With a little bit of luck

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

What qualifies as romance? When I was a young teen, my sister, nine years older and newly in the working world, went to New York City with some girl friends. They toured around, saw the sights, went to a show - My Fair Lady.

She was telling me about how romantic that show was and I was following closely. So when she got to the ending, the famous “Eliza, where are my slippers?” line, I really came up short. To put my response into today’s lingo, I thought “WTF?”

Romantic? This patronizing, pedantic man treats her like a lab rat. She succeeds in the programming, and finally gets the strength to walk away. He grudgingly acknowledges he misses her presence. She returns, and his response shows he’s made no movement, no change. This is romance? 

Somehow, it became conventional wisdom that a man didn’t need to tell a woman he loved her — she would just know. Who foisted that canard on the world? Women are encouraged to believe something despite little or no evidence or outward expression. It seems to me it’s a terrifyingly small step from “He loves me even though he doesn’t say it,” to “He hits me because he loves me.”

So maybe women have more and deeper emotional resources than men. And maybe women use both hemispheres of their brains more equally, and the communication between the hemispheres is stronger and quicker. How does that translate into women having full emotional responsibility for both partners?

For decades in this culture, men were allowed to express two emotions — rage and lust; that was the gamut of their sanctioned emotional range. Good women could express many emotions, as long as the emotions were selfless and the women were passive. It has been stifling for both men and women to have weaknesses made weaker through disuse, while overused strengths become bound up and calcified.

We’ve stumbled through the sexual revolution and the second wave of feminism. We hope these have resulted in both sexes having more emotional freedom — free to feel and free to express it. Yet it still feels to me like a work in progress.

How long a way have we actually come, baby?