I am sorry if I have in some way offended you or minimized your situation with your husbands. I do feel that you two are an outstanding example of what a supportive wife should be. But as I think about this issue, I see the negative bias of feminism is so much of our daily lives. Of course there are positives. At the time the movement arose, women were fed up and deserved equal rights, equal pay, etc. The very same can be said of affirmative action and civil rights. But I now agree with the rollback of affirmative action because it reached the point of becoming oppressive to the majority by the vocal minority.
I thought that I cannot relate to LD men, but perhaps I can. I recall a time in college when my live-in girlfriend told me she needed more sex. While I knew when had not had much sex at the time, I had not realized it had reached an extreme. And in thinking about that time, I know there must have been some mild depression or a feeling of emptiness involved. I was able to shift gears quickly because we were young, it was an easy time of life, and she offered a very loving, supportive relationship. I may not have been able to change so easily if there were problems and stress.
I believe now my period of low drive had roots in my FOO, intimacy issues, self esteem issues, poor modeling from parents, etc. I also know that having a strong identifiable purpose in life is critical. Merely surviving day to day in a mundane marriage with no dreams for the future other than making sure the kids survive to adulthood will sap the drive out of any man. This is not to say any woman here is causing that, in fact it could be all due to the man, but it will still affect him.
So let me propose a scenario that LD could be due to mild depression (I am ignoring physical problems). For me, I know that when I have been down and depressed, I am focusing on my plight, but it is a dysfunctional form of selfishness. Wallowing in self pity does no one any good. And if a person has poor self esteem, these thoughts can be worse. Couple this with a lack of purpose in life, or a belief that you are not capable of ever achieving your dreams, and further depression can set in.
And this is where feminism comes in. If the man is raise to minimize his feelings and feels responsibly for keeping his wife happy, or at least trying to fix her unhappiness, then he takes on an additional load. And even if he knows that he is not responsible for the feelings of others, he cannot help but be brought down by a wife complaining that her feelings are hurt. He instinctively wants to make her feel better, even if he knows he can’t. This inability diminishes his feeling of control over his world. Yet he is a man and men control their domain, they are the king of their castle, or at least other men are, just not him.
This is a server wound to the male ego. I believe the source of all these types of problems is in the FOO. And until this FOO can be identified, exorcised and healed, the man will continue to be dragged down by it. If the wife continues to put emphasis on her discontent, her need for more quality time, his shortcomings, she is just exacerbating and perpetuating this cycle of depression in the man.
What I see in Schlessinger’s method is a way to break this cycle. The logic of this is apparently lost on women, since they are trying to do what is best for the relationship. They have been trained that expressing their feeling in an open, honest way, and not holding things in is the way to emotional liberation. And for women it is. But it can be imprisonment for men.
So, there is my theory. What does everyone think about that?
