From the responses to the poll, I’m seeing that people want more posts on relationships. This is unexpected but I’m always willing to do what I can to please my readers. This is why I’m starting a new series of posts on relationships. I’m not sure what kind of relationships people want to hear about, so I will discuss all kinds, from romantic to sexual to professional.
Story 1.
My friend Ellie is a strikingly beautiful woman. If you see her on the street, you are bound to stop and stare because she looks like a supermodel. Ellie is also brilliant, she speaks multiple languages, and there are few things she doesn’t know how to do. Because of her numerous accomplishments and amazing looks, Ellie is very popular with men and keeps getting married.
Ellie’s type is a quiet, nerdy, shy guy. Of course, such guys feel extremely flattered when a stunning woman like Ellie returns their affections. Sometimes, Ellie is the first woman ever to pay any attention to them. The early stages of the relationships are always the same: the new husband adores Ellie, showers her with gifts and attention, and treats her like a queen. I know from experience, however, that this stage will not last for long. Soon enough, Ellie will tell me what a horrible ogre her new husband is. He will deny her access to their bank account, take away all of her money, say horrible mean things about her appearance, and forbid her to talk to her friends and her mother.
“I think I hear Jack at the door,” Ellie whispers to me over the phone. “I have to run or he will kill me. He says I talk too much.” I still remember how Jack would stare at her in absolute awe and would be afraid to breathe in her direction for fear of upsetting somebody so wonderful, so the transformation is very strange.
So far, Ellie has had 3 husbands and numerous boyfriends. Somehow, she manages to turn every single one of those quiet, gentle guys into controlling macho freaks. As a result of these experiences, Ellie has arrived at a conclusion that within all men a patriarchal monster is hiding. When she gets fed up with how manipulative and nasty her husband du jour is, she plots an escape. Then she finds a new guy, and the story repeats itself.
The reasons for this strange pattern became clear to me when I met Ellie’s family. She has 2 sisters, and all three daughters, the mother and the grandmother worship and fear Ellie’s father. He controls them, says nasty things to them, and they stare at him with awe and admiration, incapable of placing a limit on his behavior. Ellie is a strong woman who has overcome a lot of hardship. This is why it isn’t hard for her to bend her boyfriends to her will and push them into the scenario that is familiar and comforting to her: an ogre of a man and an oppressed, self-sacrificing woman.
Clarissa's Blog 
Are you sure she doesn’t leave because they’re not controling enough?
From what you write here, it sounds to me like she’s trying to create a male partner she can’t escape from (like dear old dad) so when she’s able to escape she dismisses them as weak.
Or there’s something in her father’s domination that’s reassuring and that these other guys aren’t doing, turning into rude jerks rather than whatever it is she’s after.
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Or she’s enactng the escape she can’t make with her father through her boyfriends/husbands.
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“Or she’s enactng the escape she can’t make with her father through her boyfriends/husbands.”
– Yes, I think this is definitely it. Ultimately, people get what they are looking for. They will break thorgh every obstacle to be with the object of their desire. Here, the father is the object of the desire but that desire is tabooed, so one needs to escape to relieve the stress of being with “the father.” But then the desire reawakens and a new “father” is found. And so on.
I spent many years enacting a similar scenario until I figured out what I was doing. (Obviously, there was no domineering man in my life, but the pattern was the same.)
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I watched part of a documentary that seemed to me to portray Yankee psychodynamics as they were in seventies — and probably still are.
In it, this woman adopts a chimp to bring up as her child and test whether she can teach it sign language by making it more human. She champions herself as a supermother type, as to do the significant men in her life. But she resents the masculine domination capacity of her lover so she revels in situations where the chimp bites him or cannot be controlled by him. She is using the chimp to express her resentment at the male, whilst consolidating her own passivity.
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I’m not sure she chose normal, mentally healthy guys, then turned them into controlling assholes. It rather seems that she chose covert abusers, because that’s the kind she is attracted to as that’s the type of relationship she experienced firstly in her life. She chooses the type of man who once idealizes his partner, and once discards her. This is a typical behavioural pattern of narcissistic abusers who use the nerdy, shy guy facade too often. I don’t think normal people with mature and stabile personality can be turned into ogres by anyone.
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Absolutely! If these men didn’t have a profound need to be in this sort of relationship, they wouldn’t be in it. Even when a partner bends you to their scenario, there must be something in you that is attracted to that model.
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It’s incredible they always find each other, however I don’t understand how this whole thing works physiologically. It’s like they send invisible signals to each other.
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“It’s like they send invisible signals to each other.”
– That is EXACTLY what it is like, invisible signals. I know that wherever I go, I will only meet single type of man. Something makes every man on my orbit – and I don’t mean men who are romantically interested in me only, I mean all men – act like my greatgrandfather. People asked me why I wasn’t afraid to get into the truck with two strange men last week. But that was because irrespective of their age I knew they would immediately start channeling my great grandfather at me. Because it’s always like that.
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“– That is EXACTLY what it is like, invisible signals. I know that wherever I go, I will only meet single type of man. Something makes every man on my orbit – and I don’t mean men who are romantically interested in me only, I mean all men – act like my greatgrandfather. People asked me why I wasn’t afraid to get into the truck with two strange men last week. But that was because irrespective of their age I knew they would immediately start channeling my great grandfather at me. Because it’s always like that.”
So what if people channel a sad clown at you? I’m always getting the sad clown in the males around me who want to dominate me (not the ones who don’t). The minute some guy tries to dominate me, he becomes a sad clown and shoots himself in the foot — I mean he starts to overstep the mark I find acceptable and then I have to say a definitive NO to him and then he retreats in a very embarrassed way.
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“So what if people channel a sad clown at you? I’m always getting the sad clown in the males around me who want to dominate me (not the ones who don’t). The minute some guy tries to dominate me, he becomes a sad clown and shoots himself in the foot — I mean he starts to overstep the mark I find acceptable and then I have to say a definitive NO to him and then he retreats in a very embarrassed way.”
– And do you enjoy seeing them retreat in shame?
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No, I am deeply disappointed every time, that this happens. It makes me disbelieve in the possibility of any sort of civilisation, so it is an intellectual blow.
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Wow. My Pops is/was very authoritarian and yet I have ended up with a guy who is precisely the opposite to this in all respects.
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Yes, but… What about passive aggressivity? At first sight that is the exact opposite of authoritarianism.
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Mike is not passive aggressive.
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So you could get over your childhood conditioning. Kudos to you. It must have been a lot of hard work.
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“So you could get over your childhood conditioning. Kudos to you. It must have been a lot of hard work.”
– For me, to stop being an Ellie was hard work, indeed. The hardest part was to realize that I was doing it instead of blaming the world for being imperfect. 🙂 I was very much into that for years. 🙂
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Well hard work in a sense and fun in another sense, since transgression is always fun, indeed a barrel of laughs. Transgression just means to do what your superego forbids you to do, thus you train and discipline the superego and bring it under control. In any case, since I was never ego-based, I did not seek to replicate any familiar patterns. To be very clear, I was not brought up by my parents so much but by the system, which was regimented on a military model, so I always was pretty much in a mode of experimentation with life,, having no deep impression of familial relationships to base my expectations on.
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“Wow. My Pops is/was very authoritarian and yet I have ended up with a guy who is precisely the opposite to this in all respects.”
– Are you authoritarian? In the best possible way, of course. 🙂 You sound like a very powerful person.
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I’m very decisive, but very, very liberal. You will probably not find someone more liberal than I, who is decisive at the same time.
Mike and I have approximately the same character structure and the power relationship is very equal.
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I’m also extremely easy-going but people are still terrified of me.
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I don’t know if people are terrified of me or not. IN any case, whilst I have been able to do many personality modifications vis-a-vis myself, I cannot do so in relation to contemporary society. Like i said to someone last night, sooner or later most people become sad clowns in relation to me and shoot themselves in the foot. It’s a strange phenomenon, but I think unnerve very conventional people. But I don’t seem to have that effect on unusual or creative people.
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“It’s a strange phenomenon, but I think unnerve very conventional people. But I don’t seem to have that effect on unusual or creative people.”
– You are scary. But in a really really good way. I like scary, imposing people. I’m so tired of quiet little wallflowers. What I hate the most is when people mumble. Brrr. But I can’t imagine you mumbling. 🙂
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I’m really more of a jokester. In fact I keep up a constant stream of joking chatter nearly all the time. I find it really, really amusing, although not everyone gets the joke. One of my biggest sources of amusement is to pretend to misunderstand something fundamentally or to be on the wrong planet.
As an example, when a news story came up about how Prime Minister Tony Abbott was threatened by an ISIS supporter, I said, “Why did he threaten our prime minister, Shinzo Abe?” And then I keep saying it until everybody has had enough.
I’m probably much more annoying than threatening in most ways.
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“I’m really more of a jokester. In fact I keep up a constant stream of joking chatter nearly all the time. I find it really, really amusing, although not everyone gets the joke. One of my biggest sources of amusement is to pretend to misunderstand something fundamentally or to be on the wrong planet.
As an example, when a news story came up about how Prime Minister Tony Abbott was threatened by an ISIS supporter, I said, “Why did he threaten our prime minister, Shinzo Abe?” And then I keep saying it until everybody has had enough.
I’m probably much more annoying than threatening in most ways.”
AND OBVIOUSLY I’M REPEATING MY RECOGNITION OF THE TRAUMA OF REALLY GENUINELY NOT KNOWING WHAT PLANET I AM ON — IE. WHERE I FIT IN — WHEN i AM DOING THIS.
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I’m speculating lately (more than usual on this topic) that perhaps why psychoanalysis does not make any sense to me, most of the time, is because it assumes an ego orientation to life as inevitable and and natural. The ego is inclined to be self-deceived, as traditional Eastern philosophy points out. It thinks it wants something but it doesn’t. It made a mistake. It didn’t aim for what was good for it but ony for what was familiar. Nietzsche said beneath the ego is the “self”, which actually draws correct evaluations about what is going on with oneself. It commands one to pursue life or to die. If the ego is making a lot of wrong decisions, the self has the executive power to pull the plug and command the individual to die.
This is interesting enough and probably true. In any case, it still assumes that the ego is very important, although now it is not at the forefront of the identity.
Actually, what was always at the front of my identity was superego, which means I did everything not out of desire but duty for a large part of my early adult life. This meant a very harsh and driven life, but I don’t believe I was ever self-deceived about anything. In fact there was little room for “self” in this equation.
I’ve overcome that limitation significantly now, through lots of self-training and actually what Georges Bataille calls “transgression”, which is the way to expand and develop a self beyond the original narrow limitations. But I still retain a different weight to my being compared to the average Westerner, which makes me invisible to them or opaque (depending on how you’re looking at it). One can make judgements about me based on an assumption of the normativity of ego-orientation and I will sit back and simply note they are untrue.
I’ve always tracked all my actions like a good computer programmer recording updates to software and fixing bugs, so I know exactly why I had to choose the mode of transgression to make myself free. If people suggest that I really do not know myself after all, I can can point to my own mental recordings of how much I have changed, thus acknowledging to myself that transgression is efficacious.
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Seems like somewhat classic “If it weren’t for you” game ala Eric Berne …
“But why do you have to be so awful?”
“But why do you want me to be so awful?”
“If it weren’t for you …”
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You see, when you get into the Tardis with The Doctor, you’re a companion, and he expects you to want to flee to your old comfortable life.
It’s not a matter of if, it’s merely a matter of when …
On a related note ….
Billy Joel — “The Stranger”:
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