Bad Advice Friday: My partner refuses to treat me as an equal

A relationship coaching team tell a woman her husband's bad treatment is her fault.

Bad Advice Friday is a twist on my usual Feminist Advice Friday. In this semi-regular column, I look at the bad advice other columnists have given. The bad advice is often rooted in patriarchal norms, in the idea that women’s emotions really don’t matter, and in the cultural practice of centering men’s desires at the expense of women’s needs. You can find a complete list of previous bad advice columns here.

The problem

A woman writes to Susie and Otto Collins, a pair of relationship coaches, with a scenario familiar to anyone who reads this newsletter: her husband doesn’t treat her as an equal, financially exploits her, doesn’t value her contribution to the family, and generally mistreats her. “He wants me to go along with things he wants and I have done that for years. It’s when I want something, he doesn’t go along with me,” she says.

It’s a familiar refrain, and Susie and Otto had a great opportunity to talk about why these dynamics play out and replicate in so many heterosexual marriages.

But why would they do that, when they can blame the woman and tell her to be grateful for the shitbag she’s stuck with?

The bad advice

Channeling the collective worst impulses of the often-abusive coaching industry, the advice-givers ignore the reality that clearly exists (one of exploitation and maltreatment), electing instead to talk about one for which there is no proof (one in which your thoughts and energy somehow control your reality).

“Equality starts in you and the thoughts you choose to attach to and relive over and over” is the crux of their advice.

They tell her not to get caught in, or believe, judgments or criticisms because it will “reduce stress.”

What do they think this will accomplish? When women are deluded about their reality, when they think their own exhaustion and overwhelm is because of something other than their partner’s laziness, they don’t feel better. They feel worse. Because they feel inadequate, like they can’t manage to do something that comes easily to everyone else. And they keep trying to fix a problem that is not their creation, and not their fault. Self-delusion is not a viable strategy for living in a patriarchy.

They lightly suggest a conversation with her husband, but only if she can improve her communication so that he “opens up,” while adding that he might not even be willing. They offer no suggestions for what to do if he doesn’t open up, or how to get him to change, or how to cope with this reality.

Nope, it’s all her fault, and it’s not really a problem anyway.

Because women aren’t fully human entities whose time and lives matter.

My advice

I get dozens of questions like this one, and I usually don’t answer them. That’s because I feel like my work is itself the answer: the problem is not bad communication or neurodivergence or any of the other myriad causes we blame on women. Women write to me wondering if they are like other women, or if they are somehow less deserving of equal treatment, or more delusional, or, or, or…

It boils down to all women being socialized to believe things are their fault, and that they therefore must be the exception to whatever feminist rule I write about.

The problem is that a patriarchal society that devalues women, their time, and their lives—as evidenced by advice columnists that treat maltreatment of women as a minor issue, and who seem to have no problem with men stealing literal years from their partners’ lives.

So individual men, too, devalue the women in their lives.

Writer, your husband is being an asshole. But you’re not really fighting your husband. You’re fighting the patriarchy. That’s what makes this fight so hard to win. He has been socialized from birth to believe that you don’t matter as much as he does, and that kind of socialization does not shift easily. He’s going to pull out all the stops to convince you that you deserve this treatment, so let me be the voice in the wilderness telling you that you don’t.

Collective problems aren’t solved by individual actions like communicating better. It’s time to get radicalized, see this for what it is, and insist that your life, too, matters every bit as much as his.

He either comes with you into a better life, or you leave him behind.

Here are some posts I’ve written that I think might be especially helpful: