If you're still wondering why you and other
strong women put so much time into doomed relationships with Drama Kings,
why you and they don't pack their bags sooner, you're not alone. I'm asked
the question all the time. "Why do strong women stay in relationships that
drain and exhaust them? Why don't they just leave?"
Strong women
stay in relationships with Drama Kings as long as they do -- which isn't
necessarily very long -- because they want relationships. They love men
and desire them. They want love. They want sex. They care what men
think of them, and they want all the intimacy and involvement that
partnership promises. They don't want to be alone. They know they live in
a world still set up to be easier for couples than for singles. They hope
that with increased commitment, time, and change, even rocky, weird, and
dysfunctional relationships with Drama Kings can improve and develop into
a new story, a narrative of deeper attachment, cooperation, intimacy,
reciprocity, and ontinuing strength for them both. They're willing to work
at it.
Sometimes they stay simply because they'd rather have a
weird, rocky, and dysfunctional relationship for a while than have none.
Everyone knows by now, since every developmental study shows us so, that
girls and women flourish when connected to others and ensconced in
elationships. So we women have a tendency to put enormous energy into our
love affairs, sometimes overdoing it when our partners put in too little.
Even the very
strongest and most independent of us sometimes emporarily resort to
the tactic of trying to assure a good
relationship by using the old "feminine" conduct-book skills --
accommodation, pleasing, deferring, silence, and,
yes, manipulation -- because, particularly with Drama Kings, it's the
only way we can think of to have the sex and fun we want, the love and
connection, and maybe marriage and kids, too. It's part of attaching to
want to stay attached.
Strong women may stay longer than they
planned to with Drama Kings because they don't respond to stress according
to the well-known fight-or-flight model but to a newly articulated
"tend-and-befriend" model developed by UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor,
PhD, and a team of colleagues. Noticing that almost all the studies on
response to stress have been conducted on male animals who do illustrate
the fight-or-flight paradigm, Dr. Taylor observed that the people she'd
worked with for thirty years in her health practice do not. Women, she and
her colleagues have speculated, respond to stressful situations by
protecting themselves and their young (the "tend" part of the model)
through nurturance and seeking support from others (the "befriend" part).
Male dominance behavior seems to be involved with androgen hormones like
testosterone, while female dominance appears to be linked to oxytocin, a
hormone that actually inhibits aggression and fear and stimulates
relaxation and the desire for social contact in survival situations as
well as in breastfeeding, sex, and cuddling -- the opposite of fight or
flight! So rather than leaving when things get tough, a woman's survival
mechanism may prompt her to invest more energy in trying to connect or to
stay put and increase her contact with friends -- a possibility supported
by research in humans and animals.
Stay put for a while, that is. I
have a better question for you, though. Why do women leave? All the women I
interviewed for this book who'd been with Drama Kings left before the
two-year mark. This is not the old story of men leaving women. This is not
middle-aged husbands looking for younger women, not males fed up with
"needy" women who they believe perceive them as meal tickets, not young
men looking to have their cake and eat it, too, who are leaving in great
numbers. Women are leaving men. Marriage statistics are telling:
Two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by the wife! How could a truth
that has so dramatically transformed our country's domestic landscape so
elude the trend watchers?
When I reported the statistics a decade
ago -- after all, it's a fact I didn't make up; it's right there in
government brochures -- I was laughed at. I'd go on the air, disclose what
women were saying, and then be asked the same old question even as I
answered it: "So, then, if women are so
unhappy, why do they stay?" I'd repeat, "They don't. That's the point.
They're walking out the door."
They still are today. As a result, much has changed. Married-couple
households, which accounted for 80
percent of the population in the 1950s, now account for only 50.7
percent; married couples with children, once the
cozy composition of almost all American households, now make up a mere
quarter of them and will probably decrease to a fifth by 2010; families
with husbands who make the money and wives who work in the home account
for a
measly one-tenth of all households. These domestic changes were
spearheaded by women. One paper reiterating statistics about women leaving
concludes,
"While these statistics alone do not compel a conclusion that women
anticipate advantages to being single rather than remaining in the
marriage, they do raise that reasonable hypothesis."
As an
American, a woman, and a wife, I wonder whether any other institution with
similar cockeyed statistics could escape notice. If sixty-five percent of
women schoolteachers fled the academy, or if the same number of female
soldiers left the army, wouldn't the culture be alarmed? Wouldn't we start
asking new questions instead of old, irrelevant ones?
If an exodus from any other treasured and important institution
were led by one gender, wouldn't there be a serious national effort to
discover what made them flee or to redress their grievances, find
incentives to encourage them to stay? Women's wholesale retreat -- from
Drama Kings but also from other men -- is all the more startling because
relationships are the habitat in which so many young women believe they
want to be, and marriage is the environment they grow up assuming will be
the most nurturing. After all, ninety percent of American women marry at
least once before their fiftieth birthdays, and they do so expecting to
thrive -- and intending to stay.
Here's another statistic: Single women are far less depressed
than married women. And single men are far more depressed than married
men. If many of these men are Drama Kings, then the group of people in our
society who are most in need of the balm of intimacy are the least able to
let it reach them.
At the time I first heard these numbers, I was
interviewing married women, hearing so many of them struggle to articulate
why they felt as disenfranchised or alienated in marriage as they might in
an institution in which they're emphatically unwelcome, such as the
Vatican. I remember thinking then that no billion-dollar initiatives "to
support marriage" make sense unless it's clear what part needs support.
What needs fixing in marriage is the same as that which needs fixing in
relationships with Drama Kings: the part that isn't working for women.
Men, far more often than women, thrive in marriage. Men, far more often
than women, wilt and wither physically and psychologically outside of
wedlock. It's men who find the institution of marriage to be the
nurturant, comfortable place it's reputed to be for women -- thus, it's
men more often than women who remarry surprisingly quickly after they're
divorced or widowed, and men, beneficiaries of the old system, who are not
hurt by its inertia.
Marriage isn't just an institution, then, it's
as male an institution as the NFL. And if marriage proponents really want
to tackle the issue of why so many of the strongest women are hanging up
their wives' uniforms years before crossing into the end zone, they had
better take notice.
Reprinted from: Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women
Crazy
by Dalma Heyn C 2005 Dalma Heyn.
(November 2005;$23.95US/$31.95CAN; 1-57954-888-1)
Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available
wherever books are sold or directly from the
publisher by calling (800) 848-4735 or visit their website at
www.rodalestore.com.
Author Dalma Heyn earned her MSW degree at New York University. Her
earlier bestsellers, The Erotic Silence of the American Wife and
Marriage Shock, have been published in 24 countries, excerpted in
publications all over the world, and hailed by reviewers as
revolutionary," "extremely important," and "a deeply provocative breath of
fresh air." She lives in Westport,
Connecticut.
