“You know,” my boyfriend said one night over a lovely dinner. “Once my contract’s up at NIH, I should really start thinking about going home to Iran.” He said this casually, as if offering up a random observation, not dropping a ticking time bomb square in my lap.
After a long day, I was fried from reading stacks of dry toxicological studies at the K-Street office where I worked, a task that, even during the best of times, left me wishing I were blind. I’d never really liked chemistry. I’d taken it up as my major only because I’d wanted to impress some guy. Some other guy, who happened to be in love with a chemist. Now here I was, on a daily basis, summarizing the effects of fluoric acid on aardvarks when splashed in the eye. My boyfriend’s comment, however, kicked me awake. “How long before you finish up your project?”
“Nine, maybe ten months, depends.” He leaned back against the wall and stretched his legs languidly in front of him.
“What do you want to do about us?” I tried to sound casual, to cover the stink of terror in my voice. We’d been back and forth on the marriage thing for the nearly two years we’d been living together. Some days he couldn’t imagine life without me, others, well….
“I’m not sure yet. We’ve got plenty of time to decide.”
In the bathroom that evening, toothpaste dripping from my lips, I took a hard look in the mirror at my 23-year-old self.
From the outside I looked like I had it going on— reasonably good-looking, college-educated with a decent paying job, lots of friends— but on the inside, things were pretty grim. I was a floater, unsure of my own opinions or goals, an imitation adult who was still looking for a Daddy to show me the way.
I allowed the thought to come— What will I do if he leaves me? I couldn’t admit defeat and go back home. There wasn’t a soft cushion to fall back on in Connecticut, not with two unhappy parents. Sure, I could stay on in D.C., get my own apartment, build a successful career, develop some satisfying hobbies, but that would require ripping my obsessive focus off of him and coming up with a plan.
I could feel the panic bubbling up from below. I had nine or ten months to win this man over before he sauntered off to Iran and, quite frankly, I didn’t think I had what it took to pull it off organically. What little I knew about myself, I didn’t find particularly loveable: why should he?
Atop the toilet tank— covered in one of those awful blue, elasticized rugletts— I kept my makeup bag. Sliding the zipper open, I withdrew a pill pack and ran my index finger along the raised circle of pink and blue tablets. I popped one of the pills through its foil membrane and studied it for a few moments before dropping it, ceremonially, into the bowl and flushing.
“It’s OK,” he said three months later when I announced my pregnancy. “Really, I didn’t mean to blame you. I’m sure it’s not your fault.”
I threw my arms around his neck and buried my wet face into his chest. I heaved a sigh of relief, not because he was being so gracious, so generous in his estimation of me, but because I hadn’t been sure if my ploy was actually going to work.“We’ll get married,” he said. “I suppose we’ve got no choice.”
So, imagine my chagrin when I realized that Dr. Laura Schlessinger wrote a book about my life, entitled 10 Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives , and I’ve yet to receive a royalty. Published in 1994, I must have picked it up the first time shortly after my divorce. I’d bought it because it neatly outlined the 10 ways I’d fucked my life up right on the back of the book:
1. Stupid Attachment: Looking to the context of a man to find and define yourself
2. Stupid Courtship: Becoming a beggar, not a chooser, in the dating ritual because you are desperate to have a man.
3. Stupid Devotion: Finding yourself driven to love, and suffer, and succor (or is that “sucker”?) in vain.
4. Stupid Passion: Having sex too soon, too romantically, setting yourself up to be burned.
5. Stupid Cohabitation: Lying to yourself and living with him because you hope he’ll want you.
6. Stupid Expectations: Using marriage as a quick fix for low or no self-esteem.
7. Stupid conception: Using biology misguidedly as a jump-start for love, personal growth, and commitment.
8. Stupid Subjugation: Allowing you and your children to be held hostage by your own obsessive need for security and attachment.
9. Stupid Helplessness: Being too scared and insecure to deal with your rage and turning it into wimpyness instead.
10. Stupid Forgiving: Not knowing when to break off a no-win relationship, or how not to get involved in the first place.
I’m not going to linger on all of these. Because none of us, at the moment, has six weeks. (You’ll have to read my book. Each line item gets covered ad nauseum).
Let’s just dig into number 7.
What no body ever tells you when you trap a man into marriage, is that for the rest of your life you will wonder if your husband ever really loved you. No matter how much you’d like to pretend otherwise, he didn’t marry you because he wanted to; he married you because he had to.
Think you’re insecure waiting for him to marry you? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
In a relationship with little emotional intimacy. Where it was impossible to open up my heart fully for fear of driving him off. To trust him enough to allow myself to be vulnerable. How had I concluded that the only thing that could mortar two separate halves together was the shared love and responsibility for a child?
We were two people who had sex with one another, who enjoyed a few laughs and some intellectual debate, but there was little attunement between us. To him I was a soft cushion to lie on, a blindly devoted schoolgirl who would do anything to make her sweetheart happy; not a frightened, disembodied woman capable of subterfuge. To me he was an autonomous island, a supremely impassive man who enjoyed people without needing them; not a man riddled with complexes. I’m sorry, but a baby couldn’t weld that mismatch together with a torch.
I appreciated, when reading the book, how easily Schlessinger called a spade a spade. Morally, karmically, emotionally, getting pregnant on purpose is always the wrong thing to do. The fear of losing my man– which meant, sadly, losing myself– had turned me into the kind of person I just didn’t want to be.
This pregnancy was never about becoming a mother or being a family. It was about coercing and manipulating somebody into changing his life before he was committed to the change. And the reason you did it is because you don’t have a life outside of what you thought being married would give you.
Which takes us to number 1: Stupid Attachment, the bedrock of all the other aforementioned fuck-ups.
When I lived in Iran, people, upon meeting me, asked me the same two questions: What did my father do for a living? What did my husband do for work? I found it interesting, if not a little annoying, that the same question was never posed of me. In a country where women held prestigious jobs, where they represented 60% of the university population, I was assumed, or so it seemed, to be an extension of the men in my life. My status was based on their accomplishments, not on my own. But why I would have found this insulting, I really can’t say. Because the truth of the matter is that I believed this myself. Beyond attachment to my man, I hadn’t the slightest idea who I was.
Tragically, when a woman doesn’t dare to dream or endeavor to a purpose, a sense of meaning generally comes from excessive emphasis on a relationship with a man and/or producing babies—sometimes even using the latter to ensure the former.
Now, there are times in our lives where we all struggle with identity.Take the guy at the gym who nearly died for example. After a lifetime of bodybuilding, he’d rather short out his pacemaker lifting weights, than develop another part of himself. For me, the last years of both high school and college were probably the worst. Because I couldn’t see the next step ahead of me, only a gaping abyss. There were too many vague choices. I needed help–Daddy-style help– because what would happen if I picked the wrong door?
Then there was that era when my kids were no longer little. Once I was no longer needed, I couldn’t even remember what used to rock my world. And right after the divorce. Who was I, really? Beyond that strife.
Finding an identity is tough. I know women who’ve stayed in bad marriages, and this includes myself, because the idea of going out on one’s own, of finding the right path (as if there’s only one), of having no one else to blame when you come up short, feels far more uncomfortable. The journey required looks, rightfully so, really daunting.
I sincerely believe that if women studied male lessons in concepts of assertion, courage, destiny, purpose, honor, dreams, endeavor, perseverance, goal orientation, etc., they would have a more fulfilling life, pick better men with whom to be intimate, and have better relationships with them.
And I know women who are confused by their continued unhappiness after dumping their spouse. I used to tell this joke right after my divorce: I lost 160 lbs, how is it that I still feel heavy? Of course, I’d gone ahead and exchanged one dependency for another. I stayed on with my mother–another frightened, divorced woman–for nearly seven years because I couldn’t figure out how, all alone, I was going to raise my kids. And the ink hadn’t dried on the divorce papers before I was dating inappropriate men: a married man, a narcissist, and then an underemployed yoga instructor.
Bad news, ladies. You may think the controlling/abusive/cheating/fill-in-the-blank husband was the problem, but really it’s you. Nothing will change until you acknowledge that in your attachment to this man who has disappointed you so, you, all along, were running away from your self.
Hiding behind him. Sad. And bad. Aside from the obvious reasons why, think of the kind of man you get when you pick a hiding place. It’s certainly not going to be someone desiring an equal, open, mutually respectful relationship—is it? No, of course not. You’ll end up with someone who gets off on being one –up. And the behavior of a one-up type is not going to feel that good to you on the receiving end. You do not have any bargaining power at all, because you are so inappropriately dependent.
I found the outline of myself very, very slowly. It started when I ran a mile, progressing to ten, then twenty. For the first time in my life, I felt strong and confident. After a long-brewing fight with my mother, I bought my first place–a condo conveniently located two blocks over. I discovered I could pay the mortgage, and feed the kids. We had enough left over each month to travel when we pleased.
But I suppose I started shading my form in when I dated the narcissist. “If you don’t like being a chemist,” he said during one of our exchanges. “What is it that you want to be? If you had no excuses, what would you do instead?” I remembered how much I liked writing when I’d been in high school, long before I got hooked on men, or considered myself a train wreck. And then he encouraged me to register at Harvard. Took me to Cambridge. Showed me how. Three years and a lot of miles later, me, myself, and I earned a writing degree.
Go make yourself feel like you have purpose on this earth. Go feel like your existence makes the world different. Go do something that gives your life meaning. Your choice in men will improve. We only go after, and we only accept, what we think we deserve. Go back to school—go become yourself. Dream, reach….When you dare to dream, dare to follow that dream, dare to suffer through the pain, sacrifice, self-doubts, and friction from the world—when you show courage and tenacity—you will genuinely impress yourself.
So go ahead. Isn’t it time you get to know yourself? To dream up something big?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Here are a few Schlessinger quotes I wish I’d read when I was younger. The things I want my daughter and step-daughter to hear, my struggling friends, but most of all myself. Because, once you’ve been a dependent personality, that tendency is always there. It will rear it’s ugly head at times when I interact with Walt. For these words alone I will not insist that Dr. Schlessinger pay me what’s due:
Want self-esteem: Get it the old fashioned way..earn it!
Fear of the unknown is how great things start.
It’s up to you, kiddo. You want to have some thing beautiful and meaningful in your life; you have to hold out for it and in your own mind become the receptacle for it.
It’s amazing how much nonproductive anguish and suffering (abuse, mismatch, disdain, disinterest) women will endure in order to avoid productive forms of anguish and suffering (inner knowledge, independence, and challenging life for a personal dream).
