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I went to the doctor the other day for a routine check-up and was surprised when before I left she started asking me about my relationship: if I was happy, did he treat me well…
It came after a series of questions like -
do you smoke?
and do you wear your seatbelt?
and the all of a sudden it was: does he hit you? Does he call you names? Do you feel safe?
It was the domestic violence screening part of the check-up and while I was impressed that she went there, I kept waiting for the second set of questions that I knew would never come.
Do you treat him well? Do you hit him? Do you call him names? Does he feel safe with you?
For a period of time my answers to these questions would have been: men don’t deserve to be treated well, it’s okay to hit men because they’re bigger and stronger and it won’t hurt them, it’s probably good for their pysche to call them names and chip away at some of that ego and sense of entitlement that is the driving force of patriarchy and sexism, and men shouldn’t feel safe ever because I don’t feel safe ever.
Now that I work with kids, I recognize the very childish logic behind those answers. Someone has taken something from me, and from the girls and women that I love. Well fuck that, I know how to take shit, too. I learned it from you, patriarchy!!
I was operating on what I see now as a sad and petty economy of losses, and it inevitably left me broke in so many ways. One of my mentors told me about a turning point in her life when she stopped drawing the enemy lines around people and instead took on the systems and institutions that supported their behavior. And it was true, i had drawn a line between me and men, between me and white people, between me and straight people, between me and anyone that wasn’t brimming over with anger and cynisism. I kept drawing lines until there was no one left in my camp to fight for.
I’m constantly amazed by how our actions – when unskillful – actually serve to undermine our very intentions and goals. And how can we be skillful at something like love, or healthy relationships, when there are so few examples of what exactly that is? For sure, we know what love isn’t, and I think where I really went wrong was thinking that if I did the opposite of what love wasn’t – then I would be doing was love was. I thought I was transforming a power structure when in reality I was just recreating it with a few minor cast changes. Instead of freeing myself from the oppression of sexism I was now suffering twice as much. First because I was still living in a sexist society, and second because you can’t hurt people, demean them, create a environment for fear and distrust – and not end up hurting yourself in the process. What I really wanted – to love and be loved, to have a feeling of safety, security and intimacy – I was actively destroying my chances of ever experiencing.
As activists naturally we look to actions to catalyze change, but when I think about how my mentality towards healthy relationships changed over time, I spent a lot of time doing nothing at all. Not dating, not judging, not blaming, not keeping lists of everything that was wrong with me or everything that needed to change about them. Cuz all that bullshit was the behavior that led to the mountain of relationship dysfunction to begin with!