Neutering the Language

I do not want to trivialize what may be a serious problem, but what strikes me first about this letter, written to advice columnist Carolyn Hax at the Washington Post, is that it is completely illiterate. 

Perhaps Post editors are responsible. Perhaps the letter writer is especially woke, but the language is neutered to the point where you do not know whether the writer is male or female, whether the partner is male or female, and so on.

I would point out that this insistence on neutering the language makes the sentence construction unremittingly passive. It is almost impossible to read this letter and to grasp what is going on.

When Hax responds to the letter she seems to be assuming that the partner who is getting angry is male, and thus, is putting children in danger. Perhaps this is true, but perhaps it is not.

I would note that the letter writer is in therapy, and can apparently no longer think straight. Said letter writer wants his or her partner to do couples therapy, though partner points out that they have done couples therapy before and have not seen any positive results.

I will quote the letter, interspersing my own comments.

My partner has a lot of anxiety in their life. This manifests in a lot of fear, a lot of control, and uncontrolled emotional outbursts. 

Evidently, we are surprised to read that the person who manifests a lot of control loses control. This sounds a bit like therapy speak. 

The writer continues:

When an outburst happens, the excuse is stress. When there is an explosion at the kids, it’s because they “just won’t do what I ask.” The pandemic has been an exceptional challenge, as hand sanitizer has been a constant in our lives since the before times.

Whatever does hand sanitizer have to do with anything? Is one partner obsessively concerned with sanitizer? Is he or she yelling at the children because they do not use enough hand sanitizer? One does not know how old the children are. One does not know how many children there are.

Is he or she telling us that children do not use enough hand sanitizer? But, which parent is obsessed about hand sanitizer?

The writer continues:

I am in therapy. I’ve asked to go to couples’ therapy. My partner refuses, saying we’ve done couples therapy before (we have) and we are still fighting (we are). They don’t view the anxiety as a problem. It’s who they are, and if I can’t deal with it I must not like them. I can’t even use the A-word for fear of an argument.

The couple is still fighting. Apparently, therapy is not the solution. For all I know, it might be the problem. Clearly, the writer has glommed on to the term anxiety and is trying to affix it to the other partner as a diagnosis. The writer sounds like someone who has rather poor relationship skills. The partner sounds like someone who is fed up with being considered a psychiatric case.

Couples’ therapy in the past got us communicating better but didn’t really deal with the underlying emotional challenges we have in our individual lives. Since the anxiety “isn’t a problem” for my partner but it is for the rest of us, what do we do? This is an incredible person full of love, intelligence and compassion who just gets overwhelmed by anxiety and cannot see it. Unfortunately, the rest of us do.

Letter writer is obviously a great believer in therapy. He or she even believes that it helped the couple to communicate better, even though the letter suggests that it has not. He or she sounds like a chronic scold, who pretends that her partner is a loving and caring person who cannot deal with a psychiatric diagnosis.

Does it not sound as though the family has banded together to marginalize the partner and to force him or her into therapy, or into an admission that he or she suffers from a mental health problem? Is the family, beginning with the letter writer, trying to impose an authority on the partner, authority that the partner finds demeaning? In these conversations one partner can demean the other to the point where the other gets angry. At that point, the first partner declares that the second partner is in need of mental health care or, better yet, needs to be reported to the police. Hax tells the woman to find a good lawyer. Again, are we seeing therapy destroy a marriage? It is difficult to tell since we do not know the gender of either of the partners, to say nothing of the gender of the children. 

The letter writer shows no awareness that he or she, along with the children-- how old are they?-- are as much the problem as the solution. Ganging up on a partner in the name of whatever silliness one has learned in therapy is not the royal road to conjugal harmony.

And, dare I mention it, but we do not know whether either of these partners has a job, whether either of them is working at home or in an office, whether the children are in school or are learning at home. We do not know how old the children are either.

In short, we are kept blind by the letter writer, who thinks it’s all about a partner who refuses to do therapy. It is just as likely that the partner who is refusing therapy is being marginalized for it, and is reacting badly to the tyrannical expectations of a suitably therapied partner.

Besides, now long would you want to be living with someone who is insisting that you speak grammatically incorrect English, who corrects your pronouns in order to make your language more woke? Wouldn’t that drive you somewhat crazy?