Free Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy by Dusty Miller

communication style, they would.
    Strategic Communication: The Retro Solution
    Sometimes, couples are advised to try indirect, strategic communication. Strategic communication allows the couple to avoid being direct and honest about anything that potentially could open up uncomfortable feelings or conflict. Couples who try to protect their intimacy engage in a sort of chess game that maneuvers the conversations around important issues and feelings rather than discussing those issues. However, believing that the relationship will survive by using indirect, manipulative communication or by avoiding problematic issues can be as unhealthy and shortsighted as the “open honest communication” method.
    One familiar example of strategic communication is the age-old advice given to women about how to land and keep their man. “Let him think he’s smarter than you, stroke his ego, don’t let him know that you can beat him in tennis…” The parallel version of strategic communication takes place when men pretend to agree with their female partners to “humor” them. “I’m sure you’re right, dear,” says the husband vacantly as he ignores his wife’s impassioned distress about her brother’s iron-fisted control of the upcoming family holiday.
    Gender Myths: Me Tarzan, You Jane
    Another cause for couple trouble is the assumption that men are distancing when they express their emotions through action rather than by talking. Another aspect of this oversimplified view is the assumption that because women are more likely to talk about their feelings, they are never the distancers in relationships.
    As you begin to learn more about the ways that women do, in fact, distance, you may be surprised. The stereotypical man might be able to hide his emotions under the brim of his John Deere cap, but his wife may be distancing by using sex as a bargaining tool, or being disconnected from her body while making love. Women can also distance by giving their quality time and attention only to their kids, friends, and family; in short, by focusing on everyone but their partner.
    Experts often unwittingly collude in maintaining the loneliness of the couple by attributing all major relationship problems to gender differences. Couples become convinced they are doomed to loneliness in their intimate relationships, constricted by the narrow definitions of traditional gender stereotypes. From Tarzan and Jane to King Kong grasping the tiny female in his great fist, we continue to be sold the stereotypes of males and females as radically different species. This relegates the one-dimensional man to be the John Wayne strong silent type, and the woman to be his fragile, emotionally volatile “better half.” How could two such constricted human beings connect deeply either emotionally or sexually?
    Men were still viewed as the distancers in intimate relationships by the women’s liberation generation in the 1970s and ’80s. They were often portrayed as hopelessly defective in the relationship department. Although the ’70s produced a counterbalancing image of more competent women, the male stereotype merely shifted slightly, morphing into Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990). This version of maleness promoted an image of macho virility that perpetuated the myth of male incapacity for deep emotional intimacy with women and children.
    Then, we read that men and women evolved on different planets (Gray 1992). Yet again, gender differences were accentuated. The people from Venus (women) are assumed to be love addicts while the other species from Mars (men) continue to live in their caves and avoid intimate communication.
    Overstating gender differences lets women off the hook when it comes to owning their identity as distancers. The assumption that men and women are so totally different from each other also underestimates men. Many men long for love and intimacy in couple relationships. If all those men from Mars just wanted to get laid, there would be