The Paradox of Control

I don’t normally commit myself to a series of blog posts-even a short one-because it never seems as much fun to write on a topic you selected that was on your mind weeks ago.    Other things of interest always come up.  Well, with that out of the way, I said I’d write this, so here goes…

I last wrote about men being passive and detached from their relationships.  If you've not read that post, you may want to skim the two previous posts as they set up the context for this one.  Admittedly there is more to say on that topic but I kind of lost interest and need to move on to something that is perhaps a direct result of men’s passivity, especially in the church.  When men are passive, especially when they should be strong, women feel that they need to take control.  And who can blame them? 

Unfortunately, when women become accustomed to passive men, they may feel the need to take control.  Too many men are willing to forfeit their biblical leadership role.  It is, at least at first, easier for them to do what they are told rather than butt heads with yet another person in their lives.  Women, and I’d hazard to say men aren’t much different in this respect, don’t respect people they can control.  That isn’t to say that some women don’t enjoy controlling the key men in their lives, but the reality is that someone you control can never be an equal.  To control someone, they must submit to your authority.  And that is a hard realization to stomach.  Sure, we will submit to our bosses at work (at least when we have to) and we will submit to the authority of law enforcement (at least when an officer is present) but submitting in any relationship is rarely easy.  For a woman in a marriage with a passive or detached man, there is no authority to whom to submit!  In those instances, control is the option she must take if she wants her man to step up and lead… or so it may seem.

For a lot of people, “submit” has a profoundly negative connotation.  I have a fierce dislike to submitting to authority that I don’t respect.  (Sometimes that is because the authority is inept and other times it is because I am off-base.)  The church, and I suppose the Bible, is oft-criticized by those who say that “wives submit to your husbands” is an outdated, patriarchal, way of thinking that has no place in a modern society.  (And those are the people who are being diplomatic!) I suppose that if it weren’t for the part of the passage that states “submit to one another in reverence to Christ,” the critics would have a good point!  Unfortunately the criticisms are given credibility by insecure men in church or other leadership positions who dismiss women’s opinions as less important than theirs.  I don’t have time, or patience, to get into a discussion on women in leadership but I will mention that there are times when the Israelites were led by female judges in the Old Testament…

Men, if you haven’t experienced the tension between a woman’s desire to be in control and her desire for you to lead in a relationship, you’ve either not been in a relationship or you prefer more passive women than I.  Take, for instance, the awkward dance of selecting a place to eat: a woman may know exactly where she wants to go but that is classified information so far as you are concerned. Very rarely will a woman actually say where she wants to go.  She wants you to be decisive and pick …with the caveat that it is the place where she wanted to go but wouldn’t tell you.  She’ll either keep saying no until you pick the place she wants to go or will go and be displeased. (Does that tension of control seem any more familiar now?).  Here are some other examples that come to mind:  “Are you going to wear that?”  “Fine!” (said emphatically of course.) “You always (fill in the blank)!”  Of course there are many methods but the point of this post is not to detail them.

The big problem with women controlling the relationship is that either the man is passive to begin with, becomes passive to keep the peace, or there is a lot of fighting!  Typically the man begins to resent the controlling woman and the woman no longer respects the passive man.  If this occurs in a dating relationship it will soon end; if it occurs in a marriage it may continue for a long time and the damage may be irreparable.

Phil Knauer provided a less potentially divisive way of explaining the tension that women feel to control or submit by stating that women have a desire to “be loved but be independent, simultaneously.”  Not being a woman, and understanding women rather imperfectly, I could be off-base but from what I’ve observed from my female friends, I think Phil’s statement is on point.

Today some men and women seem to have reached the conclusion that being loved and independent are mutually exclusive.  There are compromises to be made in any healthy relationship but I would argue that a relationship of two equals cannot exist without each person maintaining some autonomy.  Unfortunately many men (and women) equate independence with doing things my way.  That leads to self-focused relationships which cannot mature.  After all, if I am always looking at me, how can I really love you?

I recently told someone that I tend to be interested in women who don’t need me.  It isn’t that I would prefer to date a woman who wouldn’t care if I disappeared.   I like women who are doing what they are called to do and wouldn’t need my help (or another man’s help) to accomplish their work. That is not to say that many of them do not want to be in a relationship; instead I would say that they have taken control of their lives to carry out their mission.  Many of them are, at least to me, the model of independent women who have taken control of their own lives in a positive manner.  Sadly, I also know that some of them have let men into their lives who weren’t interested in having an equal partner.  Others settled on a guy who seemed great because they perhaps thought that a better man wasn’t going to come their way.  Perhaps most disheartening were the candid admissions of women in relationships where they felt that they didn’t deserve the guys they were dating.  Most sacrificed some of their independence to be in a relationship, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some sacrificed too much and still didn’t feel loved.

I am struggling to close this posting as there is so much to say on this topic so I’ll close it with a pair of quotes which I think summarizes much of what I’d like to say if I had only a few words to say it.  Jean Anouilh succinctly noted that “Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.”  To love someone else you must be sufficiently autonomous to have a self to give.  

I’ll close with a quote from Thomas Merton as I think it speaks more eloquently to the struggle of loving people who are unique beings.  “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”