I spent some time with my father over the weekend. We were moving furniture around, rearranging the house. I’ve got a new couch showing up to replace the most uncomfortable couch in the universe. I won’t bore you with any more detail. My relationship with my father has changed over the years as one would expect. Obviously, when I was a child the relationship was one where my father was the authority figure. The stern hand of discipline. I was lucky to have a father who was very much involved in my activities growing up.
When I graduated from the University, my father sent me a letter which I still have today. It was composed of ‘advice as you enter the adult world’ information and thoughts on how a man should comport himself. There were quotes from Shakespeare and other writers that were fitting for a young man. I could tell he was proud of me.
A couple of years later, my father asked me to come work for him, which I chose to do so. We worked together for the last 12 years of his career, and over that time we got to be more than just father and son. We got to know each other as adults and friends. During much of that time the two of us saw things pretty much the same in regards to people, politics, and how we viewed the world. It has only been in the last couple of years where our viewpoints have diverged somewhat.
My father is a product of his formative years. The 1950′s and 1960′s when he came of age in the midst of a war, the rise of second wave feminism, and free love. Much of the interactions between men and women were still shaped by the normative roles that each still played. Man as the head of the household, woman as the homemaker and caretaker of the family. That was a time when, at least for my father and my mother, the shared but different sacrifices were recognized by both parties. My mother was and still is appreciative of all that my father does for her. As such my father believes deeply that it is the man’s responsibility to provide for his wife and to ‘keep her happy.’ Only by doing so can a man be truly happy.
My father trotted this pretty lie out once again over the weekend. I laughed when I heard it for the countless time. I deadpanned back to him that keeping a woman happy is impossible. She will be happy if she chooses to be such, or she will be unhappy and make her significant other miserable if she chooses. The problem is we’ve created a whole generation of men and women with unrealistic expectations. When the impossibility of meeting those expectations is confronted, they tend to get angry and look for someone to blame. Often it is the man who is blamed. It is the man who is confronted almost daily and told constantly that the failure is his and his alone. Too many men still accept the blame.
