How Healthy Male And Female Roles Help Reduce Toxicity in Relationships

Contemporary speech has taken to overusing the word toxic to describe almost anything off-putting.  Toxic is secondarily defined as “very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way”, and is used today (especially by our youth) to demonize everything they disagree with or choose not to tolerate.

Aside from its primary definition (literally “poisonous”), toxic can be appropriately used to describe certain aspects of many relationships.  We’ve all encountered actions or attitudes from partners which not only break us down personally but also tear at the foundation of our relationship’s ability to succeed.  

This is not a sexual preference or gender exclusive, though I will view it here through the lens of heterosexual couples, a dynamic with which I am familiar.  Men and women do this equally in their internal struggles between ego and compromise.

Men have treated women like garbage since the dawn of humanity.  In the times before Enlightenment and technology, superior physical strength ruled the day and women had no recourse but to play along.  Men, of course, took full advantage of this, and some continue to practice hard-line patriarchal measures in their relationships today.  

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This goes deeper than blatant physical abuse, which society long ago criminalized.  Some men create or seek out previously emotionally damaged women to exploit their needs for acceptance and love in order to give men power and control.  

Such damaged women (often simplistically described as having “daddy issues”) misinterpret that control as admirable strength when it is in fact the opposite.  Anyone who feels the need to dominate any physically weaker being is compensating for a lack of self-esteem to feed their ego.  

What these men fail to realize is that, besides being a horrible way to treat anyone (especially someone they claim to love), this behavior undercuts the building blocks of their relationship as a whole.  That is what makes it toxic.  Making a woman feel unworthy and dependent only minimizes her ability to contribute to a healthy partnership, as she becomes incapable of inserting her true self into the equation.  

A woman who walks on eggshells is not a partner, and as such cannot be fulfilling to a man any more than she can be fulfilled herself.  Such dysfunction is often misinterpreted by both partners as love - “he’s obsessive and controlling because he loves me”, or “I’m giving her what she really needs because no other man will love her enough to do so”.  Many are actually convinced of this and believe it’s the best they can do because they’ve never experienced the freedom a functional relationship between equals provides.

The opposite exists in equal measure.  In many cases, contemporary overcompensation has empowered women - and enfeebled men - to the point of disintegrating gender roles, often to the detriment of healthy heterosexual dynamics.  

It is not sexist to recognize that gender roles have a purpose.  They have of course been rightly lessened as humans evolved past their hunter-gatherer roots, but they still serve a purpose, especially in child-rearing.  In a reversal of earlier trends, however, many men have regressed to milquetoast passivity while being led around on a leash by their unyielding women.

These women need to justify their empowerment by emasculating their men.  They rebel against anything they feel “puts them in a box” and lash out against the patriarchy, which must also include their own partners.  They will say “you’re not a man, you’re an animal” when he tries to take charge then say “stop being a pussy and act like a man” when he doesn’t.  

They take advantage of the fact that it is unacceptable to physically react to a woman to make him psychologically confused about his place in the world, questioning how his brain and body are programmed by nature to behave.  It’s easy to be brazen when nobody will punch you in the face. 

This is of course intentional, even when unwittingly so.  Whether they realize it or not, this is a fight for recognition of female empowerment over what they’ve been taught was generations of programming to the contrary.  This, again, is what makes it toxic.  Much as it is for men in the earlier examples, the need to support their egos supersedes the nurturing of a balanced relationship to achieve a happy compatibility.  

Denying at least some degree of gender roles is denying biological nature.  It was long overdue progress when role extremes became shunned by civil society, and men and women ceased being “master” and “subject”.  But there is a functional smoothness in which mild gender roles contribute to most healthy relationships.  

They can certainly be reversed in specific situations according to personal needs (like female breadwinners or male childcare givers).  But numerous studies have shown that maintaining some degree of “role respect” results in far better outcomes for long-term success and grounded, stable children.

Males and females (of all animal types) are programmed differently.  Finding common ground does not require us to ignore that reality.  We can be equal partners and still recognize that biological gender has a fulfilling place in sentient life when we acquiesce to what comes naturally.  This doesn’t have to pigeonhole anyone into limitations on their experiences or accomplishments, but such recognition will have a tremendous positive influence on the personal contentment of anyone in a heterosexual battle of egos. 

I don’t mean to denigrate anybody’s personal comfort zone regarding gender roles - we should all do what makes us happy.  But I question whether such imbalanced existences can actually result in communal happiness.  It is often said that ignorance is bliss, though I can’t see how true bliss can exist in a state of denial.  

Substituting fear and self-loathing with personal autonomy and respect can only serve to expose our true selves, and real happiness in relationships can only be achieved by knowing each other’s true selves and loving them anyway.  Anything else is both definitions of toxic - besides being unpleasant and hurtful, it also poisons us from within.

Zephareth Ledbetter is the author of “A White Man’s Perspectives on Race and Racism”, available as an ebook at smashwords.com/books/view/1184004, and can be reached on Facebook and Twitter