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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…
