CHAPTER ONE
Making Sense of Today’s Changes
What is changing with gender and love? Certainly we can identify general change themes over the last century. The clear gender roles and established moral codes of times past have given way to much greater flexibility and more options in the choices we make. Average family size has diminished markedly,
1 with a growing number of people choosing not to have children at all.
2 Divorce has become increasingly common to the point that “until death do us part” has become the exception. And not just gender in the sense of roles and accepted behaviors, but our ideas about what it fundamentally means to be a man or a woman, have become increasingly plural and fluid.
We’ve also witnessed explicit advocacy for change, starting with the woman’s suffrage movement, and in 1920 in the U.S., the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The 1960s and 70s gave us the “summer of love” with its celebration of the body and sexuality. The 70s and 80s produced modern feminism’s call for equal rights and equal opportunity. The 90’s brought new advocacy for gay rights, with gay marriage and gays in the military eventually gaining acceptance. With this century, we’ve seen increased support for people who do not easily fit into binary gender categories and a growing call for transgender rights. And more recently, we’ve witnessed important new attention given to abuse of power and sexual misconduct, most specifically in the workplace, but also more broadly.
Is all of this change for the good? There are people who would argue that it represents quite the opposite, that it reflects an erosion of moral order, or worse, that civilization as a whole has entered a time of decline. And even where changes appear beneficial, they have often had disturbing consequences. The fact that marriage is not as once-and-for-all as it once was is at least disruptive, and often the source of considerable pain. And while the social movements I’ve described have been largely positive in their ultimate effects, most too have been accompanied by blindnesses. For example, the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s brought important new freedoms, but when viewed from the perspective of today, it is clear too that those freedoms were often not accompanied by the new responsibilities that we now know must accompany them.
At the least, the changes we confront today require that we leave behind much that we have known. And often they present uncomfortable new uncertainties and ambiguities. But unsettling consequences acknowledged, it seems clear that the larger portion of the gender- and love-related changes I’ve described are ultimately positive. They point toward greater freedom of choice, equality of opportunity, and acceptance of diverse ways of being. And today we see other changes of a more everyday sort that turn out to be just as significant when we take a moment to consider them. I think, for example, of how comfortably young men and young women today interact just as friends, something that was rare only a few decades ago. In the end, all these changes— whether more dramatic or more everyday—benefit us.
We are left with the essential question of just why we see these changes. People tend to think of social change in terms of organized change movements or specific policies. The kinds of explanations I tend to emphasize are more systemic—they recognize interplaying causal factors. And as I’ve noted, they are very often also evolutionary—they bring attention to the role of underlying “developmental” change processes. Here I will give particular attention to how we can think of current changes in the worlds of gender and love in terms of systemic dynamics of a specifically developmental sort.
A couple of these developmental contributors to what we see are familiar, or at least they tie to explanations we commonly hear cited. The first presents no real challenge to culture’s most recent story. Much in contemporary changes can be thought of as a simple extension of the same modern-age impetus toward greater individual determination that produced democratic governance and the American Bill of Rights. Modern efforts toward greater gender equality make a good example.
Understanding the second requires that we think more conceptually, but it is ultimately straightforward. Important aspects of today’s new freedoms can be thought of as expressions of postmodern sensibilities. Postmodern thought first appeared philosophically in the nineteenth century and has played a growing role in academia in recent decades. It brings a willingness to challenge absolutist assumptions of all sorts. It is reasonable that this would include traditional assumptions that we’ve had about gender and love.
But it turns out that neither a simple extension of modern-age achievements nor a postmodern challenging of past absolutes can ultimately explain what we see today. We need more if today’s changes are to make full sense. And of particular importance, we need more if our explanations are to help us develop the new capacities and ways of understanding needed to effectively make our way in what will likely be an even more uncertain and easily overwhelming future.
The main focus in these pages will be a third developmental step: the new cultural chapter I referred to in the preface as Cultural Maturity. Making full sense of Cultural Maturity’s implications requires that we think in ways that are new to most people. But as we will see, the further kind of change process the concept describes will be increasingly essential to a vital and fulfilling human future, and as we will explore specifically with this book, to a vital and fulfilling future for gender and love.
Loving as Whole People
Love makes a good place to begin understanding Cultural Maturity’s role in what we see. The phenomenon we call love is becoming different today not just in the forms it takes, but in its nature as felt experience. Ultimately, the changes we see have to do with what makes something love at all. Our times are requiring us to bring more to the experience of love than has ever before been necessary—and more than we human beings have before now been capable of.
Over three decades ago, I wrote an article I titled “A New Meaning for Love.”
3 No piece I’ve written since has been more often cited. A few paragraphs adapted from the introductory section of that article offer a hint at just what is changing and what makes these changes significant:
“My reaction to the dilemma of a couple who came to me recently for therapy helps highlight these changes in love and its workings. The couple showed a high degree of sensitivity to each other and were accustomed to security and contentment in their relationship. But lately they had begun to argue. Resentment and fear were entering their connection.
“When listening to the couple, I was surprised by what I felt in myself. I empathized with their pain, but I was also aware of feeling respect, fascination, even excitement in hearing what they had to say. Over time, I found myself thinking of their frustrations and pain less as expressions of personal failings than as products of the integrity the couple had brought to their relationship. They had begun to push into a new cultural frontier, and their fears seemed quite appropriate to the uncertainty inherent in the challenges the frontier presented. What is that frontier? Put simply, it is to love as whole people.”
What I was responding to could not be more important. Throughout our most recent chapter in culture’s story, intimate bonds have involved two people, each functioning as parts, coming together to create a whole. Our job with love has been to find our “better half.” In its time, this two-halves-make-a-whole dynamic has provided a rich and effective kind of connecting.
My grandparents provide a good example of the beauty of this kind of bond when it is historically timely. They met in grade school and were inseparable throughout their lives. Their purpose in love was to complete each other. They succeeded to such an amazing degree in doing this—in being the mythic brave knight and fair princess for each other—that when one died, the other followed within months. The primary “organism” of their existence was quite literally the whole created from the two of them together.
But something different is being asked of us today. Increasingly we are being challenged to connect not as two halves, but as separate whole beings. Bonding as two halves is a difficult security to surrender, but increasingly we are finding that there is really no choice. When one part of us tries to make someone else our solution, another part quickly acts to undermine it. We find ourselves creating struggle, doing something to put the other off, anything to regain our embryonic yet critical connection with a new sort of completeness in ourselves. Increasingly it is possible to love only to the degree to which we can find ways to relate to another person while remaining fully ourselves.
For these changes to make complete sense, we need to step back for some big-picture historical perspective. The whole notion that love is something that changes can be hard for people to get their minds around. We tend to assume that love is an eternal notion—that love is love. And if we do recognize that our ideas about love have evolved, we are likely to assume that love as we have known it in our time represents a culminating ideal. But in fact, love as we have tended to think of it—romantic love—is a relatively recent cultural “invention”—a product of our Modern Age
4—and, by all evidence, not an end point. Romantic love is appropriately celebrated. It has provided a powerful step forward in love’s evolution—toward, among other things, greater authority in our lives. Previously, love’s determinations were made by families or by a matchmaker. But there is no reason to expect romantic love to be the end of love’s story.
An easily startling recognition implied in what I have described supports the importance of something more. The modern-age Romeo and Juliet ideal represents something quite different from what we have assumed it to be about. We’ve tended to think of romantic love as love based on individual choice. But while choice set against the constraints of family expectations is without question much of what makes Romeo and Juliet a compelling tale, the modern age romantic ideal is not yet about individual choice in the sense of choosing as separate whole people.
A further recognition makes the need for something more even more clear and inescapably important. Love as we have known it necessarily involves distortion. With romantic love, the bond is created through the projection of parts of ourselves—I ascribe feminine aspects of myself to you; you ascribe masculine aspects of yourself to me. And as always happens with projection, we also mythologize the other, in this case making that person the magic answer to our lives (or, at less pleasant moments, the great cause of our suffering). Not only is romantic love not yet love between whole people, it is not yet love that reflects who the two people involved actually are.
The fact that love as we have witnessed it to this point has been based on projection becomes obvious with reflection. Projection is what makes it possible to fall quickly in love with no real knowledge of the other person. It is also what makes it possible for the sound of wedding bells at a movie’s conclusion to assure us that the protagonists will live “happily ever after” when, in fact, love’s journey has barely begun.
The common result when we fall out of love provides even more inescapable evidence. People tend to assume that we will then have distaste, even antipathy for the other person—which with high frequency is what we in fact feel. Notice that this outcome makes no sense if love had been between two whole people, if we have loved each other simply for who we are. The ending of such a relationship can bring significant sadness, but only in very unusual circumstances would antipathy be warranted. Why do we assume antipathy? When love involves projection, antipathy is needed in order to extract the projected part and regain our full sense of ourselves.
It is important to appreciate that up until very recently romantic love’s projective mechanisms have served us. Much of the “glue” of relationship—the magnetism of love and the basis of commitment— has come from this giving away of key dimensions of ourselves to the other. Not only have these mechanisms benefited us, they have made love possible. Making the other our answer has shielded us from uncertainties and complexities that we could not before have tolerated. But, like it or not, two-halves-make-a-whole relating is ceasing to work. In my work as a therapist, I increasingly find people seeking more complete kinds of connecting.
For lack of a better term, I call what intimate relationship becomes with this needed next chapter in intimacy’s evolving story simply Whole-Person love.
5 Alternatively, we could also call it culturally mature love, or what love becomes when it takes expression from the whole of ourselves as systems. I don’t see Whole-Person love as some luxury. I think the future of intimacy depends on our ability to realize this new and fuller kind of connecting.
Whole-Person love at once offers immense rewards and presents significant new demands. As far as rewards, it offers the possibility of a deeper sense of personal identity in relationship. And because it involves bringing more of ourselves to the experience of relationship, it also offers deeper and more reliable kinds of bonds and more fulfilling ways of being together. Whole-Person love makes it possible, really for the first time, to deeply love another person simply for who they are.
As far as demands, the new freedoms that come with Whole-Person love mean that we choose between options that are not as clear and obvious as in times past. In addition, such love requires that we know both ourselves and the person we are with more deeply. And of particular significance, Whole-Person love requires that we accept limits to what we can be for one another. The other person stops being our ultimate answer—and, similarly, we no longer get to be the ultimate answer for them. Love increasingly requires that we recognize how, as Lily Tomlin put it, “we are all in this alone.”
6Fortunately, however great the demands, the rewards make today’s new chapter in love’s story more than worth the effort. It is also the case, as we will see, that we really have no choice. These are changes “whose time has come.”
Cultural Maturity’s Needed “Growing Up” as a Species
I’ve emphasized that neither a simple extension of modern-age individualism nor a postmodern questioning of past absolutes adequately explains the changes we see today. As it applies to love, this essential recognition follows directly from what I have just observed.
In describing romantic love, I noted that we have idealized it as love based on individual choice. But I also described how Whole-Person love requires us to be more complete in ourselves. It turns out that Cultural Maturity’s changes fundamentally challenge individualism as we have thought about it. True individualism becomes possible only with Cultural Maturity’s changes. If we limit ourselves to modern-age notions of the individual, our ideas about love leave us well short of what is being required of us today.
7Whole-Person love also involves a more complex result than we see with postmodern changes. Leaving behind familiar rules by itself would only leave us wandering aimlessly. Whole-Person love requires that we think in more complete and nuanced ways. In a fundamentally new sense, we must make our choices from the whole of who we are.
The concept of Cultural Maturity takes us beyond both modern-age beliefs and the newer sensibilities of postmodern perspective and provide explanation for what is most fundamental in today’s needed new picture of identity and love. And the overarching vantage that becomes newly possible with culturally mature understanding provides perspective for making sense of gender-related changes that we have witnessed over the course of the last century.
Cultural Maturity involves two related change processes that are each today reordering the human experience. The first process concerns our relationship as individuals to culture as a whole. In every previous chapter in culture’s evolving story, culture has functioned like a parent in the lives of individuals. It has provided us with our rules to live by, and in the process, our sense of connectedness, identity, and security. Cultural Maturity’s “growing up” makes culture’s parental function increasingly something of the past. CST proposes that it is this first step that produces what we call postmodern belief, with its absence of traditional guideposts.
The second process concerns basic changes in how we understand and hold experience. It provides an antidote to postmodern aimlessness. It also makes possible more Whole-Person kinds of relating. Cultural Maturity brings with it changes in ourselves—specific cognitive changes. Later we will look more closely at just what they involve.
8 For now it is enough to observe that these changes make it possible to more fully engage the whole of our cognitive complexity, and in the process the whole of ourselves.
9These changes fundamentally alter how we think about and experience identity. I find a basic image useful for beginning to grasp just how it does. Think of a box of crayons. The crayons, with their complex array of hues, represent our various psychological parts. The box represents the ability to hold that complexity. Whole-Person identity is what we get when we successfully do so.
In a related way, these changes redefine relationship. Using our box of crayons metaphor, with two-halves-make-a-whole relationship, crayons in one person relate to crayons in another. And that is only part of it. More accurately, crayons in one person relate to images of crayons of an opposite sort that are projected onto the other person. The result is an illusion of completion when in fact the other person is barely involved. With Whole-Person relationship, each person celebrates their own whole-box-of-crayons completeness and connects with the other person from it.
Later we will see how the way that Cultural Maturity’s cognitive changes alter identity and love also has essential implications for how we think about gender. Our ideas about gender, like those we have had about identity and love, have been based on projection. Because of this, not only have they been incomplete, they have also necessarily involved distortion.
Again, as I’ve described for love, the fact that our beliefs about gender have been based on projection is not in itself a problem. We will look at how our ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman have been predictably different at different times in history and how our beliefs at particular times have served the needs of those times. But appreciating underlying dynamics helps us make sense of why we have had some of the beliefs we’ve had. It also offers us a chance to begin to understand gender in fuller ways.
Bringing evolutionary perspective to how we think about gender can also help us rethink relationships between the sexes. In later chapters, we will look at how Cultural Maturity’s changes help us get beyond projections that previously have gotten in the way of our seeing one another simply as people. We will also examine how they help us more deeply get in touch with what it means to be embodied, and through this, what might be particular in any person’s experience of gender.
It would be easy to think of Whole-Person love and Whole-Person identity mostly as dreams of some far-off future. But the fact that I wrote about these changes years ago suggests otherwise. And if some of the other gender- and love-related changes noted earlier have related origins, we have added evidence that these changes are well underway. That said, it is also very much the case that we are only just beginning to see the full expression of these new realities. Certainly Hollywood depictions rarely get beyond two-halves-make-a-whole love of the most trivial sort and only hint at how deeply identity is in flux. But I believe these changes describe what will increasingly—and necessarily—define identity and love over the next century. If identity and love are to work in times ahead, venturing into this new, more mature territory of experience becomes essential.
Personal Reflections
Some reflections from my personal experiences as a young man trying to make sense of gender and love help set the stage for later reflections. I offer them because they provide further insight into just what is becoming different and also because they point toward some important surprises with regard to how we have ended up with today’s gender-related expectations.
To a degree rare for the times, in my family there was little emphasis on traditional gender roles. This was not because my parents were particularly enlightened socially, though they were more aware than most. It was more a simple product of circumstances, of who made up my childhood world.
One of these circumstances was the fact that the most significant people in my growing up were artists and musicians, a roughly equal number of them men and women.
10 My sister and I each had artistic interests, hers more in music and mine most in the visual arts, particularly sculpture. We each learned skills that might have been thought of as more masculine or more feminine. For example, as an opera singer she learned to project and have a strong stage presence. As a sculptor, among other things, I learned to sew, for the simple reason that a sewing machine is a tool that can be handy for sculptural endeavors.
Another circumstance was just as important. I had girl cousins of my age living next door. When the neighborhood crowd got together to play, we all played together. For both of these reasons, throughout my early years, while I was attracted to girls sexually, I didn’t think of them as that different from myself. For the most part I didn’t see any reason to treat them differently from my other friends.
But that changed quickly when I entered school. Other kids, both boys and girls, had had more conventional upbringings with clearer gender expectations. Suddenly guys began talking about girls as if they were a different species. And very often the girls were in fact behaving like a different species.
In particular, there were surprises with how boys and girls were supposed to act if they had interest in one another. For example, it was clear that the guy was supposed to do the initiating and pursuing,
11 and that the girl, at least initially, was expected to not really let on if she had interest—to, at least a bit, play hard to get.
There was also a further, less-than-pleasant surprise. It turned out that very often girls were less interested in generally nice guys like myself who could be friends than in guys of the more “bad boy” sort.
12I remember talking with my male friends about how all that seemed unnecessarily complicated and a bit absurd. But we concluded that this must just be how things worked and that we would need to learn to play the game.
The polarized picture became even more extreme with college and formal dating. There was then a mostly unverbalized assumption that young men and young women were supposed to be magnetic opposites. When it came to love, my task was to find a magic other who could complete me—who could be my other half—and in turn to be this kind of magical completion for the other person.
I’m struck now by how much in my learnings about gender and love that came with decades since has involved challenging beliefs I acquired during those school years. I’m struck too by how much in at least my initial rethinking was implied in what had just seemed reasonable when I was younger.
Such rethinking began with questioning the value of conventional role expectations. It came to make less and less sense to me, for example, that it was my job as a man to always be protector and provider (though I was happy to be a bit of either at times, depending on the circumstances). Similarly, I questioned whether the woman should be expected to be always either nurturer or cheerleader (though at times a bit of one or the other could be nice). At a deeper level, I questioned the whole idea that someone else should be my answer and completion. The notion seemed increasingly to get in the way of love, at least love that could work for me.
With time, I found myself reflecting more specifically on what here I refer to as Whole-Person identity and love. I found growing fascination with trying to understand what bringing greater completeness to identity and love might look like. And I found myself more and more intrigued with the greater possibility it seemed to imply.
None of these gender- and love-related learnings made love—or life—easier. And the needed stretching has not stopped. For example, parts of me can at times still find it difficult to leave behind that magical hope that there is someone who might know me completely. But gradually it has become obvious that not only is it not a woman’s job to know me completely and mine similarly to completely know her, the whole notion that anything close to this is possible is absurd. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate that it can only be in our mutual completeness that the kind of love that I would want—love that could really add to my life—might be possible.
Complexity and Simplicity—Paradox and a New Common Sense
Whole-Person identity and Whole-Person love each propel us into more complex and often uncertain worlds. That they do should not take us by surprise. A main function of cultural dictates such as gender roles has been to protect us from complexity and uncertainty. Gender roles have provided one-size-fits-all rules for making our way amongst the endless ways we can be different. And the reliable magnetisms that come with projection and polarization in a similar way have protected us from doubt and any real need to understand nuance. Like it or not, Whole-Person identity and love challenge us to engage realities that are complex, uncertain, and demanding in ways that before now would have overwhelmed us.
Fortunately for any likelihood of success with the tasks ahead, this more complex and demanding picture also brings with it what might seem a paradox. There are important ways in which Cultural Maturity’s changes make identity and love simpler. Without this result, I don’t think taking on all that this new picture asks would be possible. It follows naturally from what we see if we step back and consider what makes Whole-Person identity and Whole-Person love different from what we have known.
With Cultural Maturity’s changes, we begin to see how a major part of the experiences we have called life and love—both what has made them exciting and what has made them so often difficult—has had more to do with what we lay on top of them as experience than what they are ultimately about. When we recognize this fact, there are essential ways in which reality becomes more straightforward. In the end, Whole-Person identity and love are about simply being in the world honestly and taking responsibility in doing so. They are about making good choices and stating our yeses and nos clearly and with integrity. Ultimately, the rules of Whole-Person love are not that different from those that we rely on with the best of friendships (and not that different from what it means to be the best friend one can be with oneself).
13 I think of this easily contradictory-seeming outcome as part of a “new common sense” that is only just now becoming possible to grasp.
Other recognitions that are important for today’s new picture of identity and love similarly reflect this at once more complex and simpler kind of common sense. One recognition of particular importance concerns how we best think about the realities of times past. It reflects a kind of shift that comes with bringing culturally mature perspective to any kind of question. I’ve proposed that the two-halves-make-a-whole picture of identity and love that culturally mature perspective challenges was right for its time, and thus is not a problem. It becomes a problem only if we continue to hold onto it going forward. Developmental perspective makes the past not wrong, but simply no longer timely.
Another such new-common-sense recognition is related and ultimately just as important. We see that no one is to blame for the teaching of roles and ways of relating that today cease to serve us. When they were timely, they were taught by the social system as a whole. We can miss this. For example, people today are likely to ascribe male behaviors that can no longer work to the teachings of parents or social pressure from other boys. Note that in my case, expected behavior toward girls was at least as much communicated by the behavior of the girls. The love- and gender-related assumptions of any time are aspects of larger realities of which we are all a part and from which we all benefit (and for which we all also pay the price).
A further essential way that Cultural Maturity results in greater simplicity (as long as we can tolerate the complexity) involves how it has the potential to bring a marked lessening of conflict and drama. A certain amount of conflict is an inevitable consequence of the fact that two people are going to have different needs. But the larger portion of conflict of the drama sort is a product of failing at two-halves-make-a whole relationship tasks—such as being the other person’s answer and understanding them completely. It is a product of one person’s “crayons” sparring with the “crayons” of another. Conflict of the drama variety stops serving any purpose when a person begins to become capable of Whole-Person relationship.
One of the best places to see this essential difference brings us back to my earlier observations about what tends to happen when a love relationship ends. I described how love relationships based on romantic projection tend not to end pleasantly. The reason is not hard to understand from what I have described. Separation requires that we extract the projected parts of ourselves. Often we create the needed distance by replacing the idealized projections that drew us together with projections of an “evil other” sort.
I’ve suggested that Whole-Person love relationships tend to end differently. There can be significant disappointment and sadness that things no longer work as they have, and deep grieving at the loss. There can also be regrets that mistakes were made. But at the least, there tends to be gratitude for what was shared even if ultimate dreams could not be fulfilled. Often people remain friends in some way.
Notice that this result is again rather common sense. If we were initially attracted to someone and we have any capacity for good judgment, he or she was probably a good person. And if we stayed in the relationship with that person over time, he or she was probably basically good for us. That the person might be now seen as evil, if this conclusion has any basis in fact, can only reflect our own failings (that we could have chosen to be with—and stay with— such an evil person).
In later chapters, I will describe how this getting beyond ultimately unhelpful—and unnecessary—conflict and drama extends beyond the personal to gender’s big picture. I will propose that much of what we have witnessed historically as conflict between the sexes has been a product of ways we have protected ourselves from realities that before now would have been more than we could handle.
The new, and newly demanding, kind of common sense our future requires of us asks a lot. It can overwhelm us. But if we can tolerate all it asks, the result is an ultimately more caring picture in which much more becomes possible.