Patricia Allen - Getting to I Do: The Secret to Doing Relationships Right!

This book is dedicated to H. P.

The womens movement brought us independence, but it did not bring us love.

D R . P ATRICIA A LLEN

T he womens liberation movement changed my life. Before I read Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique, I perceived myself as a normal, middle-class, traditional Iowan wife and mother of four, who also taught art and social studies at a local junior high school. But looking back, I realize I was totally without a sense of my own rights as a human being.

My husband, a high school social studies teacher and athletic coach, whom I had married when I was nineteen and he was twenty-one, controlled every penny that we both brought home. He even did the grocery shopping. Incredible as it seems, he gave me only a quarter a day (which I kept in my loafer, because I didnt own a purse), with which I was to buy my lunch, a fifteen-cent saladschool cafeteria discount priceand a ten-cent Fresca. Most of the time, however, I used the quarter to buy stale doughnuts at a bakery thrift store near the school. The result was a steady gain in weight, until I peaked at 205 pounds.

One day a woman teacher at my school who felt sorry for me gave me a copy of The Feminine Mystique, which I devoured. This book made me understand that many women like myself lived under the control of much less gifted men. It also showed me how much I needed help.

I entered therapy and quickly began to bloom as an individual. I lost weight and became interested in clothes and makeup. I decided to go back to school to get my Ph.D. so I could become a psychotherapist and help others like myself.

I had hoped my husband would be proud of the changes I was making in my life but soon discovered that independence, individuality, and good looks were not the qualities he wanted or valued in a wife. As I grew thinner, more attractive, and more able to voice my beliefs, he grew more angry and less interested in me sexually, until soon he was totally turned off.

I immersed myself in the study of human behavior. With each new class and counseling group I attended, I found myself trying to find answers to the problem of how I could successfully combine my marriage and my career. But before I could find any solutions, my husband walked out on me.

Alone for the first time in my life, I was forced to make a living, handle money, raise four daughters, finish graduate school, and begin to build a therapy practice. I was also on the lookout for a new husband, one who would accept me as I wanted to be, both married and successful.

A few months after my divorce, I met a ruggedly handsome out-of-work cowboy, who soon asked me to marry him. My children liked him and I was thrilled to get the offer, so of course I accepted.

The first few months we were together were wonderful, except for the fact that my new husband didnt like living in my ex-husbands house with my ex-husbands furniture. So, because he was broke and I had good credit, I bought us, in order to please him, a new house, ten rooms of furniture, five thoroughbred horses, and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

I was thrilled when he finally got a job, but then, six months later, at a Christmas party, he got into a fight with his boss and was fired. The next day, right before I left for school, he announced he was going home to his mothers ranch. I assumed he was joking, but later that evening when I returned home, I caught what turned out to be my last glimpse of him, driving away in a large moving van with all my furniture. Naturally, he had already taken the five horses.

I never saw him, the horses, or the furniture again. A few months later, I lost my house, got high blood pressure, and had to file for bankruptcy.

I soon met another man who seemed to be just what I needed after the cowboy. He was loving, gentle, and rich. He didnt work because he didnt have to. He came from a fine old family and even owned a yacht. I figured he was as far away from the cowboy as I could get.

Once again, I married soon after I met my hero, and once again, things seemed fine, at first. My husband loved me and my children, and not only did he pay all the bills, he was generous as well. Living with him made me feel secure.

But then, about a year after we married, he began to complain about feeling lonely at home while I was off pursuing my career. Although I felt guilty, knowing I did put my work ahead of our marriage, I refused to give it up. I wanted equality, just as the womens movement had promised me.

I tried hard to make the relationship work, but once again I just couldnt seem to balance my marriage and my career, and after three years we divorced.

I was beginning to wonder whether marriage and career fulfillment were compatible. Instead of love, equality seemed to lead to conflict and confusion.

I observed that as women got stronger and became more male, men became intimidated and more female, reluctant to make a commitment and take on the responsibility for an independent woman who could leave him at will. These men still wanted a traditional, controllable, docile woman, not a womans libber.

Certainly, most of the men I met as a single woman were either intimidated by my success or wanted me to take care of them. The rest just avoided me.

My daughters were having as much trouble as I was. As they reached maturity, they too couldnt find mates who could or would accept their having a career and the time it took away from them. Three of my daughters went to school for degrees and became professionals, while the fourth got married and had a baby. The career-oriented daughters envied the one with the husband and child, and she envied the education of the other three.

After I divorced my third husband, I stayed single for the next eighteen years and dated a variety of men, all of whom taught me something I needed to learn.

In 1981 I earned my doctorate in psychology in the area of communication techniques. As a transactional analyst, I had studied the meaning and intent behind the words people use to communicate with one another. Soon I saw a way to simplify and package communication techniques that my clients could use easily to negotiate better relationships.

This technique, which I called Semantic Realignment and which became my doctoral dissertation, is a way to apply consistent, logical principles within a carefully worked-out system. By clarifying and applying the decision-making process, teaching individual men and women how to speak (and argue) rationally, I pragmatically established a system of complementary communication.

As an intern, I was required to run groups to demonstrate my skills. I began conducting once-a-week relationship seminars in the rec center of a local high school. My goal was to gather data and share it with as many people as I could.

Week after week, I listened to men and women who were in emotional torment over the confusion of male and female roles. I heard men complain of being smothered by women who pursued them or of feeling rejected by women who didnt. They told me that they felt thwarted from expressing their naturally male generosity when the woman picked up the tab. They asked what they were to do about a woman who asked them out and then expected them to pay. How were they supposed to respect her male qualities and then cherish her female ones as well?

Women, on the other hand, would complain of, and doubt, the manhood of men who wouldnt ask for sex. Some women refused sex until a commitment was made, only to see a man walk out before a relationship could be established. Other women fell in love, had sex, and expected a commitment to follow, only to find that the man had no intention of making one. On every level, there was a concern about commitment. It was clear to me that women were becoming so male that men saw them as one of the guys who would share money and genitals without a commitment.