Inherited Architecture

One of the most profound aspects of ending a long relationship can be the parts of ourselves that we reclaim. This can be true for anyone who twists themselves around a partner in order to preserve the relationship. But within a system of patriarchy — one we've all inherited and been shaped by — there is a particular variety of twisting and stuffing, bending and suppressing, that women do in order to remain in partnerships we've been taught we're worth less without.

In older generations, the predominant stuffing was around livelihood and vocation. Simplistically, a woman couldn't be a doctor because she had to be a homemaker and let her husband be the doctor. More subtly, that looked like my great-grandmother waiting until her 70s to become a regionally recognized painter, even though she'd had that gift her entire life. It looked like my grandmother — known by all to be the sharpest in her family — channeling her considerable intelligence into supporting her brother's PhD in physics, her son's admission to Princeton, and her husband's regional door-to-door HVAC business strategy, while remaining a homemaker herself.

I recently completed a four-month women's intensive: 120 hours, beautifully facilitated in a genuinely healthy container. What I heard in the most vulnerable moments from those 15 women mirrors what I've heard from friends throughout my entire adult life: these days, our particular experience of this inherited constraint tends to live in our sexual and physical expression.

We have higher sex drives than our partners. We stretch ourselves into arenas that feel foreign or uncomfortable — opening relationships, or turning to pornography as a regular aid — trying to bridge the gap. We stay with partners whose own relationship to pornography has become compulsive, attempting to meet them in kink spaces that feel hollow of emotional connection. Or we simply stop having sex at all, feeling unseen, even when our partners are unwilling to explore what might actually work for both of us. We cover the body parts they find unappealing, or navigate their discomfort when we leave the house showing too much skin.

In my own case, my husband told me on our honeymoon that we couldn't have sex anymore. Through my somatic meditation practice, I had learned to move orgasmic energy without physical stimulation and had begun taking full responsibility for my own pleasure — something that, for many men, might have felt like relief from pressure. Instead, he experienced my expression and liberation as a challenge, internalizing it as evidence that he was unworthy or unnecessary. I was never able to reach him with the truth: that my own embodied freedom made me easier to satisfy, more capable of genuine pleasure, and could have made our intimate life more vital and expansive for both of us. From that point on, he was afraid of what I had become. I spent years diving into ways to help him rebuild his self-esteem so he might be able to meet me there. After 18 years, I finally let go.

He didn't mean to diminish me — and crucially, I don't think he was uniquely at fault. We are all shaped by the same water we swim in. When, after our separation, I asked him to really hear me as I described what had happened through the lens of patriarchy, he was able to settle into stillness and listen. He understood: a man is made insecure by a woman's power, and so — without malice, but with real consequence — he keeps her from expressing it for years. He got it. He teared up. He apologized, and it was genuine.

What's harder is that most partners in similar situations — men who love their partners and wouldn't consciously choose to diminish them — can't access that kind of reflection. They're doing exactly what all of us have been socialized to do. The unspoken architecture of patriarchy harms men too: it tells them their worth is located in being needed, in being the most capable person in the room, in remaining unintimidated by the women beside them. It costs them intimacy, authenticity, and the kind of partnership that could actually nourish them. And it quietly instructs women to make themselves smaller, to center the needs and comfort of men, often at profound cost to themselves.

When we end these relationships — with more self-sufficiency than our grandmothers could have claimed — the liberation is palpable, the expression immense. We reclaim parts of ourselves we had lost track of. We get to show up in the world as our essential selves, in service of a purpose we can finally entertain and actualize.

The hope, of course, is that we don't only find this on the other side of leaving — but that more and more, we learn to dismantle the architecture together, while we're still in the room.