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Power is not limited to leaders or organizations; it doesn’t require outright acts of domination. It’s a basic force in every social interaction. Power defines the way we relate to each other. It dictates whether you get listened to. It determines whether your needs take priority or get any attention at all.The problem for romantic partners is that power as normally exercised is a barrier to intimacy. It blunts sensitivity to a partner and precludes emotional connectivity. Yet this connection is what human beings all crave, and need. It satisfies deeply.But there’s only one path to intimacy. It runs straight through shared power in relationships. Equality is not just ideologically desirable, it has enormous practical consequences. It affects individual and relationship well-being. It fosters mutual responsiveness and attunement. It determines whether you’ll be satisfied or have days (and nights) spiked with resentment and depression. “The ability of couples to withstand stress, respond to change, and enhance each other’s health and well-being depends on their having a relatively equal power balance,” reports Carmen Knudson-Martin of Loma Linda University. Equality, psychologists agree, is the world’s best antidote to isolation. It’s just not easy to attain or to sustain.
Intimacy is nothing new. Seeking support, feeling close, forming strong emotional bonds, and expressing feelings are essential to the human experience. Both physical and psychological well-being, in fact, depend on the ability to do so.But where we place intimacy in our lives certainly is new. The intensification of individualism and the development of the love match—ultrarecent phenomena on the human timeline—concentrate inti-macy in couplehood. Until the 20th century, says social historian Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, intimacy was dispersed among wide family and social circles. The closeness mothers and daughters and even mothers and sons enjoyed, as well as siblings and cousins, would be considered enmeshment today. Saying “I love you” to a cousin or even a neighbor was commonplace. So was displacing a husband to spend a night in bed sharing secrets with an old friend come to town. “We have upped our expectations of intimacy but downgraded our definition of from whom it is expected and to whom it is owed,” says Coontz. “We’ve taken all the personal feelings and expectations from other relationships and put them onto the couple relationship.”So much have social lives shrunk that men today tend to have only one confidante—their wife. That makes men especially reactive to their wives’ emotions—notably their negative emotions. That’s not to say that wives are not reactive to men’s feelings, but having a wider social network allows women more opportunities to calibrate their emotional lives.
The place of intimacy is not all that’s changing. For a long time, the prevailing definition of intimacy has revolved around the sharing of feelings and insecurities. Necessary as it is, it is no longer sufficient; confiding can be confining. It makes little allowance for individual growth, a requirement in long-term relationships. And individual growth fuels not only the expansion of love but the sexual desire and eroticism increasingly expected if relationships are to satisfy for a lifetime.“Intimacy rests on two people who have a capacity to both listen and speak up, who have the courage to bring more and more of their full selves into the relationship,” says psychologist Harriet Lerner. “Both need equal power in defining what they want and what they really think and believe. But you have to know you can leave a relationship. If you truly believe you can’t survive without a relationship, you have no power to really be yourself within it.”Too often, one partner gives up too much self—core values and priorities become compromised under relationship pressures; one person does more than a fair share of giving in around decision making or gives the other’s goals priority. “Historically speaking, that person has been the woman,” says Lerner. “I see it more both ways now that women are more economically independent. It takes courage to act on your own behalf.” What often happens, she says, is that people accommodate, accommodate, accommodate, grow to resent it, and then fly out of the relationship when they needed to reclaim their power much earlier. “They needed to say much earlier, ‘I don’t want you to treat me this way and I won’t be in the conversation when you talk to me this way.’ ”Because intimacy is more important than ever, relationship equality is more necessary than ever.
In marriage, Schwartz says, it applies to division of labor, joint decision making, and especially license to speak up. “Respect means that someone takes my humanity into consideration and sees me as worthy in my own right of a positive and collaborative relationship. I’m understood as a human being worthy of occupying the same kind of space in the world as you. Why is cleaning toilets good only for me but not for you? OK, I’ll clean the toilets and you’ll throw out the dog poop; then we both know we have dirty jobs we do for the collective well-being of the relationship.”There’s no single objective measure of fairness. People can accept unequal division of labor—as long as they have influence and are appreciated and not demeaned. “Unfairness does not always equal unhappiness,” she says.By contrast, power differences afflict almost all distressed heterosexual couples, and most occur along gender lines, at least in the United States, reports Knudson-Martin. It’s not that it results from outright acts of domination. In the press of daily life, couples slip into society-based patterns that favor men’s needs and desires in ways that seem unquestionable. “Distressed relationships tend to be organized around the interests of the more powerful, often without conscious intention,” Knudson-Martin reports in Family Process. Or partners are caught in a power struggle in which one tries in vain to influence the other, and so they are locked in argument, often about one issue over and over again—a positive sign, some experts believe, that a partner hasn’t completely sacrificed identity.For Knudson-Martin, the mutuality of influence that is so central to equality hinges on reciprocal engagement. In her studies of the process, she has found that each partner, by being aware of and interested in the needs of the other, allows the other to feel not only important but supported in the relationship.With identity and worth affirmed, partners then can open themselves to being changed by the other, to accept influence. They also feel safe enough to reveal their innermost thoughts, express concerns, even admit weakness, uncertainty, or mistakes in a partner’s presence. Mutual vulnerability becomes a high-water mark of bringing one’s whole self into a relationship.Knudson-Martin finds that when power is equal, partners also engage in direct communication strategies. They can ask straightforwardly for what they want. They don’t use the children as their mouthpieces. They don’t devote hours to doping out the mood of their partner before broaching a topic.Image: Heart shaped collage madke of king and queen of hearts cards
Yasu + JunkoBeyond Manipulationtraight talk is essential to shared power, insists relational therapist Terry Real, who is based in Boston. But for some females, that can be dicey at first—it requires giving up the only form of power they have long been confined to practice. “The indirect exertion of power through manipulation is part of the traditional female role,” says Real. “Men don’t like being manipulated, and it’s one of the few legitimate reasons they don’t trust women. That women exert indirect power because direct power has historically been blocked doesn’t make it any less ugly.” There’s a significant reward for direct communication, Knudson-Martin finds—the intensification of intimacy, leading to increased relationship satisfaction.Equal partnership has another critical feature—shared responsibilities for the relationship itself. The more equal the relationship, the more responsibility both partners feel to make it work or get it on track if it is off. Most commonly, Knudson-Martin says, distressed heterosexual couples walk through her door and only one partner—guess which one—is making the effort to understand what is going on. “The men say they want the relationship to work, but they haven’t internalized the idea that part of their job is to figure out how to preserve it.”To create a truly shared relationship, Stephanie Coontz notes, women have to loosen their hold on a cherished psychological tradition—emotional sharing. A demand for the constant confiding of feelings as the mark of closeness, she contends, is a strictly female view of intimacy.Centering intimate relations around the sharing of feelings is a legacy from the gendered division of labor that prevailed in the 19th century, when men ventured into the new, impersonal world of commerce and women stayed home, says Coontz. “We don’t recognize how much of the exploration of feelings arose from female powerlessness. As women, we became skilled in reading the emotions of others in our lives as a way to anticipate them or move them in other directions. And now we demand that kind of intimacy of men without realizing that we took up such emotional specialization precisely because we didn’t have any power to just say, ‘Hey, this is what I’d like to do.’”
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