In Support of a Partner
who would want a subordinate?
Getting Old
I realized this week that I’ve spent more of my life with Spouse than without. From this desk I can look at a picture on my bookshelf that is over two decades old. A selfie taken with a camera that had to be taken to the pharmacy so we could get the pictures printed. We are, as was observed on our morning walk, getting old. She said, “It feels like so much longer, but it also doesn’t feel like any time at all” and I’ve been sitting with that for a couple days to try to understand the fluidity of time. How can it feel like we’ve barely lived our lives but, at the same time, like almost all of my life has been a life together with my partner?
I don’t really have an answer, so I’m going to write about something almost entirely separate from that. But it’s a good question, right?
We recently celebrated Mother’s Day and I find it a frustrating holiday. How do you really make your partner and best friend understand that they’re the keystone of your family? And even that admittedly poetic metaphor crumbles because a keystone implies completion. It drops into the arch and then you stand back and go “there, it is complete.” But obviously that’s not how this works. This is a living organic thing that changes as time marches on. Every day, Mother’s Day or not, is hopefully a day when our lives together get another story or two, even if some of them are boring even to us. But how do you show that to someone else? How do you explain just how fundamental to a family your partner is as a mom?
Words crumble and actions feel insufficient.
Partnership
I was reading a pretty enraging article yesterday entitled The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet and I worry that the poison enumerated in that piece can drip into his ear despite all Spouse’s and my best efforts. That poison, if you want to skip the article, is basically about the charismatic folks who advocate for “masculinism” and some level of supremacy for males over females. Women should all stay at home. Women should defer to their husbands. Women shouldn’t vote. Women are the enemy of men and, therefore, the enemy of progress.
Poison.
So as I read about the poison I kept thinking that I wanted to more intentionally introduce Squirt to the antidote. But what even is the antidote? Where do I even start? Do I just talk about equality and respect and autonomy and agency with respect to women? These things should be self evident in the way Squirt sees us live our lives. I would hope. Nobody starts out a misogynist, or any type of bigot. It’s a learned behavior, and we certainly are not teaching him such things. But part of growing up is learning and more and more from others besides your parents. Processing the world around you and forming your own opinions is part of growing up.
So it seemed like a good time for me to capture my idea of having a partner instead of some flavor of inferior like the clowns in the piece above. That page falls a bit short but it’s close. I also, oddly, liked business partnership for some of its focus on mutual interests and benefits before it descended into MBA jargon. But when you mix it all together what it distills down to is the idea that marriage and romantic relationships are about tackling the world together and being better because of your partner.
You and me against the world. You and me raising a precocious child together.
Squirt has heard for his entire life that every single person he meets in life can teach him something. A corollary to that is that every single person you meet in life is better than you at something. It follows, then, that my partner is just better than me at something. Many things actually. Attention to detail, planning, organization, intuition, and artistry are some that immediately spring to mind. And I think any healthy partnership works this way — with a give and a take, a recognition of our respective strengths and weaknesses. A healthy partnership is like an alloy. And alloys are invariably stronger in one or more aspects. They are a sum that is greater than the component parts.
The poison that’s bothering me so much creates some twisted thing that destroys partnership. It imagines instead a hierarchical relationship with a subordinate and a superior. With the male always being superior because something says so. The Bible. Some straight white dude with a flashy smile. Some silly woman.
Human beings aren’t fucking hierarchical.
I don’t understand how twisted you have to be to live your life in this way. How desperate for validation you are that you must push an entire gender down just to lift yourself up and then have the audacity to think you’re moral.
How weak.
How sad.
Fluidity
As I look back over this life that I’ve lived with my partner what shines through is that each of us has been the strong one. Each of us has been the one to decide, and each of us has been the one to support the decision. Lots of living over two decades, but always together and always tackling the problems as a team. Because we’re better as a team. But also tackling the problems with an understanding that there’s a fluidity to how we approach our life together. The clowns and their poison strike me as something ridiculously rigid and thus horribly brittle.
I feel like much of what I argue for Squirt to learn is to be fluid. We just came back from seeing just what water can do at the Grand Canyon. It’s one of my favorite quotes from Lao Tzu that I’ve held on to longer than even Spouse and I have been together:
Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.
~ Lao Tzu
And perhaps it’s as simple as that, both with life and with love. Be the water, don’t be the rock. Recognize that the fools that argue a relationship’s or gender’s roles should fit into some rigid hierarchy are doing it wrong.
For me, I say I want a partner in this life where our relationship is ever fluid. One who is more than me. One who is less than me.
Together we are undeniably better.
Dad Note: Squirt read this but wasn’t really sure what to say, which I thought was a valid response.
Dad Note Secundus: It amused the hell out of me to pick the most horrific AI generated photo.
