Is this for real?

I was just about to knock off for the night and take my books to bed with me when I stumbled upon this and had to make a note of it *somewhere.* No better place than the blog for this.

It's from John Gottman's "7 Principles of Making Marriage Work," which S2 and I chewed some fat over earlier this afternoon. We were both remarking, from different perspectives, as how we find this stuff to be a bit ... superficial. That's despite the fact that this is supposedly the results of the first and most thorough bit of "scientific" research on the anatomy of marriage.

"You can see the shell-shocked look on the face of the typical young fiancé in any home furnishings store. He neither knows nor cares about the difference between taffeta and chintz. All of the china and silver patterns look remarkably alike to him. Most of all he's thinking that this is taking an awfully long time, and if he turns around suddenly he will do about $10,000 worth of damage since all of the shelves are made of glass and placed about two feet apart, probably just to intimidate guys like him. How will he react? If pretty soon he hears himself saying, "Hey, that's a great pattern," another emotionally intelligent husband has been born."

I cannot begin to count the ways that this single paragraph -- one among *many* such statements -- is an insult to both men and women. But ... really, is this the story men need to tell themselves? Gah! I can't even ask that question seriously, because it needs to be more narrowly focused: Just why the hell does John Gottman feel the need to tell this story about men? (He also talks about how foreign the notion of cleaning the bathroom is.)

He's consistently depicting them as rather fragile creatures, in this case stumbling around nervously in (usually) male-designed industrial spaces while at the same time desperately trying to navigate the big scary world of *relationships,* which themselves are designed by women and booby-trapped with all sorts of secret clubs and code words.

It can't just be the feminist in me -- nor just the woman-loving-woman in me -- that thinks this is a PATHETIC and limited notion of men. Nor do I believe that all a woman needs is her husband to say "that's a great pattern" to feel like he's "emotionally intelligent." If this is the story that heterosexual women are being sold about what they can expect of men in relationships ... oh, my SISTERS! Why in the fuck would you suffer that?

I'm sure we're all glad to know men who don't fall under this description. Some of them are even straight.

A few weeks ago, I went into the bachelor pad of a young man and saw he had a nicely upholstered Victorian-style chaise lounge. And although it was piled high with books and whatnot, he also had a round dining table with an Edwardian pedestal and a set of attractive wood and upholstered chairs that went with it. (I rather liked his taste, and many of you *know* how I am about furniture.)

I thought perhaps he'd gotten these pieces from family members, but when I inquired about them, he told me where he purchased them. Am I to assume he "chose" them under the watchful eye of a former girlfriend, but only did so after he survived bobbling nervously through the store, hoping not to tip over any vases or break any glass table tops? Because otherwise, how could this guy be getting on in the world?

Later, I went into his bathroom and noticed it was clean and tidy. And let me tell you: I peaked beyond the shower curtain -- I had to check out the claw-foot tub -- and the "clean" was for real. What to make of that?

He doesn't strike me as gay. Maybe he's just not really a man....

I mean: Must this allegedly science- and evidence-based psychology of men and marriage be so limiting in its notion of what is going on within those corporeal forms we humans call "men" and what women can expect from them in a relationship?

I'll acknowledge that I'm not a very good authority on this subject. I haven't had sex with a guy in 15 years. But I did live with one for two years in college, and I've had them as friends throughout my life. So I'm having a hard time believing that they are as paranoid and fragile (biologically) and as hopelessly emotionally and socially lost as Gottman paints them out to be.

If they are... well, thank the heavens I got no problem doin' girls. Because you could not pay me to put up with that shit, my girls. You just couldn't.