The morning started badly over coffee.
He left the house early to get a cup from our favorite shop and it wasn’t open yet. I called to find out where he was, and when he told me, I made a practical suggestion. Go to the store, get a bag, we’re nearly out anyway, it’s on the list. He didn’t want to. He wanted the cup he’d already decided on, the one he knew would be better than anything we make at home.
He didn’t say that.
He went along with my suggestion, and then came home with an energy I could feel from the driveway. Nothing was said. Everything was communicated. Eventually he apologized for what he knew I could feel from him.
I carried that apology in my body for about an hour. Long enough to notice what I was doing, and long enough to choose something different. So I started the conversation myself, still early in the morning. It went deep and it took a while, and when it was over I went back to bed and cried it out. Still morning. That is how fast this can turn, once you decide not to sit in it silently.
What came out of that conversation is the thing I cannot stop thinking about, because it is the other half of everything I have written about martyrdom.
If this is the first thing of mine you have read, start with How Martyrdom Keeps Women Small. That piece is the pattern itself, how it gets learned and what it costs the woman living it. This one is what it costs the person beside her.
The pattern has a name, and it takes two people
Therapist Harriet Lerner described it in The Dance of Anger as the overfunctioner and the underfunctioner. One person takes responsibility for everything, including the other person’s feelings, decisions and problems. The other slips out of that territory, not because they are lazy or weak, but because someone else is already standing in it. When one person carries the full weight, the other learns to put theirs down.
I have been the overfunctioner in my marriage. Not because I wanted power. Because I learned early that being useful was the way to be safe, and then I got very, very good at it.
What I could not see, for twenty eight years, is what it cost him to live next to that.
What happens to the person who is never given room
If you are never the one who decides, you stop practicing deciding. If your suggestion will be improved on, you stop suggesting. If your preference is a small inconvenience, you learn to keep it to yourself until it leaks out sideways as a mood your wife can feel in the driveway.
Researchers who study couples call the most common version of this the pursue and withdraw cycle. Sue Johnson, who developed emotionally focused therapy, identified it as the most frequent pattern in distressed couples, and her point is that both people are driven by the same fear rather than by indifference. One moves toward to get connection. The other moves away to stay safe. Each move makes the other one stronger.
Terry Real, who works specifically with men, describes something he calls covert depression. Not sadness on the surface, but withdrawal, irritability, flatness and loss of drive, all covered over by functioning. A man can look completely fine and be quietly going dark inside. I am not diagnosing my husband. I am saying that the person who stops asking for what he wants does not stay neutral. He pays for it somewhere.
Why this reaches into desire
This is the part of our conversation that undid me.
Family systems theory has a concept called differentiation of self, Murray Bowen’s term for the capacity to stay connected to another person while holding your own separate self. David Schnarch applied it directly to intimacy, and his argument is uncomfortable and true: desire requires two selves. You cannot long for someone who has dissolved into managing you. Attraction needs the other person to be a separate person with their own wants, their own direction, and the ability to say no.
If I am the one handling everything, then I am not a partner to be wanted. I am the administration of his life. And no one has ever desired their own administration.
The correction I had to make to my own story
My first instinct, after that conversation, was to take the whole thing onto my shoulders. My martyrdom cost him his confidence. My pattern made him smaller.
That instinct is the pattern itself, wearing a better costume. It found a way to stay in charge of everything, including the blame.
Here is what is actually true. We built an arrangement together over twenty eight years. I moved first because moving first felt safe, and he let me because letting me kept the peace. Neither of us did that to the other on purpose. Both of us adapted, and both of us paid.
You cannot liberate someone by taking responsibility for their liberation. I can only change my half. He can only change his. What I can do is stop filling the space before he gets to it.
And one thing that must be said plainly
This is not a lesson about a woman making herself smaller so a man can feel large. That would be the martyrdom pattern again, one level up, teaching women to shrink in the name of someone else’s growth.
The change is not smaller. It is off the hook. I am not going to manage what he wants. I am going to ask him directly and then stay in the room for the answer, including when the answer is inconvenient to me.
And there is an important caveat, because someone reading this will need it. If you have asked directly, repeatedly, and been ignored, then your exhaustion is not a communication problem to fix in yourself. It is information about the relationship. This work is for women whose partners can meet them. Not for women looking for one more way to blame themselves.
What we are practicing now
Small and unglamorous, which is how this always goes.
- He states a preference without softening it, and I do not improve on it
- I ask for what I want in one sentence, without a paragraph of justification attached
- When I feel that energy in the room, I ask what it is, instead of absorbing it and calling it intuition
- We both stay in the room after the answer, which is the hardest part
Twenty eight years of pattern does not unwind in one conversation. But it got seen, by both of us, before the day had really started, and neither of us ran from it.
A resource for men
I wrote this from my side of the bed, and I would not want to leave a man reading it with nowhere to take it. My friend Zachary Downs works with men, and I trust him. Healing Horizons is his counseling practice, and it is built for people who have been carrying shame, hidden patterns and disconnection on their own for a very long time.
If you are the one who has kept your preferences to yourself for so long that you have forgotten you are allowed to have them, that is worth saying out loud to someone who does this work for a living. You will find him at Healing Horizons Counseling.
If you recognize yourself in this, the quiz is where I would start. Fifteen statements, three minutes, and it shows you which shape the pattern takes in your life.
This is the piece I did not plan to write. It is the other half of the ledger, and it is the argument for doing this work even if you never call it martyrdom, and even if nobody in your house ever uses the word.
References
- Lerner, H. (1985). The Dance of Anger. Harper and Row. Over and under functioning in intimate relationships.
- Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Differentiation of self.
- Schnarch, D. (1997). Passionate Marriage. Norton. Desire and differentiation.
- Johnson, S. (2008). Hold Me Tight. Emotionally focused therapy and the pursue and withdraw cycle.
- Real, T. (1997). I Don’t Want to Talk About It. Covert depression in men.
A handout you can use
If you want to sit with someone you love and help them see the pattern, this is the two page handout I use. The front speaks to the divine masculine, the back to the divine feminine, and each side gives you what to notice, what to ask, and what to say.
