A friend of mine recently lent me Getting to “I Do”: The Secret to Doing Relationships Right! by Dr. Patricia Allen and Sandra Harmon, as she had found the book enormously helpful and enlightening. Patricia Allen is a relationship therapist and the book, published in 1994, is based on twenty years of her research with clients. (She has also written what is presumably a sequel, Staying Married and Loving It!) The book has some very interesting ideas, the basic one being that, in every relationship, one person plays a masculine role and behaves accordingly, and the other plays a feminine role. Harmony in the relationship exists when the participants act in line with the role they’ve signed up to play. At first glance it sounds terribly sexist and confining. However, Allen at least recognizes that in some heterosexual relationships (and this presumably applies to homosexual ones too, though it is not discussed) the woman actually plays the masculine role and the man the feminine role and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, provided that both parties are comfortable and that these are their preferred roles. What does not work is if both are taking the masculine role, or both the feminine.

The authors stress the importance of knowing up front which role you want to be in, before you meet the person. Because if you don’t consciously know, you may start out in a role you are not comfortable in. Relationship problems will start later when you try to switch roles. So, do you want to lead, make decisions, give more and be respected (masculine) or do you want to be given to, cared for and have your “feelings cherished” (a phrase she uses many times in describing the feminine role). Perhaps you’d like it both ways? Sorry, you are out of luck; it doesn’t work like that. If that is your desire, then you are narcissistic!

Personally, it makes me uncomfortable to think of not leading and making decisions, but a masculine man who is truly cherishing your feelings considers them carefully when making decisions, so it is not like the feminine role has no power. It almost seems like the decision is being made together, but in a very particular dynamic.

The feminine role has great power, but not the power to demand that the masculine person change. The feminine can tell the masculine how she feels about something, and that she respects his right to do or not do this “something”, and she may inform him that if he does do this “something” she will need to leave the relationship. Then it is the masculine’s decision to change in order to keep her, or to not change and lose her.

The woman (in the feminine role) also has a lot of power initially BEFORE she sleeps with a man if she is looking for a lasting relationship. Because women get much more attached (even addicted, Allen contends) to men after sex due to greater amounts of the hormone oxytocin, a woman would be smart to wait three months, and then ask for three things before commencing a sexual relationship. These are 1) continuity in the relationship, 2) longevity (does he imagine himself with the same long-term goals for a relationship, for example marriage and children) and 3) monogamy (that he not have a sexual relationship with anyone else while he’s having one with you).

The problem for most women these days, says Allen, lies in that they really want to be the feminine in the relationship, but don’t quite know how because they are used to being successful career women, and at work everyone plays a masculine role. But a problem for other women is that they initially take the feminine role, because that is the most typical way that relationships initiate (we wait for the phone call, wait for the man to ask for a date), but they really want to be the one in charge of the relationship, the masculine role, and so that comes out later. These women would best serve themselves by knowing they want this role in a relationship and then find a man more comfortable with the feminine role and ask him out. (Or ask out any man; if he doesn’t want the feminine role he probably won’t be interested; nothing lost either way.) If one suppresses her natural preference at first, it will surely emerge later, creating a power struggle with two people in the masculine role.

So you have to decide. Upon reading Allen’s descriptions of the roles, I was leaning towards wanting to play the masculine role. I want to be deciding what to do and want to be respected, and I like to give and cherish and care about my guy’s feelings. However, the book also includes a multiple-choice quiz (!) to help you figure it out, and based on that I came out feminine! Though not by a lot; I had plenty of “masculine” answers too. Maybe that’s my source of difficulties in the love department…

This one is definitely a thought-provoking book. Indeed, I’ll have to keep thinking about it…