How Becoming Your Own Person Can Be the Thing That Makes Your Relationship Thrive
And the anxiety that this causes men who are eager to not be toxic.
One of the misconceptions of relationship therapy is that the goal is creating closeness.
Perhaps that’s true in the first few sessions, where Julia and I work to disentangle the ineffective communication strategies that couples bring into therapy—the interruptions, the criticisms, the defensiveness.
But the key to sustaining intimacy in long-term couple relationships is managing distance.
How can a relationship allow the space for each individual person to simultaneously:
Step into their own interests, personality traits, and preferences; and
Allow their partner to do the same?
Intimacy gets developed through the process of returning to each other, which ultimately requires each person to engage the world on their own terms.
When I read a book that Julia doesn’t read and I excitedly tell her about the plot or dissect the social implications of what the author attempted to communicate, that energy, combined with Julia’s investment in my excitement, builds intimacy.
When Julia talks with her best friend and tells me about the silly, profound, or supportive conversations they had, that energy, combined with my investment in Julia’s excitement and development of a dynamic support system, builds intimacy.
(I use these two examples because distance doesn’t necessarily mean geographic space.)
A growingly common dynamic that I see in couples therapy, especially with opposite sex couples, is this:
Male partner—let’s call him Pete—and female partner—let’s call her Linda—initiate couples therapy because there’s a lack of quantity and quality connection. Pete and Linda both work full time jobs, and they have three children. Their non-working lives revolve around their children—sometimes by necessity, as they may not have a support system (this is especially true for my couples who aren’t from Boston, as Boston can be brutally clannish), or their children may have higher needs due to a younger age or developmental challenges, and sometimes by choice. This is a couple where both parents spend a lot of time with their children, a growing trend amongst American two-parent opposite-sex families. Logistically speaking, there’s not a lot of wiggle room for structural changes, as Boston is especially expensive.
Realistically speaking, success for these couples revolves around increasing the quality of interactions, rather than the quantity. And while discussions about the administration of their lives—the housekeeping, the work schedules, the childcare—may keep the business of their family afloat, these conversations also suck the intimacy out of the relationship.
A common assignment that I give these couples is to have an hour-long interaction, out of the house, if possible. The following three topics are off limits:
Kids and parenting.
Home care and the division of labor.
The logistics of your job. (Although I invite conversations that delve into the meaning and purpose that your job might give you.)
I ask my couples to consider, “Who are you outside of the logistics, outside of the cog that you play in the machine of your family?”
This intervention helps couples see the other person as adults, and ultimately, as equals, rather than a role that they’re expected to play to help the family operate. The conversations that come up often revolve around inane interactions, usually having nothing to do with their partner.
Some couples reminisce about the traits and experiences that created the initial attraction, and attempt to reincorporate those into the present relationship. Other couples begin to see and celebrate the evolutions that their partners have made throughout the course of the relationship.
This intervention invites a couple to move into the practice of differentiation by acknowledging that each person is an individual that has the capacity to not be defined by the roles and stereotypes bestowed upon them.
This can be quite vulnerable for people. After all, people might have incredibly valid psychological reasons for adhering to their roles within their family. For instance, I’ve worked with lots of couples where one person experienced childhood trauma or instability, and hold onto the role of parent out of a desire to protect children from experiencing the same hardship that the parent experienced.
Even without the impact of trauma, becoming your own person is extremely hard work.
Hans Asenbaum, author of The Politics of Becoming, writes:
“Visibility affords recognition and respect and, at the same time, anxiety and defensiveness.” (p. 838).
In his article, “Whiteness, Masculinities, and Radical Democracy: Mapping Four Spaces of (Dis)appearance”, published in a 2023 edition of the Journal of Gender Studies, Asenbaum explains that the process of visibility can be especially difficult for men (and especially White straight men) because masculinity is built on the concept of invisibility. He explains,
“While white men may be right in front of our eyes, while we hear their words and perceive their actions, we do not, in general, observe their bodies or link their actions to their gender and racial identity” (p. 835).
That is, until recently, when the #MeToo movement ignited a national conversation about the intersection of privilege, sexuality, and masculinity, and the far-too-common result of nonconsensual sexual experiences.
Asenbaum moves into a conversation about how the current Republican Party (and other Western right-wing political groups) attempt to borrow public relations strategies from Civil Rights groups to suggest that the rights of men are being taken away, and that men are “victims” to feminism, globalization, and liberalism. And it’s perfectly fair to call out the massive abuses happening within the Republican Party and identity groups that support it, such as the Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal groups that Julia and I study.
What Asenbaum misses in his article is that men, and especially White men, are in fact victims. Not to feminism or globalization, but rather to the competitive demands of capitalism.
Social narratives that teach men that they are successful on Darwinian terms: Survival of the fittest.
The strongest.
The most put together and stoic.
The most convincing or driven or assertive or family focused.
Many men that I work with have recognized and experienced the harm from these competitive systems, and are desperate to not replicate the harms of prior generations. However, as we learn in Purity Culture, telling someone not to do something is not an effective strategy to create change and evolution. Telling men, say, to not be assholes, only invites more anxiety.
The process of differentiation is uniquely difficult for men because they are taught they are successful by being the best and not making mistakes. Differentiation requires messiness, experimentation, and the making of mistakes, and ensuing short-term potential impacts of those mistakes on the family system.
We talk about this and other elements of masculinity this week with Zach Wagner, author of the new book Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality.
If you’d like support in navigating the differentiation process with your partner, we’d love to help! Email us at sexvangelicals@gmail.com.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia