Half Listening: The Savvy Couple - 7 Communication Strategies for Marriage by Olivia Eason

Author:Olivia Eason [Eason, Olivia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

5

You’re Not the Boss of Me

“He wears the pants in the family, but I’m the belt that holds them up.”

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Before we delve deeper into this chapter, we must make it very clear that we are not discussing physical abuse here. That is a painful and complicated topic worthy of all the attention in the world. However, we will not discuss this, as we believe that it does not necessarily fit into the scope of the discussion we are aiming to touch upon in this book.

Emotional and financial abuse, however, might at times be adjacent to the communication issues born out of power struggles between genders. As I was saying above, we have seen a massive amount of improvement in terms of gender equality. Even so, women are still widely regarded as less.

Indeed, we do not live in the society of our mothers and grandmothers, and we are not confined to household chores in the “idyllic” background of the 1950s and 1960s. And yet, the power struggle is still there. We may have jobs and careers in the fullest sense of the word, but while we’re expected to excel at work, we’re also expected to be brilliant wives, fantastic homemakers, and perfect mothers, all while studies clearly show the gender pay gap is still very much a “thing”. For every dollar earned by a man, a woman will earn 81 cents doing the exact same thing (PayScale, 2020).

The superiority complex is real and painful. It is in no way made up and, unfortunately, it is in no way a modern issue. The first one to have discussed the implications of the superiority complex was Alfred Adler, in the 1920s (Adler, 2010), who said that the superiority complex is born out of the need to cover an inferiority complex (as… perplexing as that might sound).

More recent studies have statistically confirmed Adler’s point of view (Čekrlija, Djuric, Mirkovic, 2017). Even more, researchers and intellectuals have successfully linked the so-called “male superiority” with actual anthropological and psychological studies and research (Parker, 1979).

Clearly, the superiority complex is a problem as real as they come, and even more so, it seems to be prevalent among men. In between being stuck at home and being stuck with having to have it all (and in utter perfection), women seem to always be at a loss. Obviously, this can affect a relationship in multiple ways.

The good news is that most times, the superiority complex is the kind of problem that can be “attacked” with a powerful weapon: communication. This is precisely what we will discuss in this chapter.

A healthy communication strategy is not only a lifeboat for couples experiencing various forms of power struggle and different shapes of various complexes, it should be the very foundation upon which these relationships are rebuilt and redesigned.

The very idea of ‘power’ in a relationship is a topic that cannot be omitted when working on communication skills. When giving a presentation at work you know you must “own” the room to ensure you have the room’s full attention.

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