Black-and-White Thinking is a Trap
We have to fight this tendency if we want to achieve true freedom.
In the Beginning…
Many years ago, I was a recently married young woman and about to become a mother. My husband and I were sitting at home one night talking to his best friend about the nature of marriage. Both my husband and his friend had grown up in Iran, a place with rather different ideas about the roles of husbands and wives than I was used to, having grown up in Canada.
Unsurprisingly, as a twenty-something, educated Canadian woman in the 1980s, I believed it to be a self-evident fact that men and women should be equals, especially within a marriage. A marriage was, by definition, a relationship between equals, ideally with both partners equally sharing power and decision making.
I mistakenly believed that my husband, Bijan, thought this way too. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have married him or agreed to have a child with him.
My husband’s friend Farshad said something that left me a little speechless. He said that women and men were not equal, and that a husband had to dominate in a marriage. Why? Because, apparently, “Somebody has to be the boss.”
The thinking behind this statement was, I think, something like, “If we (men) don’t control them (women), they will control us.”
My husband said nothing, either in consent of this idea or to refute it. The subject was changed, and we went on to talk about other things. I did not press the point, other than to record my objection to what I saw as an almost laughably ridiculous idea about marriage. Honestly, what century was this guy living in? Certainly not the twentieth century. Maybe not even the one before that.
The Myth of Progress
It seemed to me then, with my misplaced sense of my own cultural superiority, that Iranian culture was stuck in the medieval period, and that this man was to be pitied along with his future wife because he couldn’t escape his harmful cultural conditioning.
But I had been smart enough to choose a man, Bijan, with reasonable, modern ideas. I hadn’t fallen into THAT trap, unlike Pat, Farshad’s hapless fiancée (all names have been…
