Better than None

"It takes a damn good man to be better than none." - Lee Byrd and Yvonne Kranz in the For Women Who Do Too Much Calendar (October 20, 1997).

Day 162. Are we there yet? Is it over yet? Can I quit can I stop am I done?

This blog has been on my mind for weeks. I've been avoiding it because it is complex and enigmatic. I don't want to take it on. But the issue has appeared, in one way or another, amidst about 90% of my case load at work. When the universe is screaming something at that decibel level, it is hard to ignore. I haven't yet figured out what it has to do with Buddhism, though I'm sure the solution lurks at the intersection of acceptance and non-attachment. That is where all solutions lie.

Couples around me are disintegrating like coffee grounds in a compost pile. Friends, friends of friends, clients, clients' friends, and numerous others who are no more than one degree of separation from me are splitting up. Not to mention my own relationship conundrum. It appears that my generation is experiencing a colossal collision of gender roles. Couples a generation older have foreclosed on traditional, stereotypical roles with firm parameters and explicit expectations. Women cook and clean and arrange and organize and remember and celebrate and nurture and care for and attend and participate and commemorate and accommodate. Men sit in their chairs and criticize the way the women do things, while swearing they can't live without them. The arrangement is outdated and unbalanced, but at least everyone knows the rules.

Couples a generation (or two) younger are coming of age with exposure to exponentially increased challenges to traditional gender roles. They watch tampon commercials together, casually say "condom" in any setting, purchase baby slings with straps long enough for Dad, and earn in an economy where the wage differential has gone from women making 72 cents on the male dollar to 76 cents (if that ain't an optimistic indicator, I don't know what is! And it's only 2010 A.D.) Men go to supermarkets alone. Girls take vacations together. Forty years ago, Gloria Steinem told us (in between setting her bras afire) that when women achieve economic independence, men will change. Staying with your man because you want to rather than have to is a drastically different scenario. Opens up a hell of a lot of options.

My generation is caught in the crossfire. We watch our dads sit in their chairs and complain while our mothers scurry around them (and complain). Meanwhile, we listen to Bionce sing "You should have put a ring on it" and watch women in professional sports leagues and judge's robes. Through conversations with countless women who do therapy with countless other women, I'm identifying some emerging truths. The rules are shifting. We aren't willing to turn into our mothers. Our mates desperately cling to the old rules. Can we blame them? Left unchallenged, they are the ones that would get to sit in their chairs and continue to have their truths be truer, their methods be righter, their opinions be weightier, their narcissism be legitimate, their entitlement be deserved, the wounds they inflict be justified. Why would they want to change? For centuries, they have been the benefactors of the system. The burden of change has always been left to the wronged. White people didn't voluntarily get up to offer Rosa Parks a seat.

I teach my clients "manspeak," or, as I like to call it "manguage." It goes something like this: "Honey, I work outside the home the same number of hours you do, and I bring home 52% of our household income. Can you please explain to me, in logical terms, the rationale for your expectation that I alone also spend two to three hours per night on household tasks?" A brilliant client with whom I've worked for several years blew me away with a response she gave her verbally abusive and explosive husband over the weekend. She called him back after he hung up on her and said, in a neutral and kind tone, "Please don't hang up on me. You think you are right all of the time. Sometimes you are not. Let's talk about this more when I get home. Good-bye."

My partner is muddled by my increasing unwillingness to adhere to traditional female roles, particularly the one dictating that I passively accept his every utterance as Truth. He has no precedent for a man and woman discussing things like mutual grownups speaking from a level playing field. It is much more familiar if the woman wilts in a puddle of tears so that he can comfort her while nestling smugly in his conviction that she is irrational and emotional and he is right. It bewilders and agitates him because, at heart, he is a good and logical man. He squirms when he cannot produce logical answers to questions I pose such as, "How can you be more of an expert on my feeling states and observations than I am?" He doesn't like it when I point out how he responds to a comment about the noise our tandem derailleur makes when it is issued by a male teammate, while ignoring the exact same observation from me two minutes earlier. He has no response when we are at a social function and I ask him to count how many times my male colleagues are addressed as "Dr. so-and-so" while me and my female business partners, having earned the title of "Dr." in the exact same field, are addressed by our first names (or worse). Incidentally, the count is inevitably in the double digits. There is a high likelihood I will remain single. Men my age who reside in Oklahoma don't like it when I point out these truths.

I will not apologize for seeing and speaking and writing about things happening before my very eyes. I am not a man hater. I am not a raging feminist. I believe in romantic love and the beauty of mates carving out a union that celebrates and benefits them both. Loving kindness has and always will be the Way. I meditate on non-attachment every day. And there are some aspects of present Reality that I am not willing to passively accept. Because I believe they are wrong.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc