional’ version of ‘falling in love’.

So I wonder if what ‘guideline’ (did) work for me (and why) and what ‘guidelines’ didn’t work for me (and why) might somehow be indicative of the nature of my love, my relationship (and) or of human love in general.

For instance I know now several lesser reasons why I never dated my friend in high school: we were neither very popular and, high school dating often being about status than ‘romantic feeling’, I usually opted to try dating a more popular girl. I felt guilty and shallow about it even then, but even now, when I am constantly trying to be a better person than I am, I don’t think I would have well handled the opprobrium back then of two unpopular teenagers dating each other; children can be cruel.

Another easy reason was that I think I had difficulty (as perhaps nearly all teenagers do but also as often even adults do) separating friendship’s fun from romance’s love from lust’s simplicity, differences that then seemed very important (this was before the category of ‘friends with benefits’). But in retrospect I realize I really just had a friend who happened to be a girl; none of the available standard compatibility guidelines were functional enough (as love symbols) to say ‘I’m in love with her‘.

And this leads me back to my wife because neither did any established guideline work for me with my wife either. Fact is, when I think about it, the biggest reason I don’t really regret never dating my old high school friend is that she and I never had the fitted-ness of the numinous relationship experience that my wife and I had from very early on in our relationship. But of course, this isn’t an ‘established‘ compatibility guideline or love symbol: 

[W]hen I feel perfectly at peace with my wife, perfectly one with my wife, when I feel I was born to love her (c.f. Love’s Fate, Love’s Destiny), when I feel I am 100% there for the purpose of participating in her happiness process. And, well, I want that frame of mind for me, for my sake. It is a beautiful passionate moment, it is like getting to safely stand on the sun, it’s a powerful and numinous thing, and I want to feel this way all the time – because it’s when I most feel as if I am fulfilling my purpose in life, doing what I am supposed to be doing here on earth, learning the thing I am supposed learn here on this earth.
~OH, An Uxorious Frame of Mind

However, as sure as I am of this love symbol as a guideline for me, since it’s absent for the majority of other people I’m lost as to any significance for ‘human love in general’.

Health: Enjoying What Is

My wife has had some scary health problems recently that even now aren’t completely resolved. Fortunately, if she isn’t exactly out of the woods yet there does at least seem to be a light at the end of tunnel now (one that’s not an oncoming train). Yet there was a point where, honestly, I wasn’t sure she was going to make it. She chides me now saying I’m blowing the reality of her circumstance it a little out of proportion and here I’ll admit she may be right, but regardless – at the time I really thought her chances were the flip of a coin.

I remember very distinctly when she finally did turn the critical corner in the emergency and put the worst of the crisis behind her. While watching her sleep, I was also looking back down the abyss we had just missed and looking ahead to the choice of roads before us – and in the momentary light of how short and tenuous a thing life really is I saw that I wanted nothing more between us than full and complete intimacy – better, fuller and more. I wanted more than the merely adequate; I wanted more beauty and more love, to make the most of whatever we were going to get before “unknown unmakes us all“.

Of course, after we returned home and were trying to rest and settle back in to some semblance of a routine, it was precisely this immediacy, this impatience to have all the rest of the meaning in our lives start happening right now that led me right into a very unfortunate hour of unlistening to my wife – right when she needed me most.

I believe she has forgiven me for it, but of course I continue to feel horrible about it, and of course continue analyzing why it happened, what I could do differently to make sure it doesn’t happen again. What I’ve learned is this: you can never hurry meaning, never ‘catch up’ on missed meaning in your life. Life and meaning only move at one second per second; what’s gone is gone, and what’s to come isn’t going to come any faster because you’re impatient, or any slower because you’re fearful.

I know it’s a fairly ‘zen’ thing to say, but I’m often struck how it always seems the only tenable attitude toward life is to enjoy what there is to enjoy of the past (though not rehash, relive and dwell in the past), enjoy what there is to enjoy about the present, and, should you be among those fortunate to have more coming, enjoy what there is of the future to enjoy – when it gets here.