Rewriting the Rules

An Anti Self-Help Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships

Meg John Barker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351699730
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

We live in a time of uncertainty about relationships. We search for The One but find ourselves staying single because nobody measures up. We long for a happily-ever-after but break-up after break-up leave us bruised and confused.

Rewriting the Rules: An Anti Self-Help Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships is a friendly guide through the complicated - and often contradictory - advice that's given about sex and gender, monogamy and conflict, break-up and commitment. It asks questions about the rules of love, such as which to choose from all the rules on offer? Do we stick to the old rules we learnt growing up, or do we try something new and risk being out on our own? And what about the times when the rules we love by seem to make things worse, rather than better?

This new edition, updated throughout, considers how the rules are being 'rewritten' in various ways - for example in monogamish and polyamorous relationships, different ways of understanding sex and gender, and new ideas for managing commitment and break-up where economics, communities, or child-care make complete separation impossible. This book considers how the rules are being 'rewritten' in various ways, giving you the power to find an approach that best fits your situation.

1
Rewriting the rules

Figure 1.1 Contradictory rules

Uncertainty and the rules

We’re in a state of uncertainty about relationships.

There’s never been more advice on who and how to love. Dating apps promise to find our perfect match. Agony aunts and uncles pass judgement on every celebrity break-up and make-up. Reality shows advise on how to fix our relationships. Pop songs tell us how to feel when falling in and out of love. Billboard advertisements blast us with images of happy couples who’re somehow ‘getting it right’ as they’re eating their breakfast or driving their car. All day long we’re bombarded by rules about relationships: who to be in order to get and keep one, what to want and expect from one, and how to know when it’s not working anymore.

At the same time, the rules we receive about relationships have become increasingly confusing and contradictory, as you can see from the cartoon at the start of the chapter. Everything from official forms to social media seems intent on defining us by our relationships, but there’s less and less clarity about what we mean by relationships. If we were honest, perhaps we’d all tick the box that says ‘it’s complicated’.

So we’re in a state of uncertainty, and it’s all the more terrifying because it’s in an arena which has the highest possible scope for pain and distress, as well as pleasure and fulfilment. Get it right, we’re told, and we could achieve the ultimate happily-ever-after: the security of being seen as we are and loved for it; the safety of complete belonging, all of our needs and desires met. Get it wrong, however, and we risk being seen as we are and found wanting. We may face rejection after rejection, each more harrowing than the last. We might get hurt and – perhaps even worse – realize that we’re capable of hurting others.

No wonder we look for rules to tell us how to get it right.

How did we get to this point?

Historians and sociologists point to several changes that altered how we perceive and experience love.¹ Greater gender equality, and increased recognition that relationships can be between people of the same genders, mean that relationships today are generally composed of independent people who have their own dreams and goals.² We have a strong sense of individual identity and a strong desire for personal fulfilment.

At the same time, however, we look to romantic relationships as our ultimate source of validation, meaning, and belonging, perhaps because of the decline of faith and local communities, and the insecurity and instability we now face in the world of work. Love is the new religion.³

This situation aggravates an existential tension that’s already there whenever we’re in a relationship with another person: we’re separate people and we’re also together in the relationship: We’re both an ‘I’ and a ‘we’. People want fulfilling, rewarding relationships where all their needs are met at the same time as wanting to be free to pursue their own goals and write their own life story.⁴ We see this played out time and again in films and TV shows as characters try to balance their relationship with their work, friends, or passions. Therapists liken the tension to simultaneously rubbing your belly and patting your head.⁵ Feel free to try it – not easy!

Many writers say these cultural shifts are the reason relationships are in such a precarious place at the moment. Around half of marriages end in divorce⁶ and at least a quarter of married people have an affair at some point. The rates of break-up and infidelity for unmarried people are even higher.⁷ Around one in three people lives alone.⁸

Things that used to be taken for granted now have to be figured out and negotiated between people: at what point does dating become a relationship? How much should our lives be entwined or separate? Do we live together? Sleep together? Have kids together? Whose job is prioritized: the one who makes the most money or the one who enjoys it most? Should we stay friends with our exes? What counts as cheating? As the authors of the aptly titled book The Normal Chaos of Love put it, ‘love is becoming a blank that lovers must fill in themselves’.⁹

Unfortunately, given the need for communication when filling in this blank, people aren’t generally well educated about how to communicate in relationships. It’s assumed that relationships will come naturally to us, and if they don’t there’s something wrong with us. Perhaps that’s why there’s such a demand for books and TV shows about how to manage relationships. But unfortunately these often contribute to, rather than clarify, the confusion. One of my main aims in this book is to demonstrate that it’s understandable, normal, and – in fact – sensible to be confused about relationships.

Grasping the rules

A key idea in this book is that, when we’re faced with such high levels of uncertainty, we tend to grab onto something for safety and hold it tight.¹⁰ In the case of relationships, what we grab onto is rules.

A lot of the time we turn back to old familiar rules, even if these didn’t work particularly well in the past or don’t apply that well to our current situation. At least we know those rules, and that’s reassuring when things are so uncertain. The alternative route many of us now take is to come up with new rules for our relationships, either in communities or on our own. However, there’s a tendency to hold onto these new rules just as tightly as others do to the old ones; sometimes even more so because it’s hard to be outside the mainstream.

Both of these paths – clinging onto the existing rules, and grasping for new ones – lead to more, rather than less, distress. Instead of making things better, they often make things worse.

Old rules

Clinging onto existing rules has led to a culture which holds up being ‘normal’ as more important than almost anything else.¹¹

Try it out
what does normal look like?

We each have an image of a normal relationship in our heads in the same way that most of us draw pretty much the same thing when asked to draw a picture of a house.¹² Try sketching a stick drawing of a house, and a relationship here.

Figure 1.2 House and relationship

Just as hardly anyone lives in anything that looks remotely like that house, so none of our relationships look quite like our idea of normal. But we’ve unconsciously absorbed those rules about what counts as normal nonetheless because we’re swimming around in them like a fish in water. They’re impossible to escape.

So we try desperately to be more normal, fearing that people will notice that we’re not, and beating ourselves up when we can’t manage it. Sex therapists see person after person who’s more concerned with having a normal sex life – whatever that means – than with finding out what turns them on and doing that. Many folks are far more bothered about getting and keeping a normal-looking appearance than with whether their body feels good. And people often worry about having a normal relationship which ticks all the boxes of what’s expected. The pressure to be normal constrains people and leaves them anxiously monitoring themselves and others for any sign they might not be normal.

New rules

But what of those of us who step outside the existing rules, whether through choice or because there’s no other option available?

The new rules have reached a much higher profile in the years since I published the first edition of this book. Back then many people were doing relationships, sexuality, and gender outside the ‘norm’, of course. But recently we’ve seen far more awareness of this, linked to an explosion in terminology for all the different ways of experiencing sex, gender, and love.

Over 40 percent of young people now see themselves as somewhere between ‘exclusively heterosexual’ and ‘exclusively homosexual’ and there’s a huge proliferation of language to describe different sexualities and asexualities (pansexual, grey-A, skoliosexual, etc.).¹³ Facebook now offers over 70 different words for users to describe their gender including many words beyond the male/female binary (agender, genderfluid, demi-boy, etc.) Similarly there’s a burgeoning range of terms for various romantic and aromantic relationship styles (monogamish, solo-poly, queer platonic, etc.). We’ll be unpacking all of this more in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Personally I’ve found these shifts – and the conversations around them – incredibly useful in my own understanding of love, sex, and gender. But there’s also been a massive backlash against millennial ‘snowflakes’ and the identity politics of the ‘Tumblr generation’, suggesting that those who hold onto the old rules find the new rules very threatening. In such a toxic atmosphere it’s easy for people to grab tightly onto the new rules they’ve come up with. Perhaps they insist just as strongly that their way of doing things is the only way, police the boundaries around their identity fiercely, and/or publicly shame those who struggle to keep up, or experience things differently. We’ll return to these issues when we discuss Terry Pratchett’s crab bucket in the final chapter of the book.

Us and them

This old rules vs. new rules situation creates an ‘us and them’ binary: ‘us’ being the normal people striving to have normal relationships, and ‘them’ being the outsiders who’re doing something freaky, unnatural, or wrong. In such situations ‘they’ are, at best, ridiculed, and at worst aggressively rejected. Think about how people are treated in the media when they publicly step outside the accepted rules about who it’s appropriate to have sex with and how: getting paid for sex, being unfaithful, or being outed as gay, bi, or kinky.

Given this kind of treatment, it’s tempting for ‘them’ to try to prove how normal they are in every other respect. Alternatively they flip the ‘us and them’ binary by grabbing tightly onto their own rules – ‘us’ – and dismissing anyone who doesn’t agree as ‘them’, for example by labelling them ‘basics’, ‘norms’, ‘mundanes’, or ‘muggles’.¹⁴

So all of us, ‘normal’ and ‘outsider’, end up grasping hard onto the rules: comparing ourselves against others and judging them, fearing we might be doing it wrong, and desperately trying to defend ourselves and prove that we aren’t.

Exploring our relationship to the rules

In this book I devote one chapter to each of eight key aspects of relationships. In these chapters I explore what the existing rules are for that aspect and why they might not always work so well. After that, I consider people and groups who’ve stepped outside those existing rules and what they’re doing, exploring what we might all learn from such alternatives. I also examine the limitations of these newer rules and how they can become a problem themselves if held too rigidly.

Finally, in each chapter I explore a third alternative to either grabbing onto existing rules or desperately seeking new ones. This involves staying with the uncertainty of not having clear rules, and finding a way to go on that doesn’t require grabbing hold of anything. If this sounds like a tall order, in reality it means that at least we try to notice when we’re grasping onto the rules and then attempt to hold them more loosely.

Figure 1.3 Rules options

As you’ve probably gathered already, one of the main rules about relationships is that we’re talking about a specific kind of relationship here: what we might call a romantic, sexual, or partner relationship. This kind of relationship seems to be prioritized over other kinds, as you’ll see if you take a glance at the relationship self-help books that are out there. In fact these kinds of relationships are so prioriti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the second edition: rewriting rewriting the rules
• 1 Rewriting the rules
• 2 Rewriting the rules of yourself
• 3 Rewriting the rules of love
• 4 Rewriting the rules of sex
• 5 Rewriting the rules of gender
• 6 Rewriting the rules of monogamy
• 7 Rewriting the rules of conflict
• 8 Rewriting the rules of break-up
• 9 Rewriting the rules of commitment
• 10 Rewriting your rules
• Notes
• Index