Ask Philippa: Her life. His Rules.

She settled. Now she's waking up.

Simone de Beauvoir

THE QUESTION

Dear Philippa,

I am currently due to turn 40 and my partner and I have been together for seven years and have a six-year-old.

Email your problems to AskPhilippa@Yahoo.com subject to my Terms and Conditions

When we met, my partner insisted he only wanted one child. I suppose I held out hope he might change his mind. Now we have one wonderful child and I’m desperate for another, but he won’t budge. Fair enough, I have accepted this mentally, but now my body is screaming out for another one. It’s awful. I know it’s not all peaches and cream, but I crave a new challenge.

My partner is great in many ways, but I often feel like he’s always in the driving seat and my child and I are just along for the ride. He often says “my career is the most important thing for me” and never gives any thought or attention to my hopes or dreams. I am now on the path to becoming a counsellor, having started Level 3, and after Level 4 I would like to pursue postgrad study, but he says this is taking it too far and would be too much strain on us as a family. I find this ludicrous. When I challenge him, he just gets angry. His previous marriage failed as his partner left him once she’d completed university. I gather his fear of my studies stems from this.

I do love him, but I’ve never been head over heels. I fear I have settled, as he offered me financial security and stability. But now I feel my life is dull and uninteresting. We have no social life, as he has no friends. I would have left if not for my child. My priority is to keep my kid happy and settled. The relationship is not bad enough to leave. It’s just these niggles.

Please advise.

THE ANSWER

Here is an exercise that I think we all need to do from time to time:

Think five years ahead and look back on you now. Would you be pleased with the decisions you are making today? What would your regrets be? Then ten years ahead. Then further. Then imagine yourself at 99 in a rocking chair, looking out over a garden, feeling sleepy and looking back over your life. As that 99-year-old, have a conversation with the 40-year-old you and see where it goes.

You are yearning for another child, and that yearning might not only be about the child itself, although of course that’s part of it, but also about a desire for more richness, more vitality, more connection, more challenge. A sense that your story isn’t finished. I wonder too whether the yearning is partly about time. As we approach forty, our genes can cry out for us to reproduce and sometimes those selfish genes don’t cry out in our best interests, although they might be doing, only you can know. That awareness that reproductive time is dying out can carry a kind of urgency and, sometimes, a sadness. There may be a sense of grief for a path not yet taken. Perhaps this longing touches something in your sense of self. Not only the wish for another baby, but a desire to feel purposeful, expansive, engaged. It might be tangled together: the longing for another child and the longing for something in yourself that feels unfinished. Maybe it’s both?

You describe a relationship that offers security and structure, but which, perhaps, does not offer space for your flourishing. It may have suited you at one point, when stability felt like the highest priority, but it sounds as though you have outgrown that version of your life. There is a kind of wisdom in the choices we make for our survival, even if later we have different priorities.

When a partner declares that their career is the most important thing to them, and seems unwilling to consider yours, it suggests a dynamic where your needs and hopes are not being held in equal regard. You are being asked to live in service of his ambitions, to keep the domestic sphere intact so he can be free in the world. But now that you are feeling the call of your own path, this imbalance has become more apparent. As you say, it’s as if he is gripping the steering wheel and you’re in the passenger seat, with no map and no voice in where you’re going.

He is also not seeing you. Just because his last wife left when she got an education, it doesn’t mean that all wives leave once they graduate. He might need reminding that not all women are the same. And if you do leave, it won’t be the degree that drives you away. It will be his need to control you, his inability to encourage you to flourish, and his prioritising his career over you and yours, that would be the main contributors to your separation. Whatever wounds he carries from his past are his to process. They do not entitle him to clip your wings. It may be worth finding a way to tell him this, if he’s able to hear it. Maybe it would have to be a letter as he gets angry. Maybe show him this substack?

I’m not happy with the shutting you down with his anger. Is it trying to control you with fear? I expect his anger is shutting out the vulnerability he is feeling and needs to express about your becoming who you need to be. You cannot address that part of him or reassure him when he shuts his fear and vulnerability down with anger. If anger continues to be his response to your personal development, that could be a red flag worth paying close attention to. But you don’t need to convince him because you don’t need permission. There seems to be a distinctly patriarchal flavour to your situation. It feels unbalanced. I see your self-development as your right, rather than as a threat to him.

The “no friends” bit worries me. You are, it seems, his sole connection. Perhaps he has difficulty with the idea of you having other interests, other friends, beyond him. His insecurity may be making him controlling. And just because he doesn’t want to make friends, don’t let that stop you doing so. Friends are important, and in my experience, fellow counselling trainees make very good ones. Unless he is controlling you, and it sound as though he might be, don’t blame him for the lack of social life, make your own.

Your child, of course, is the centre of all this. It’s understandable that their wellbeing shapes your every decision. If they see a mother who suppresses her desires, who contorts herself to keep the peace, who quietly surrenders her dreams to avoid conflict, then there is a danger that could become a blueprint for their own life, and a model for their unconscious expectations of gender roles. On the other hand, if they see a mother who listens to her own inner voice, who has the courage to honour it even when it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable, then they may learn a very different story. One of dignity and agency and equality.

You say your relationship is not bad enough to leave, and I hear the ambivalence in that. It may be that nothing dramatic is wrong, and yet something isn’t right. These feelings are not ones to brush aside. We often wait for things to get truly unbearable before we allow ourselves to act, but perhaps we don’t need things to fall apart before we give ourselves permission to reach for more.

You are allowed to want more for yourself. And if your partner loves you, he will need to find a way to hold that without punishment or control. If he cannot tolerate your growth, then you are being asked to shrink for the sake of his insecurities, selfishness and the relationship. Not tolerating your personal growth will also inhibit his chance to expand his outlook. And that, over time, could become corrosive for you and for the relationship itself.

So perhaps it’s time for a different kind of conversation. One that is less about persuading him and more about clearly stating what you need and what you will no longer be willing to suppress. It might be a difficult conversation, but on your course you are being trained to have challenging conversations, you could think of it as practice.

Whatever you choose, I would suggest that you keep your connection with yourself at the centre. Keep asking yourself, “What do I feel right now?” and from that, work out “What do I want?” and then, when you’ve worked that out, “Go for it.” You are not selfish for wanting more. You are allowed to grow, even if it unsettles the structures around you.

Here are a few quotes and things to remember for you:

Feminism asked women to become something new. And it asked men to give up something that they didn’t understand they had.

bell hooks said that Patriarchy has no gender, and that when men and women believe that male domination is natural, inevitable, and the only way to organise life, they are both supporting patriarchal thinking

Germaine Greer: “Women have somehow been separated …from their faculty of desire, … and they have been taught to think that this separation is a virtue. The energy that might have gone into their own lives has been directed into supporting others.”

Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” That process of becoming can stall when a woman is denied the space to evolve. And when the people around her are invested in her staying small, the tension between becoming and belonging becomes painful.

M. Scott Peck said something like this: Love is: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own and another's spiritual growth”.

These voices can offer a kind of chorus to your personal story, helping you to see that your yearning, your dissatisfaction, your questions, are signs of a woman starting to hear herself again.

Best wishes,
Philippa

Share this with someone who needs to hear it.