Keep Calm and Carry On

Quite possibly the best article I have read all year, from this months Elle, by Alice Wignall. Good advice if you can take it, hard to follow, but worthwhile in the end? I guess that would depend on your overall objectives.

Passivity: It works. But would you let him call the shots?

It sounds pathetic and smacks of being a ‘surrendered girlfriend’, but taking a passive stance might be the best relationship trick you ever learn.

It’s a nightmare scenario. Quite literally, in fact, the person you love turning around and saying that, on reflection, they’re not sure they feel the same way you do. It is the kind of stomach-churning spectre that haunts our dark and midnight hours, that will usually vanish in the glare of rational morning light. But, when insomnia strikes and your imagination turns over this vision, how do you believe you’d react? Would you call him a loser, tell him he doesn’t know a good thing when he sees it and leave the first chance you could, taking your dignity with you? Would you cry, beg, try to make him see the error of his ways?

Or would you just do nothing? That’s what Laura Munson did. One day, the man she’d been with for 20 years, her husband and the father of her children, told her that he didn’t love her and was going to leave her. Her reaction? She told him she didn’t buy it, that he should take some time and effectively ignored any further attempts to raise the subject. He went AWOL for a few months, then gradually started to reintegrate with his family’s life. Six months on, their marriage was healed.

Munson, a writer; contributed an essay on her relationship tactic to The New York Times. It was the top-read article for days following publication; the most-searched for feature for two months. It crashed the website’s comment section. She secured a book deal and the result – This is Not the Story You Think it is… A Season of Unlikely Happiness (Amy Einhorn Books) – has got commentators from Oprah to Newsweek to Time magazine asking: is doing nothing the new way to get what you want?

Instinctively, I want to say no. I want to believe in the modern model of empowered womanhood – a hybrid of Destiny’s Child songs, Tyra Banks attitude and Sex and the City – which tells us we’re worth it that we can do anything if we put our minds to it, that we should be worshipped all the livelong day and anything less than that is simply unacceptable.

But then I look at my own life, and I know it’s not that simple. For Laura Munson and I have something in common. In my case, I had been with the man in question for only a year or so, not married, no kids. But still, there was never a good time to hear what he was trying to tell me: that, though things were fine, though I hadn’t done anything wrong, he just didn’t see us together long term.

What did I do? I went out that evening, got drunk with my best friend, went back to m flat, got up the next day, went to work and didn’t mention it again. When faced with the biggest calamity of my romantic life to date – for I was very much in love – I was utterly passive. I did nothing.

This wasn’t a clever game plan. I was scared. Scared that if I raised the subject again, I’d meet the ultimate rejection: ‘We definitely should split up.” I was also scared that by over-reacting – or just plain reacting – by crying or screaming or demanding resolutions, I’d push him into a position from which there was no way back. Because there was something else that Munson and I had in common: like her, I just didn’t buy it. I was aware that he was trying to express confusion or uncertainty, perhaps that same ‘Hold on, am I sure about this?’ attack of vertigo we all get when teetering on the brink of commitment. What if I put him on the spot and, failing to express what he really meant, he told me to go? That would be a disaster, for both of us. Instinct was telling me that whatever it was he wanted, me out of his life wasn’t it.

Of course, I worried this was just wishful thinking. Friends raged at me for being a doormat, for putting up with shabby emotional treatment. Yet, I couldn’t quite bring myself to draw down the final, fatal confrontation. I drifted on and the days ticked over, then the weeks, then months/ when, half a year later, I raised the subject gain, he said, ‘What? Oh, I don’t think that any more.’ And that was it. We stayed together. In the end, being passive was the best way to fight for what I wanted.

The concept of passivity – especially in relationships – reeks of inequality, of Betty Draper levels of suppressed desires, of silent weeping and brave faces. But when things stop working, I’d say passivity is your friend. You might curl your lip, call me weak, but is it weak not to demand resolutions, not to insist on airing every grievance, not to heap fuel on already-smouldering resentments? Passivity is the art of giving thins time, letting them calm down and when you find yourself the wrong target of someone else’s unhappiness or confusion – not getting dragged into the situation. I still don’t know what was up with my boyfriend, though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t really anything to do with me. But if I’d turned drama queen on him, within five second it would have been.

I can count scores of friends who have resolved relationship dilemmas by being (accidentally) passive. While figuring out what to do, they find things work themselves out. I wonder if men quite like being left to make up their own minds. Fraught and fretful as our lives are, it’s a modern women’s way to leap on the first sign of failing in our other half and wrestle their issues from them, to resolve them ourselves – by ending the relationship, if we can’t think of anything else. At least, if you’re being passive you cant be patronising. It gives our partners time to think. Not communicating seems to get the message through.

It works other places, too. Take work, for example. Beyond the basic requirements of turning up, doing your best, and going for opportunities when they arise, is taking your foot off the pedal such a bad thing? Is there any need to shout about your ambition, to air every run-in with a colleague and – most crucially – to despair over every failure. I dread to think of the energy I used in my younger years wailing over my unfulfilled potential and the iniquitous rise of less-talented colleagues. Now, I do my best at my job, let the rest of it wash over me, barely think about where I’ll be in five years’ time and trust that it will sort itself out. The minute I started doing that, of course, my career started running more smoothly. Probably because I’m not a sullen, bitchy colleague any more, obsessed with my portion of the pie and who else has been nibbling at it.

There’s a feeling that passivity is a quality best suited to shy little girls hiding behind their mothers’ skirts. But, in fact, isn’t it the more mature approach? Think of the desperate wannabes on Big Brother. With their ‘I speak my mind’ and ‘I don’t put up with disrespect’, they’re the very opposite of passive. And where does it get them? Screaming their insecurities and low self-esteem into each other’s faces, no one can hear anything for all the noise. As Laura Munson said in her interview the Time magazine, ‘We live in such a reactionary society that we think, in order to be powerful, we need to fight. That’s a shame.’

Our self-obsession has reached such heights that our first thought when anything happens is ‘how do I react?’, as if only our reaction matters, as if action is imperative. What’s so wrong with inaction?

It seems barely permissible anymore. In her essay ‘Welcome to Cancerland’, the American writer Barbara Ehrenreich talks about how a breast-cancer sufferer must describe her illness in active terms – she is fighting, battling, surviving. If you say you just want to sit back and let the doctors do what they will, you’re not doing it right, says Ehrenreich. Even a cancer patient can’t be passive, it seems.

But there is power in passivity. Being passive doesn’t mean not stating your preference. It means recognising situation where your input isn’t needed, where it might actually be unhelpful. In relationships, it means not engaging in someone else’s psychodrama, nor giving oxygen to your own. And let’s not forget, at the heart of passivity is a little bit of aggression. What Munson did to her husband – and did I do this to my boyfriend, too? – is say, ‘Sorry, you’re not pinning this one on me’ and leave him to work it out. Passivity leaves people guessing, it deflects the issue back at them, and leaves you out of it.

Is it easy? Of course not. We’re all inured in the 21^st-century cult of self-expression, the belief that nothing in the world deserves to be heard more than the thought that is currently drifting across out frontal cortex. Your feminist instincts will cry out. And is it painful, just to bite your lip and wait? Oh yes. But since when did that romantic notion, ‘ If only he knew how much I cared’, ever prove to be true? I’m not suggesting you sign up for a lifetime of servitude but, for a few months at least, the next time that nothing’s going right – do nothing.