The Relationship Advice That Drives Me Nuts
The devaluation of women’s time and labor is not a “story we’re telling ourselves”
Fighting with your partner? Use these 4 phrases.
This was the subject of a dedicated email from The New York Times that recently graced my inbox. It claimed to offer four magical phrases that will help people in relationships share their “grievances in ways that speed the repair process.”
Well, of course I clicked through to the story. I’ve been fighting with my estranged husband since June. I’ve shared plenty of grievances, but there has been no repair process, speedy or otherwise.
Like all of my self-help-obsessed American counterparts, I was eager to know what I was doing “wrong” so that I could fix it. This, despite the fact that I already had a pretty good idea of what these four phrases would be, had already wrestled with them in multiple therapy sessions, had already felt like a failure because they never worked in the way I was told they should work.
Now and then, there were some flashes of understanding, some glimmers of empathy, but they never took hold. And of course, I blamed myself. Clearly I just wasn’t doing it “right.”
