In the Name of Love
If you haven't read "In the Name of Love: A Study of Sexual Desire" by Jill Tweedie, I really recommend it. Here's what I wrote this morning in response to her chapter on the psyche of love:
I have the tendency to make my relationship the centre of my life, the most important thing, the priority, the thing I always choose first, the thing I'd always rather be doing. (Tweedie says that women are brought up with the mother as an example of a woman with no identity, living through and/or for a man (the husband-father). Even though my mother rebelled in word and later in action, everything she did was in reaction, in relation to my father. She had no identity outside first loving, second serving, and third blaming him.)
But I want to be successful and fulfilled in my work. I want, sometimes or in part, to be identified with my work, to BE an artist. I want an identity of my own.
So I choose men who don't demand much, who are blank canvasses, who don't dominate me.
So I can still put energy into my work and art and other people in my life.
And I perceive those men as needing me, so I don't feel like I'm the needy (dependent) one in the relationship.
But there is a basic internal conflict between my habitual psychological behaviour (tweedie) – to attach to, cling to and seek happiness from men – and my conscious desire – to be independent, passionate about my work, and to have my own identity and a) know it and what it is, b) trust it, c) express it, d) be confident.
As Tweedie suggests, I find it difficult to have a stable identity when there isn't a man around to ... serve? (as in to mother and counsel) or to prove myself to (in the initial stages of the relationship)?
And I think this contradiction is inherited part and parcel from my mother, who talked feminist and was a kind of matriarch in a home populated mainly by women, but still saw life as service (to husband but more to children) and defined herself almost entirely in relation to my father, finding it hard to make or keep friends, hobbies or career because they weren't what was really important in life.
I have the tendency to make my relationship the centre of my life, the most important thing, the priority, the thing I always choose first, the thing I'd always rather be doing. (Tweedie says that women are brought up with the mother as an example of a woman with no identity, living through and/or for a man (the husband-father). Even though my mother rebelled in word and later in action, everything she did was in reaction, in relation to my father. She had no identity outside first loving, second serving, and third blaming him.)
But I want to be successful and fulfilled in my work. I want, sometimes or in part, to be identified with my work, to BE an artist. I want an identity of my own.
So I choose men who don't demand much, who are blank canvasses, who don't dominate me.
So I can still put energy into my work and art and other people in my life.
And I perceive those men as needing me, so I don't feel like I'm the needy (dependent) one in the relationship.
But there is a basic internal conflict between my habitual psychological behaviour (tweedie) – to attach to, cling to and seek happiness from men – and my conscious desire – to be independent, passionate about my work, and to have my own identity and a) know it and what it is, b) trust it, c) express it, d) be confident.
As Tweedie suggests, I find it difficult to have a stable identity when there isn't a man around to ... serve? (as in to mother and counsel) or to prove myself to (in the initial stages of the relationship)?
And I think this contradiction is inherited part and parcel from my mother, who talked feminist and was a kind of matriarch in a home populated mainly by women, but still saw life as service (to husband but more to children) and defined herself almost entirely in relation to my father, finding it hard to make or keep friends, hobbies or career because they weren't what was really important in life.
posted by Laverne Laverne at 3:11 PM
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