Love Without Submission

Safety, choice, and presence

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Every family or friend group has one of these couples, and everybody knows what I mean without ever having to say it directly.

You are at somebody’s cookout and she is sitting at the end of a picnic table, and another woman asks her whether the two of them are headed back to Tennessee again next summer. You watch her look across the yard at him before she answers. He is forty feet away by the garage with his back to her, talking to somebody else entirely, and she looks anyway. Then she says they haven’t decided yet, which is true in the sense that there is nothing for her to decide.

It shows up in a hundred small places once you start noticing. She orders what he orders. She laughs about half a second after he laughs and only if he does. Somebody brings up the painting or the running she used to do and she tells the story with an apology folded into the middle of it. Somewhere along the way that part of her life became a subject he had opinions about.

On the drive home somebody in your car finally says it. She used to be so funny. Everybody agrees and nobody does anything about it, because there is nothing anybody can do with an arrangement that is working for at least one of the two people in it.

Erich Fromm wrote about that arrangement in The Art of Loving. He called it symbiotic union, and he described it as what people reach for when being a separate person becomes more than they can handle. One of them deals with that by taking another person over and running them. The other handles it by dissolving into somebody and letting themselves be run. Submission is Fromm’s word for the second one. The submitting partner has solved the problem of being alone in the world, and the solution works, which is exactly why she will defend it to your face if you ever say anything to her about it.

Don Miguel Ruiz has the best picture I know of for why that solution holds in his book The Mastery of Love. Imagine somebody with a magical kitchen in her house, where any food she could ever want is sitting there whenever she wants it, in whatever amount she wants. A man knocks on her door holding a pizza and offers it to her on one condition, which is that she does whatever he tells her to do for the rest of her life. She laughs at him and closes the door. She has a magical kitchen. Why would she ever choose to give her freedom over to this man with a pizza?

Now empty the kitchen out and leave the same woman in the same house without having eaten in three weeks. The same man knocks with the same pizza and the same terms, and this time she takes the deal and feels lucky to have gotten it. She will also defend him to anybody who says a word against him, because he is the only source of food she has available.

The kitchen is you. A person who can feed herself, who carries some sense of being worth something that doesn’t have to arrive from outside, will never trade a whole life for somebody’s approval. A person whose kitchen has been empty since she was five years old will trade nearly anything for it, and she will call the trade a marriage, and from across a yard it is almost impossible to tell the difference between the two.

You can see all of this in her from the other side of a cookout, and clarity about somebody else’s marriage has never once changed anybody’s life. The harder question points back at you. Hardly anybody gets through a life without handing some of it over to somebody, and for most of us the handover is small enough and local enough that it never once announces itself. It lives in one relationship rather than all of them, and it covers a few subjects rather than everything, which is exactly why it has gone twenty years without being noticed.

There is somebody in your life whose mood you check before you decide what you are going to say, and there is an opinion you have held for six years that you have never once said out loud in front of them. You have reasons for all of it, which is exactly how it stays invisible to you.

What makes the difference, in that relationship and in hers, comes down to three things.

The first is whether being yourself in front of somebody costs you anything. Safety in a relationship usually gets discussed as the absence of yelling, which is part of it and yet it is the smallest part. The real question is what happens to the temperature in the room when you disagree. If having your own opinion reliably produces three days of cold, you will stop having opinions, and you will never experience that as a decision you made. Your body will make it for you well before your mind gets a vote, because something in you is keeping a running tally of what it costs to be a separate person in that house and adjusting your behavior to match.

That tally started long before she ever met him. Somebody emptied her magical kitchen when she was a girl, and whoever did it taught her the going rate for being a separate person in a room, and she has been paying that rate ever since to whoever is standing closest. He didn’t invent the arrangement. He walked into a house that had already been built and found a door standing open, and for a person in that condition an open door and somebody willing to walk through it feel like the same thing as being loved.

The second thing love without submission requires is choice, and that claim belongs to Fromm more than anybody. He argued that love is an act of will rather than a feeling that lands on you out of the sky, and it sounds cold right up until you follow it out. An act of will requires that you could have done otherwise. Fifteen years of being unable to leave looks exactly like fifteen years of deciding to stay, from a lawn chair forty feet away. The difference sits on the inside, and you can hear it whenever she defends him, because there is something a half step too fast about her loyalty that everybody notices and nobody ever mentions.

The third thing love without submission requires is presence, and it is the saddest of the three. A person who is managing somebody is never actually with them. She has not really been to a cookout in years. Her body goes, and it spends the whole afternoon tracking his face across the yard and reading the volume of whatever conversation he is in and staying half a step ahead of anything that could turn into a problem on the drive home. Nobody in that condition is available to talk to, which is most of why she has gotten boring, and she was not always boring.

So he won. He got everything he wanted and he is as alone in that house as he has ever been in his life because there is nobody over there to be with. Fromm’s argument runs in both directions because the domination side of it is an escape from aloneness too and it fails for exactly the same reason the submission side fails. You can’t be met by somebody you have erased.

He came from his own childhood home as well. Usually it is a house where being managed by somebody else was the thing that hurt and the only position that ever felt safe was the one holding the controls. He took that position a long time ago and has never once experienced it as cruelty. From where he stands he is handling things. He makes the decisions and carries the weight and knows what everybody is doing and he is exhausted and he cannot work out why a woman who agrees with him about everything leaves him feeling so unaccompanied.

It would be easy to read all of this as a story about men and women, and the positions have nothing to do with either one. The same man who runs that marriage down to the thermostat setting can walk into a room with his own father or his boss and become the one checking a face before he answers a question. He will do it without ever noticing the switch happened. Whoever is feeding you is the person you submit to. Most of us are stocked in some rooms and starving in others, and the rooms where we are starving are the ones where we are hardest to recognize.

None of this gets fixed by somebody telling her what they can see. She already knows. She has known for years and saying it to her mostly produces a defense of him, which is the response that makes everybody give up on her and go home.

What changes it is the magical kitchen, and stocking a kitchen that has been bare since childhood takes years and nearly always takes somebody outside the marriage to help with it. She has to find out that she can feed herself. Until she does, every conversation anybody has with her about leaving is a conversation about starving to death, and she will take the pizza every single time.

What love looks like on the other side of all that is a lot less dramatic than people expect. Two people who could each survive losing the other, standing there anyway on a Saturday. She speaks her own truth at the cookout and the drive home is fine. He hears something he would rather not hear and the temperature in the house holds steady. Nobody is managing anybody, and both of them are actually in the room, which turns out to be the whole reason for having somebody in the first place.

Peace my friends,

~Travis

Up next week: Meaning as Something You Live

This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.