I’ve been reading parenting books to give myself the illusion I am slightly more in control and prepared for giving birth, and some of the advice and language to do with interacting with your toddler or child (I read ahead) was repeatedly striking me as very familiar.
At first I thought it was from my days working in an office and doing various communication courses, but then, in my browsing through the ‘other people who looked at this book bought…’ suggestions, I came across a book to do with keeping your relationship happy once you have a baby, and from there (it being a lazy browsing day) I fell right into the self-help relationship field. And then I knew, from having read a few of these sorts of books some ten or more years ago and skimread others more recently, why the parenting books seemed a bit familiar.
Is it just me, or do self-help relationship books seem to expect women to simultaneously bolster men with praise and positive feedback, treat them with patience and tolerance so they feel supported and loved, make appointments for them so that they follow through, and just in general act like their mother, AND to also not act like an overbearing parent by giving too much advice (nagging and critical), being too controlling, or putting on too much pressure? Now there’s a fine and irritatingly simplistic and sexist line for you.
And there’s the whole ‘man seeing partner as wife/mother instead of lover’ problem, which you’d think the general hand-holding, nurturing advice could only worsen. There was one case study of a career-driven woman whose husband wanted her to be more interested in keeping a nice house and making home-cooked meals because his mother had been, paraphrased, a “dedicated stay-at-home-mum and fabulous cook”. Apparently, it was the way he felt loved. The wife put aside her reservations and went along with it, and they are now happier (to which I darkly wonder, for how long?)
Now, let’s put aside the ick factor of a man openly demanding to be loved by his wife the same way as his mother. Let’s put aside the fact that, given the ages of the couple, the wife’s mother was also likely to have been a SAHM providing home-cooked meals and that such things would therefore be a way of feeling loved for the wife as well, and that in actual fact, the husband, if he really felt that love was shown by making home-cooked meals, could very well get off his arse and provide such for his wife (which would have meant the request wasn’t wholly driven by sexist gender stereotypes). Let’s instead consider the fact that this man has forced his wife to behave more like his mother and how long is it going to be before he’s going to stop wanting to sleep with her because she’s too much like his mother?
Anyway, it seems to me you could quite happily swap the pronouns in a parent-child relationship self-help book and get a perfectly normal wife-husband relationship self-help book out of it. I don’t think that’s healthy.
Ugh, that’s really bizarre. What kind of people write this stuff? Instead of the usual snippets from reviews, their book covers should have testimonials from their children/partners, offered as proof that the author has managed to use this advice successfully at least once.
Even if they have personal evidence that their approach does work (and it’s not like it’s often evaluated to see if it does; I recently read ’59 Seconds’ by Richard Wiseman, about quick, effective techniques for sef-improvement from cognitive psychology research, which reported that the use of active listening, an absolute standard of the self-help relationship industry, in no way predicts the success of relationships), I don’t think I could bring myself to do some of ‘good wife’ things they suggest. I guess it’s mostly women buying these books and therefore it has to be women making the changes? It’s just weird that the suggested changes often appear to be along the lines of, act more like the traditional stereotype of a woman.
I find it incredibly hard to respect advice that talks about ‘men like this and women like that’. For example, these books say men don’t like being criticised. What, and women have no problem with that? Who exactly does enjoy being criticised and therefore wouldn’t benefit from their partners learning to give constructive feedback?