The Mutual Submission Deadlock

Athol Kay today describes the evolution of his marriage into a relationship where he assumed more dominance. As always, the whole post is worth reading. But I wanted to comment on one particular part:

In Jennifer’s case she was so naturally submissive that she didn’t take control over things, but we’d end up in sort of mutual submission deadlocks. “What do you want to do?” “I dunno what do you want to do?”

The Mutual Submission Deadlock has been one of the absolute biggest problems for me to overcome in my own marriage, and for very similar reasons. I am not particularly submissive, but I am very introverted (borderline Asperger’s syndrome). I’ve also had decades of societal and (much heavier) family pressure towards a personality of not pushing my own desires on other people. This has ended up pushing me towards just not telling other people what I want, and just expecting them to magically know. My father and my less-obnoxious brother have this exact same problem as well.

The solution is really quite easy: just voice preferences when I actually have them. This answers the complaint that the original poster Athol refers to had. This is by no means a heavy handed “my way or the highway” style of dominance. In a way, it’s not even really dominance at all. But it solves a couple of major relationship issues.

First, when we’re truly in a deadlock it resolves it. A preference has now been voiced. If she truly has no preference, the issue is settled.

Second, in the (far more common) case when she does have a preference, the burden is now on her. If she doesn’t like my preference, she can come up with an alternative. Quite often, this is what happens – and a fair amount of the time, we even choose her preference over mine. Clearly, this is not heavy handed dominance. Yet even so, with the newer approach I’ve navigated the situation without coming across as a pussy. My preferences for things like where to eat are often very minimal. For example, I tend toward simple tastes, and often get similar meals wherever we go; it makes many restaurants truly interchangeable to me. But by expressing a preference, I am now not just a wimp letting her guide me along – or worse, just a “kid” for whom she has to make all of the decisions. I am a man with preferences, thoughts, and taste of my own. I am just willing to compromise on the little things that truly aren’t that important.

I still struggle with this, though. I’ve got over three decades of practice at hiding my preferences. Letting them out is neither instinctive nor natural for me at the moment. But I’m working on it, and it’s definitely getting better.

On a completely unrelated note:

By way of comparison, back in the day I passed on dating a particular feminist friend that I was interested in. Nice girl, smart, pretty just with this huge feminist chip on her shoulder that I couldn’t be bothered with. I just slowly found it a turn off and never pursued her. As far as I could tell in our little Christian circle of friends she never ended up dating anyone, so if her goal was not to be taken advantage of by men – mission accomplished.

This describes my sister at a note perfect level.