Married to the Enemy: A Guide to Overcoming the Obstacles to Intimacy When We Are Raised in a Culture That Uses Sexism and Stereotyping to Divide Us

© 2011 Dawn K Kozarian & Mark James. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 6/1/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-2350-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-2351-4 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-2349-1 (dj)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011902507

Printed in the United States of America

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In loving memory of

Bud Elmendorf,

Bob James,

Kim Kiser

"We often live feeling stuck in patterns of behavior;

never really recognizing the liberating power of conscious choice."

Dawn Kozarian

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Part One: The Set-Up

Good Intentions

Commitment

Historical Facts

Our Culture

Our Schools

Our Homes

Society Perpetuating the Divide

Part Two: Deprogramming and Loving Authentically

Our Journey

Communication Styles

Feelings

Dawn’s Story

Affirmation of Worth

Mark’s Story

Affirmation of Worth

Discovering That We Are the Source of What is Created

Crossing the Great Gender Cultural Divide

The Shift

Serve Your Relationship

Authentic Love

The Love Dance

References

Foreword

By Mark James

Several years ago, through a Christian dating service, I met a woman who was a single mother. She had a free pick for a date, and she picked me (someone must have been watching over me). After the first date, I knew I wanted to marry and grow old with her. Obviously, there was chemistry between us.

Both of us had suffered from divorces. Dawn had worked through and had done much of her healing, while I had spent my time working out, visiting pornography sites on the Web, and being emotionally clueless. I was also coping with some physical limitations brought on by an earlier stroke. Dawn seemed to see a wounded person whom she could help, and I saw a challenge to be a better human being.

Dawn knew I was serious about being a better person when, after being extremely rude and neglectful toward her, I called a therapist and made an appointment. There was something not right with me. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I had a lot of anger in me that I felt I couldn’t express. Oh sure, I was good at letting anger leak out destructively. But to express anger honestly, directly, and respectfully was another story—not to mention all those other emotions that make us human. They were like distant cousins to me. Everything that I thought was normal, wasn’t. I had to deal with my sexist attitude and family-of-origin issues; I had to change some of my behaviors or else kiss this relationship, like all my previous relationships, good-bye. It’s easy to start a relationship. The challenge is in sustaining one. After several months of dating, I had enough courage to ask Dawn to marry me, and she said yes! In that moment, we took a leap of faith.

Our first three to four years of marriage were a major power struggle, to say the least. I read many books and wrote in my journal during this time period, but I was really more invested in resistance than healing. It wasn’t until I realized how much I was hurting the woman I loved that I began to genuinely invest in moving forward. It was my job to do the healing from my past while staying married to Dawn … easier said than done. Going from sexist, self-centered, stubborn, and controlling to humble, empathetic, and loving continues to be a part of my life’s journey.

I want to thank Dawn for her endless love, acts of kindness, listening skills, strong will, and passionate views of the truth. She showed me the path to healing myself so that I could move toward becoming a whole person. She is a caring and loving mother, partner, lover, and best friend who is just starting to pursue her passion—putting pen to paper. Thank you, Dawn, for believing in me and having faith that I am growing in love and spirit. I am forever grateful.

Acknowledgments

We want to dedicate our book to our five wonderful children: Jennifer, Justin, Matthew, Emily, and Andrew. Most of what we have learned about love we have learned from them. In watching them grow and experiencing them accepting each other when we became a blended family, we have been inspired to be better versions of love. Our children have helped us to see the possibilities.

We want to thank our friends and family for their support and feedback. In particular, we want to thank Dawn’s mother and stepfather, Bud and Marilyn Elmendorf, for not giving up on love and being an example of a positive, empowering relationship. They learned from their previous marriages, and they created a mutually rewarding partnership for more than thirty years.

Dawn would like to give special thanks to her grandparents, Gerald and Florence Ferdon; though now deceased, they continue to inspire her to give and receive love well. She would also like to give a special thanks to her lifetime friend, Bonnie Arnett. Bonnie identified with the title and has been a constant supporter in this project.

We both want to thank Dawn’s father, Andy Kozarian, for his honesty and openness regarding his attitude toward women. We also want to thank our good friends Pam Griffin and Phil Bremen for not letting us simply complain about our partner, but for challenging our thinking. When we spoke to either of these two people, we consistently came back to our relationship feeling more vulnerable, nurturing, and open to resolving our issues. Every couple could use a pair of friends who help in this way.

Part One:

The Set-Up

(LIVING IN A BOX)

Good Intentions

Most of us are well-intentioned when entering the state of matrimony. We believe the words to love, honor, and cherish. Why, then, do so few of us actually end up feeling loved, honored, and cherished? How is it that, given enough time, the majority of couples end up divorced or miserable? Dawn’s grandmother would tell her that familiarity breeds contempt. Well, if that is true, why would any of us let anyone get close enough to be familiar? The answer is that in spite of living in an image-conscious culture where it’s more important to be kind to an acquaintance than to a family member, we all desire to have our deepest self known and loved.

Perhaps it is time to look at the social dynamic in this culture and how this dynamic may thwart a couple’s ability to be happy. Our premise in this book is that, because of a culture that teaches us that the sexes are from two different worlds, the vast majority of us are predestined or pre-programmed to feel like we are married to the enemy rather than a friend, lover, partner, and/or soul mate. We feel like this for some very real reasons that have to do with the attitude and behavior that develop between us as a result of a deeply held negative belief system often taught by our culture and reinforced by our families.

This book is not for the fearful, but rather for the courageous couple who wants something better and is not afraid of working on relationship karma (WORK). It has been our experience that when the relationship is on automatic, we often fall into a very negative karma, creating an atmosphere of power and control instead of love and respect. Automatic, or the unconscious mode, is often a copy of our parents’ relationship and thus usually falls short of what is needed to make a relationship work in these contemporary times.

Mark: Ultimately, if I try to dominate and control Dawn (and I routinely do this in some sort of passive-aggressive or underhanded way, since I would never want to be seen as a physical abuser), she responds with anger, hurt, or frustration, or perhaps matches my attempt to dysfunctionally control the relationship. In my efforts to be treated with the entitlement and privilege of my father’s time, I have pushed Dawn away, generated an atmosphere of distrust, and created a lose-lose situation—a negative karma.

It has been our mission to change this unloving and negative karma to an authentically intimate, respectful, and honoring one. Like the humanistic psychologist Erich Fromm¹, we do not see love as something you fall into and thus can just as easily fall out of. We see love as an art that is cultivated over time with authentic communication, patience, experience, knowledge, wisdom, assertiveness, forgiveness, conscious loving choices, and most importantly, perseverance and practice. We may not be able to pick the person we are attracted to, but we can choose our behaviors with that person. We can choose behaviors that will cultivate love, or we can choose behaviors that will take us down a destructive path, much like the characters in the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee, or the characters that Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner played in The War of the Roses, or the characters played in the movie The Break-Up by Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn. Love is an art, and relationship is the canvas we can use to create either a reflection of a higher love or a façade of a put up with love.

Divorce does not have to be the answer to the problems a couple faces in a relationship. Divorce is an external solution to what is often an internal problem created by negative external influences. Sometimes, the solutions are found when we go inside ourselves and learn more about how we became who we are. Through this process we are empowered to be more conscious of our choices and thus create who we are individually, as well as a couple. The two of us were struggling in our marriage, so we decided to take a hard look at what was going on under the surface. Regardless of whether or not we make it in the marital dynamic, we are growing into a deeper regard for each other. We hope that in writing this book and sharing much of our journey, we can help other couples move toward individual wholeness, which will ultimately enrich their relationship.

Dawn: While coming out of a grocery store, I heard one lady recommend to another that she read Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. I spoke up and told her that in my opinion, that book perpetuates a divide between the sexes. We started a conversation, and I told her about the book that my husband and I were writing. I told her it was titled Married to the Enemy. She said that was the book she wanted, because she could relate to the feeling of being married to the enemy.

Men and Women at War

At a fiftieth wedding party, we heard the female partner of the celebrating couple respond to the question How did she do it? with I put up with a lot! When this particular woman’s husband passed away, there was not one mention of his relationship with her. Instead, the eulogy consisted of the people he worked with and his relationship with other family members. We know of another woman who lives a totally parallel life from her partner and figures he will die at about age sixty-four, then she doesn’t have to sacrifice anything like she would in a divorce. If you look around, you may observe that of the half of the marriages that stay intact, only a fraction seem to be fulfilling. Putting up with appears to be the general standard for American couples. We feel this is unnecessary, and our intention with this book is to give you the means to create a relationship base that you can build from—a foundation made of respect and honor, free of sexism and gender stereotyping.

We recognize that as human beings, we are a very complicated species, and there may be many contributing factors to a person having trouble in relationship: unresolved childhood mental, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; overprotective parents or permissive parents; birth order; and the list goes on. We encourage our readers to address all of the different aspects that went into the making of your self and may now be keeping you from having the kind of relationship you would thrive in. However, before individuals in couple relationships can address any of the above, they need a foundation based on mutual respect and recognition of their equality of worth.

In this book, we will look at taking that first onion layer off of a difficult relationship. The first layer has to do with attitudes about our sex and the opposite sex that our culture cultivates from the time we are born. We will demonstrate how this culture divides us and undermines our ability to create a positive relationship with the opposite sex. This makes it necessary for many of us to consciously undo this influence if we are to ever create a positive partnership.

Of course, unlike the prejudices against the opposite sex, and even our own sex, that were imposed upon us in our youth and our adult life, the undoing of these influences is our choice. In sharing our journey, we hope to help other couples find solutions to the problems they may be having in relationships due in part to gender-polarizing programming. We use the word programming to further illustrate the reality of what happens when we are fed constant messages about our and others’ gender during our formative years. Much like a computer that is programmed to respond a particular way to certain keys being tapped, we will respond to words, situations, and behaviors as if they are buttons being tapped, based on our gender training. For example, regardless of what was going on with Dawn (full-time career and mother of three), to Mark being married meant that he would automatically have his laundry done and meals made. Mark’s unconscious key was his concept of marriage, and his response was unfair domestic expectations of his wife.

In talking with individuals who were in couple relationships about this concept of being married to the enemy, we got nervous laughter and a definite I can relate! Recently, at an airport, we were in conversation with an older woman, and we told her about our book. After we quoted the title, she exclaimed, Oh, the enemy, I divorced him a long time ago. We believe much of this problem comes from our culture’s relentless push to drive the sexes apart.

Dawn: I know that in my first marriage, and certainly in the early part of my marriage with Mark, I felt that I was more married to the enemy than a friend. I have also observed many couples talking in warlike terms. For example, I heard one woman, while complaining about a conflict with her husband, say, He may have won the battle but not the war. This happened to be a marriage therapist my first husband and I saw. Needless to say, we discontinued her services. My first husband saw himself as conceding to me if he saw things my way.