Can We Forgive Men?

A post election day counseling session

Hello friends.

I am so, so sorry. This is a lot.

I have a quick story for you.

I met my husband when I was only 19 years old. We just celebrated 25 years together. Of those 25 years, the hardest months occurred in 2022 and 2023.

It's strange to reflect on how events in one’s own life fit the curve of history. It feels impersonal somehow, like I'm an animated statistic rather than a messy, sweaty human being.

But as I look back, it's undeniable that we started to experience new frictions under the strain of lockdown, when mothers all over the country were unleashing primal screams over the unequal division of domestic labor and the mental load.

And, as it happens, shit really hit the fan for us more or less right after the Dobbs decision came down.

This has been called a gender gap election. That's a bit too binary for me. My queer and trans friends showed up for Harris like crazy. It probably makes more sense to call it a referendum on the patriarchy.

And I fucking hate it. I hate that we still have to fight the patriarchy. I hate that we had to try to beat an adjudicated rapist by dragging bloody, dead women in front of the body politic and saying : here, please, we are human beings, you might even be related to one of us, please care.

I hate that we failed.

I understand that this may be specifically liberal white-lady outrage. Other communities have been dealing with this feeling of being dehumanized and devalued for a long time. The phrase Black Lives Matter expresses a feeling very similar to this. Palestinians have certainly expressed it. Missing and murdered Indigenous women. Many more.

My mother, who was 21 when Roe became law, asked me on the phone the other day: “Do women know how much men hate them?” My mother, who is from North Carolina and once wrote, “In the South all the big questions are left open: was slavery wrong, is Elvis dead, are women people?” She's been married 45 years, by the way.

My husband knows women are people. So does my dad.

But there are many things about the framework of heterosexual marriage that can be very trying, even when two people love each other very much and work earnestly to resist the scripts imposed by society.

I felt the fundamental unfairness when I was going through two years of fertility treatments, followed by pregnancy, labor, postpartum, and breastfeeding and he… wasn't. We both wanted the kids but it was way harder on my body and there is no way to ever make that equal.

And I felt it in a different way during the pandemic, which I've written about in The Stolen Year.

And I feel something similar when I show up in a climate space, or a parenting space, and it is mostly women. Which is always.

#NotAllMen. But how to not take it out on the specific man in front of you when being a woman in the world, and especially a mother, feels so categorically unfair?

And again, how to not be debilitated from our anger at the fellow citizens who seem to hold all the power and stand against our very right to live?

N.b.: This isn’t about holding hands and singing Kumbaya with people who clearly don’t care if we live or die. And nor am I holding up the value of staying married in the abstract. Boundaries are necessary. And I'm on record saying rage has its purpose.

But not being consumed by anger and bitterness is still important, even when you are loving at a far far distance.

The Buddhist teaching is that being angry is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.

In our dark passage, we went to couples counseling. We read a lot of books. We went on retreats and hit pillows. We stayed up through harrowing, late nights very much like this one.

And here are some of the lessons I'm still absorbing that I think could be helpful as we try like hell to go forward as a country, to remember what we love about the home and lives we have made here, to even out the balance of power, to protect our children, to block as much harm as we can, and to reconnect to the Earth itself.

• Esther Perel says that when facing a decision or dilemma, where there is by definition some ambivalence, couples externalize their internal tension by taking opposite sides of an argument, driving each other further and further apart.

I see an analogue to the dynamic of polarization in our national politics, where we make the other side into the enemy instead of fully experiencing our uncomfortable feelings. One side says climate change isn't a problem and the other side says it's all the fault of the evil billionaires and corporations, and what we're not saying is : this is scary, this is chaotic, and yet I'm somehow not ready to make radical changes to my life to try to stop it.

• The Gottmans say that 69% of conflicts in a marriage are unresolvable. They must be managed, not resolved. So our conflict management skills become paramount.

• Within conflict, the Four Horsemen of marital apocalypse are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

Of those, contempt, which comes from a pose of moral superiority, is the most destructive. And wow do I own that personally, and also see happening in politics on the left. Victimization breeds contempt.

They advise an exercise called “dreams within conflict” where you seek to understand the deep symbolic needs your partner is expressing when they dig into a position.

This is a kind of enlightened imaginative empathy that also works well in the political and communal practice of nonviolence—provided you have the spoons, the energy, for it.

• Terrence Real does an amazing job explaining how toxic masculinity and particularly the myth of rugged individualism destroy heterosexual partnerships and cause misery.

He talks about how, in close relationship, we can lower each other's stress levels and co-regulate each other; by the same token, the people we love can also cause us enormous pain. In fact, considering how we evolved as social beings, he questions whether the individual is the proper unit of mental health in the first place.

He sounds almost mystical when he talks about “letting go of the delusion of individualism and opening up to ecological wisdom.” In this case, he’s talking about the ecology of a partnership, but this insight works at every level from a family to a planet.

Marriage has been my most important dojo. It's been the tree I've planted and watered, the tree that's sheltered me, the tree I've harvested and the tree I've climbed; my space to fly and my nest to land in. I know my husband feels the same way.

So I want to believe in progress toward more skillful coexistence, even through searing conflict. I've experienced it on a personal level. Right now my only strategy is hope.