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Relational Equilibrium
It will help you overcome the implicit hierarchy hurting your relationship.
After 13 years of marriage and working with hundreds of couples, I believe that the basis of most relationship struggles comes down to… hierarchy.
Psychological Patriarchy
Psychological patriarchy expresses itself in the labeling of certain traits as masculine ( confidence, power, dominance) and feminine (connection, empathy, feelings) and valuing masculine traits above feminine ones. Psychological patriarchy also leads to a rigid, binary view of partners being either a winner or loser, up or down, dominant or submissive.
As with fish in water, we are blind to the psychological patriarchy we’re swimming in. Our capitalistic society is built on hierarchy, competition, and scarcity. This binary world view ultimately leads to hierarchy in relationships.
Hierarchical Relationships
Where there is hierarchy there is no partnership. — Galit Romanelli
Hierarchy appears in almost every level of our relationships. Couples set up a hierarchical 95/70 dynamic in relationships. When a couple begins to solidify their relationship, they implicitly and unconsciously divide up who will be better (95%) and who will be worse (70%) in the different facets of their lives: looks, sex, parenting, career, money, social life, talent, and so on. One partner will be experienced as more professionally successful, the other perceived as the better parent. One as better looking; the other more intelligent.
Such implicit agreements maintain partners’ reflected sense of self while maintaining the homeostasis in their relationship. Both partners might consciously disagree or deny it, but unconsciously they both enable this pecking order to continue.
Somewhere down the line, if couples don’t address and soften the hierarchy, they will begin feeling lonely, unappreciated, and unseen in their relationship. When a couple operates in a rigid hierarchy, there is no partnership, mutual interdependence, or movement.
Hierarchical relationships eventually suffer from the three major relationship problems that send couples to therapy. I call…
