Your Gender Traits & Strengths
Welcome to Your Love Breakthrough! Get Real. Love.
In this edition: Your Gender Traits & Strengths
Perspective – Sorting through Gender History
Practical Tactics – Finding Your Gender Center
Perspective – Sorting through Gender History
For many, June spotlights gender themes. It's also Father's Day month.
Gender roles and identity in Western society have shifted dramatically multiple times since the 1960s. Depending on your family's stance, the society you grew up in, and how you processed all of it, you've related to this topic uniquely.
Throughout these different iterations, there has almost always been factions within the predominant viewpoint of the moment demanding that everyone must agree with its values and live out their relationships accordingly.
Backlashes have rocked the pendulum:
Male dominance of the mid 20th century... swung to exasperated (often bitter) power-feminism... swung to often-covert sexual harassment and bullying against the marginalized and lower-ranked... swung to the "Me too" and LGBQTA+ movements... swung to an uprising of reclaiming heterosexual masculinity... and on and on.
Case in point: In the early and mid-2000s, a resentment against male dominance created a trend of women striving to be strong and independent. Many of these women simultaneously allowed themselves to be convinced that only "real men" initiate, pursue, take charge, and provide (financially).
This locked vulnerable daters in a catch 22, a double-bind. I knew a guy who went on a date with a woman who asked if he wanted to split the bill. Thinking, "I better be open-minded and feminist," he said, "Sure." She responded, "I was testing you. Real men insist on paying."
Practical Tactics – Finding Your Gender Center
As children, we're suggestible. We either adapt to what we're taught, or we react by fiercely opposing teachings we're force-fed.
As adults, we do have the capacity and power to process all of the beliefs of our upbringing, how we feel about them, and how we relate to them according to how we're designed. We can separate ourselves from any labels, prescriptive dating and relating protocols or empty (sometimes harmful) dogma posing as inerrant. You can:
Pinpoint absolutes about gender roles and identity that you don't agree with, that you resist, or find difficult.
Ask yourself why you feel like straining against these mores. Do you believe they're wrong? Are you afraid there's truth in them that works against you and your place in a current or potential partnership?
Do you feel that you must behave a certain way or adapt to a certain label in order to behave the right way in dating or relationship?
Ask yourself how you (or your partner) are feminine or masculine. Which traits of these can you offer in a partnership? Which do you want in a partnership?
Definitions of "masculine" and "feminine" aren't weapons of judgment when you lean into how you relate to both characteristics. It frees you from judgment and connects you to your partner with deeper appreciation and admiration.
If this email was forwarded to you, Sign up to get uplifting messages from Christy Sanborn Grassman.
What you have you missed? Check out past email messages from Christy Sanborn Grassman.