My husband wants me to gentle parent him: Feminist Advice Friday
A reader's husband says she needs to use gentle parenting techniques to manage his emotions. Forever, apparently.
A reader asks…
Husband says something dumb/offensive/rude/etc. I decide that I'm not going to engage in the discussion anymore, and politely end the conversation and go find somewhere else to be.
Husband follows me and tells me I'm being overly sensitive or over reacting. I tell him that I found his comment rude and decided not to continue the discussion.
Husband then tells me that when I notice that he has responded inappropriately about something, I should ask more questions to make sure he has understood, or to make sure he has thought the problem/concept through, or to give him some sort of 'signal' that he is acting weird.
This annoys me because he is a grown man who should be responsible to monitoring his own responses. I don't want to gentle parent him into not being rude. I'm not his therapist that I should have to lead him is discussions of logic and reasoning on various topics. I HAVE done this in the past, but I'm just so over it. What do you think?
My answer
There’s a joke going around feminist circles about how you shouldn’t have to gentle parent your husband into behaving like an adult. Your spouse has taken it one step closer to absurdity, by outright demanding that you gentle-parent him.
He’s wrapped up a lot of deeply obnoxious assumptions in this request:
You’re smarter and more competent than he is, so he needs you to teach him how to function well. Why does he think he deserves to be with someone who is better at basic functioning than he is? What entitlement.
He is entitled to your emotional labor whenever he wants it.
You are emotionally overreactive and overly sensitive, but somehow also required to teach him how to be less so.
You must tolerate his bad behavior and teach him how to be better. In spite of you knowing how to be better (because, after all, you’re able to teach him!), you still deserve to have to put up with his bad behavior.
He’s pretending like he can’t do any better, while simultaneously insisting that he deserves a relationship with you. These things can’t both be true.
He wants you to behave as his parent—and I bet he also still expects you to have sex, doesn’t he? He wants you to teach him basic human skills, but I bet he also wants you to respect him, trust him, and praise him in front of his friends, right? I bet he wants you to build him up and make him feel good about himself, in spite of his own admission that he’s just not as good as you.
Tell him that women don’t like having relationships with toddlers, and if he expects to be treated like one, you’ll need to fundamentally alter the rules of your relationship—starting by giving you all the money and decisionmaking power, of course, and completely abandoning sex, since he is a baby.
This thing where he tells you you’re overreacting also bears mentioning, and I think may even be the more important issue. “You’re too emotional” is one of the most important tools men use to justify their dominance.
He’s telling you that he is the one who gets to decide which emotions are appropriate, and you are the one who has to manage everyone’s emotions. Of course he has no responsibility for managing yours. He just takes for granted that your emotions are silly and unreasonable. The quiet part is that this is because you’re a woman, but rest assured, if you push him hard enough he’ll say that part out loud, and tell you that it’s your hormones, or feminism, or me causing your reaction.
All of this, though, is really a distraction. That’s really what I want you to hear. It might seem like I get lots of different Feminist Advice Friday questions, but the truth is that I basically get the same question over and over. This is an example of the “Is my husband’s behavior reasonable/Am I crazy, and how can I convince him otherwise?” question.
Your husband knows what he is doing. He knows that he’s refusing to control his emotions and reactions. He knows he is behaving badly.
“I think you should have to put up with this because I am a man and am therefore entitled to behave however I want, and you are a woman who exists to serve me,” however, is a pretty unappealing justification—even though simple sexism is the reason for his behavior.
So instead, like all misogynist men, he has to manufacture a more palatable sounding excuse.
We live in a patriarchy, which means that excuses for men are everywhere. He’s essentially pulled one out of the ether. Rest assured that if you shut that one down, he’ll move onto another—how you’re mean and abusive for expecting better behavior, or how his behavior is fine, or how his therapist thinks you’re the abusive one.
He doesn’t actually believe what he is telling you, and you shouldn’t either.
This is why it’s so important to focus on the impact of men’s behavior rather than taking them at their word about their intent. If intentions are all that matter, men will never change. They’ll always have a justification.
As if ending the conversation and going elsewhere was not already a ‘signal’ that he is acting weird.
It really shines a light on how disingenuous this ask is. “Give me a sign!” “No. Not like that!”
Zawn, I'm wondering how you would give advice if the opposite were true? E.g. a woman says or does something and the man assigns a reason to it that makes sense in his head and paints him as the victim. "You took my special Tupperware without asking, so you must not care about my illness" for example (true story) gaslighting her into thinking did I really mean that when I said/did X? One of the hallmarks of narcissism is assigning harmful intention to people's behavior regardless of their actual intent. I'm not trying to undermine your point, just truly understand the difference, because I know there is one.