Laura Doyle claims her mission is to end worldwide divorce. Through her book, originally published as “The Surrendered Wife” and updated as “The Empowered Wife” (quite a telling name change), Doyle has launched a self-help empire encouraging women to improve their intimate relationships through focusing on their own health, attitudes, and behaviors.
The message that you, as a woman, can fundamentally—without the conscious effort of the other person in the relationship —improve your intimate bonds can be hard to accept. Surely, this mess is someone else’s fault! There are women who simply cannot stomach the name of the book and immediately pitch it in the trash. Those women, in the instances I am aware of, ended up divorced. Were their circumstances truly different from the common lot of women with ordinary marital struggles? Or could they have given Doyle’s recommendations a try? We’ll never know, nor is it our concern.
We may also be offended by the idea that we, as women, should try to improve our relationships without explicit help. And yet, when we pay attention, we can see that often women play a disproportionate role in setting the emotional tenor of a relationship. When we notice that everyone around us is in a bad mood, oftentimes self-reflection without self-pity will reveal that we were the ones initially in a bad mood, which rippled out into the household in volatile and destructive ways.
Women at their best…inspire virtue. That is the underlying thesis of this website. A virtuous and self-sacrificing woman is beautiful, and her beauty inspires virtue in those around her. The cultural scripts for marriage that we have been given for the past several decades do not lead to beauty. We are told not to care about our physical appearance, not to be courteous with our spouse, to demand more from those around us, and to protect ourselves from giving too much. We are encouraged to be angry and controlling. Are there less attractive qualities in a woman than an explosive temper and tendency to micromanage? Probably not.
Isn’t this just misogyny and trying to control women with “beauty standards”? Not at all. The sound principles of a good marriage are not Botox and ab tightening, but, above all, a beautiful interior disposition. In order to have that, we must, as Doyle recognizes, find what good there is in the world. There are many ugly and difficult matters around us, and we could choose to focus on them. Training ourselves to set time aside for activity that delights us—true self-care—and to cultivate gratitude for those moments and activities that enliven us makes us a different kind of person, a much lovelier and happier version of ourselves. It may sound so simple as to be daft, but if you try it, you may be pleasantly surprised by the results.
What about the bad things in the world? If we are not angry, haven’t we neglected a moral duty to pay attention to the pain and dysfunction of the world? This is a topic that requires some expansion, but suffice it to say that finding respite and reprieve along the way and living a life of positivity and joy will do more to make the world better than fixating on what is wrong.
Perhaps the primary reason for our resistance to Doyle’s ideas is the seeming purity of intention. Few people marry without the desire to have a close and meaningful relationship. When the daily experience of our marriage is tense and unloving, it’s easy to assume the other person is a monster. We wanted to have a good marriage! It must be his fault! But we can choose to recognize the chasm that can form between what we say we want and what we actually do.
Underlying the intimacy skills in “The Empowered Wife” is a recognition that women are, on average, different from men. Generations of a feminism preaching total egalitarianism has obscured this undeniable reality. Marital conflict is often exacerbated by spouses reading into the other’s behavior the emotional and logical frameworks most easily accessible to a particular sex. Women are often deeply wounded by reading into their husbands’ behavior emotional layers that most men simply do not pay attention to. Conversely, women often offend their husbands by developing unspoken expectations and anticipating nurturing concern that does not come easily to some men. These miscommunications lead to what Doyle charmingly terms “needless emotional turmoil.”
Doyle certainly has a way with words, and her pithy expressions capture complex relational dynamics that occur frequently among average married couple. As inspired as “needless emotional turmoil,” in my estimation, is her description of complaining as expressing “lazy desires.” It is facile to come up with a list of grievances and notice things that you do not like. More challenging, and more interesting, is the exercise of articulating what it is that you do want.
Here, it is worth putting in a word about what Doyle’s book is not. It is not a “trad check list.” There are some women who do not fit the mold of a stereotypical woman, and the same for men. That said, women tend to embody feminine energy and men, masculine. Both sexes need both. Doyle offers principles that help to channel feminine energy positively into strengthening bonds and encouraging closer relationship. You can’t just tick the boxes and expect everything to be rosy. In order to achieve true vulnerability and intimacy, you must wrestle with your own challenges as a person, develop patience for the other person, and make sacrifices. The pay-off is well worth it, but the initial efforts do not feel like giving yourself a warm, fuzzy, self-affirming hug. That kind of coddling will not get you where you want to go.
I’m skeptical of Doyle’s coaching program, which is advertised as highly expensive and seems to result in many women thinking that they need an impractical and expensive SUV. The principles she lays out, however, are very helpful—and free! What she calls “the 6 intimacy skills” are ways of living and interacting that facilitate harmony, trust, and understanding. They are not magic, but they are insightful and effective.
The main benefit of the “coaching” is likely having other women attempting the same transformation, people who can hold us accountable and troubleshoot missteps. Grateful as I am to Mrs. Doyle for her formulation of these principles, you do not have to pay her for these benefits. Reading the book and discussing it with friends can provide social support for countercultural and highly successful lifestyle changes.
What are Doyle’s intimacy skills? 1) Self-care, 2) Gratitude, 3) Receive, 4) Respect, 5) Relinquishing Control, 6) Vulnerability.
Doyle does not, as far as I can tell, have children. This fact can give many women an excuse. She doesn’t understand how hard it is to make time for yourself. She has no perspective on the unique challenges of parenting and the physical and emotional strains that often accompany it. But these are merely excuses. There are plenty of women with children and challenging life circumstances who have successfully used her strategies and arrived at improved relationships with their husbands. Some women have even used the six intimacy skills to improve the quality of their relationships with their children!
Taking on a personal improvement project in the middle of a strained relationship sounds exhausting. As many women report, following Doyle’s suggestions is not exhausting, but, in fact, life-giving and rewarding. The life of virtue puts us in the driver’s seat of our own lives. If others cannot or will not act in ways that inspire true intimacy, we can choose to take the lead. And in that the “surrendered” wife really is the “empowered” one.
