Internal Realignment
the strange experience of losing respect for someone
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One of the topic I think about most is sex differences.
As with most topics, APBPD (American Political Borderline Personality Disorder)1 comes into play here. The left swings to one extreme — pretending there are no sex differences. And the right swings to the other extreme — pretending the differences are far more significant than they are.
But there are some important differences, and they matter for navigating the world. They especially matter for parenting, and particularly for how the lack of a good father will affect a child. In my experience, girls with an absent or abusive father become suicidal, sexually self-destructive, or both. And boys with an absent or abusive father frequently end up making mistakes that require ERs, judges, or parole officers. (There are similar sex differentiated things to be said about schooling, but that’s another essay.)
That boys and girls need their fathers deeply and for different reasons is a claim about sex differences that almost nobody disputes when it’s put in front of them, while simultaneously being one that almost nobody will say out loud.
Which is…roughly the condition of the entire subject.
The useful claims get quarantined because the neighboring claims are radioactive, and so the whole territory ends up mapped by people who are either lying about what’s there or overselling it.
The most popular claim in that territory, at least in America, is a book.
In 2004, Emerson Eggerichs published Love & Respect. Its thesis comes out of the last line of Ephesians 5, where Paul tells husbands to love their wives and wives to respect their husbands — and Eggerichs’ whole argument turns on the asymmetry. Paul doesn’t tell them both to do both.
Eggerichs reads that as instruction: women need, above all, to feel loved; men need, above all, to feel respected. In conflict, each one withholds precisely what the other most requires. She feels unloved and responds with something he hears as contempt. He feels disrespected and withdraws warmth. She reads the withdrawal as proof she isn’t loved. Eggerichs calls this the Crazy Cycle, and the name is the reason the book sold two million copies. Everyone has been on that ride.
The secular versions are less well known but not much different in shape. Deborah Tannen’s rapport-talk and report-talk. John Gray’s planets. A large and (mostly) unfalsifiable evolutionary psychology literature holding that the sex-typed terrors are status loss for men and abandonment for women.
I am not going to litigate whether any of this is true. I don’t know, I don’t think anyone knows in the way the confident people on either side claim to know, and the honest version of the empirical case is thin enough that arguing it would be its own essay and a boring one, focused mostly on bad research design, statistical sleight-of-hand, and the lack of clarity in definitions.
Also — every one of these frameworks is built for couples. Marriage, or something close enough to it, is the assumed container — the advice, the examples, the anecdotes all presume two people who share a bed and a mortgage. Partly this is because a culture that has largely stopped organizing itself around children still treats the romantic pair-bond as the one relationship that counts.
And partly it’s because nearly every book written about men and women as such has sex somewhere in its subtext, including (hell, especially) the Christian ones that would deny it.
That container is, in my never-quite-humble opinion, the least representative one available. Not because marriage doesn’t matter, but because it is basically the only relationship in American life that comes with a toolbox.
Vows. Clergy. Counselors. In-laws with opinions. An entire publishing industry.
And above all a shared assumption that when the thing goes wrong it is supposed to be repaired rather than abandoned. Marriage is the relationship we have built the most machinery around, and it is the one we have studied.
Everything else runs bare. A twenty-year friendship has no vows and no counselor. Siblings have no repair protocol. A working relationship with someone whose good opinion you have quietly organized your professional life around has, at best, HR.
And these are not edge cases — most Americans now spend most of their adult lives outside a marriage, and even the married spend most of their waking hours among people they are not married to. Anyone who has spent seven minutes on social media can attest that sex differences and resulting tensions, confusions, conflicts, and miscommunications really, really matter.
Which means the literature has it backwards. Marriage is the noisiest possible place to study respect, because in a marriage respect is tangled up with money, sex, children, logistics, and a legal contract — any one of which can hold the whole arrangement upright while respect quietly drains out of it.
In a friendship there is nothing else holding it up. Respect is most of the substance.
If you want to see what losing it actually does, you want a relationship with nothing else in it. That is precisely the relationship nobody has written the book about.
What I want to say about the paradigm is narrower and, I think, stranger.
I write to clarify my own thoughts, and it occurs to me now that I thought this was an essay about sex differences. It turned out to be about losing respect for someone — which my Christian background trained me to see as a sex difference, and which may well be one. I no longer know, and that not-knowing is the essay.
Something happened recently that made me read it from a position I had never occupied before, and from that position it looks almost right.
Almost right, and interesting precisely where it’s wrong.
The Rarer Perspective
One of my favorite novels, We Need to Talk About Kevin, written by the brilliant Lionel Shriver, gives us a school massacre story written from the perspective of the killer’s mother. That unusual perspective — not a victim, not a perpetrator, but absolutely a responsible party, to a debatable extent — is a big part of what makes the novel so engrossing.
Everything I’ve read responding to Love & Respect is from the perspective of a person who agrees or disagrees with the paradigm from their experience of being the person getting, or not getting, what the book claims they should want. Men whose marriages blew up because of the Crazy Cycle. Women who write about desiring respect more than love and reacting far worse to the loss of the former, or about spending their entire lives pursuing love because they didn’t know it was okay to want respect.
Much like the point-of-view character in Kevin, I have an unusual perspective.
Recently, I found myself experiencing a loss of respect for someone who had previously been important in my life.
He was not a romantic partner. Not an ex, not a might-have-been, not any version of that. I mention it because Love & Respect is, as with basically all of the literature on this topic, a marriage book, and everything I am about to describe happened nowhere near a marriage — which is a problem for the book’s argument.
My therapist’s office is a 45 minutes drive from home, so I had a lot of time to think about our discussions as I worked through my recent PTSD episode. It was during that time that I realized why what he called the “internal realignment” I was experiencing was so painful and disorienting.
Phenomenology
The strangest part was how long it took me to notice that I was the one who was changing.
It didn’t feel like a change in me. It felt like learning a fact about him. That’s the whole trick of it. Losing respect for someone presents itself as information. It arrives with the texture of discovery — oh, I see what he is — and discovery is something that happens to you passively, the way weather happens.
You don’t experience yourself as having done anything. You experience yourself as having finally seen clearly.
But nothing about him changed during the period I’m describing. He was the same person on both sides of it. What changed was my estimate of my own judgment. I had fully trusted and believed a promise, and I had to go back and revise what I thought of the person who had done that trusting.
That’s the actual event. Everything else is downstream. The thing that felt like acquiring a fact about him was really a demotion I was issuing to myself.
Once I saw that, the rest made a kind of horrible sense — including the part where the past stops holding still. Memories I had already filed came back up for review. Not dramatic ones. Small ones, mostly. A thing said offhand. An inside joke that made me feel like I actually mattered.
They didn’t change content, they changed color, and I had to decide, one at a time, whether the version I’d stored was still the version I believed.
There is no procedure for that. You just do it, badly, with a psyche that’s sore. It is remarkably like doing physical labor with your upper body after just having had your shoulder popped back into place.
The vaguely described version sounds like ordinary disappointment, and it wasn’t. It was closer to a structural problem.
There are people who hold up part of the architecture, and when one of them is reclassified the whole arrangement has to be redrawn around the new position. That is the pain — not the reclassification, the redrawing.
It felt physical, like having an internal organ moved. Not removed. Moved. The organ still works.
It’s just somewhere else now, and everything that used to sit next to it has to make room.
Which is why I kept trying to experience it as something being done to me.
I have unusual credentials here. I have nine of the ten Adverse Childhood Experiences the researchers measured, which means I have extensive, almost professional experience of being victimized. I know that terrain. I know how to name it, how to reframe it, how to work out which part is mine to carry and which part isn’t. Not perfectly. Not even, consistently anyway, all that well. But well much of the time, which is what eleven years of trauma therapy buys you.
It’s the closest thing I have to a specialty, and the fact that I typed that sentence while laughing is maybe the best credential anyone ever arrives at here — the terminal degree.
And none of it applied.
On the surface this looked exactly like the kind of injury I’m good at. It had a man in it. It had a broken promise in it. It had me trusting something I shouldn’t have. Every instinct I have reached for the machinery, and the machinery closed on nothing — because being harmed and losing respect are not the same operation. Harm is done to you. This I did.
I was the one doing the reordering. Nobody could do it on my behalf, and nobody could stop me from doing it. I kept wanting a perpetrator because a perpetrator would have made it a problem I already knew how to solve.
So I was very experienced and completely unequipped, which is a specific kind of humiliating. And it left me with the thing I hadn’t expected: real curiosity about who else has been in this position, and whether the reason we have an entire industry of books about respect is that a lot of people have been standing exactly here and describing it badly.
The Holy Shit Moment
Last weekend I was driving home from therapy when I remembered the last time I’d waded into the Love & Respect discourse — years ago, on a research binge, the way one does2. And I found myself wondering whether anyone had written about the other side of it. Not being disrespected. Losing respect. The withdrawing end.
I couldn’t remember a single thing. Not a chapter, not a blog post, not a paragraph. There’s an enormous literature on how to maintain a man’s respect, on the female obligation to supply it, on what it costs him when it’s gone — and virtually nothing on what happens inside the person doing the withdrawing. Which struck me, on that drive, as genuinely frightening.
Because if there’s no map for it, then the only people describing the experience are people like me, who came to it through catastrophe and have eleven years of clinical scaffolding to fall back on.
Nobody has written the version for a person who isn’t exceptionally damaged. I have no idea how someone handles this without a therapist and a decade of practice at taking their own interior apart.
I don’t think most people do handle it. I think it just sits there, unnamed, doing whatever unnamed things do.
Then the thought arrived, fully formed, the way the important ones always do — not built, just delivered:
If what men who lose respect experience is half as painful as this, then it suddenly makes perfect sense that there’s a whole industry built on trying to convince the readers of self-help books, nearly all of whom are women, to act their asses off to avoid it.
It took me almost a week to decide I was no longer triggered out of my mind.3
I’m serious about that week. I distrusted the thought precisely because it arrived while I was raw, and because it flattered a framework I’d spent years being skeptical of, and because “my private catastrophe turns out to explain a bestseller” is exactly the shape of insight that raw people generate and then regret.
So I slept on it, after a day that had left me exhausted and with my rare use of sleeping aids to help. When I woke up it was still standing, which is the only test I have.
Here’s why it holds.
Losing respect and being disrespected are not two experiences. They are one event, seen from either end. When someone is reclassified in your inner architecture, there is a corresponding fact on his side, which is that he has been reclassified — and I think that when this happens to a person, they generally know. Not always consciously, and not with detail, but they know. Something in the room is different.
Which is perhaps the real source of ghosting and a great deal of unjustified no-contact regimes, if you think about it…but that’s another essay.
The old currency doesn’t spend. And if the redrawing I’ve described is what’s happening on the end of the person losing respect for someone else, then there is something parallel happening on the end of the object of it: watching a position you occupied get vacated, with no ability to reoccupy it, because respect isn’t something the other person can decide to reinstate.
That’s the part I hadn’t understood. I couldn’t have given it back. There’s no mechanism.
Which means the flinch isn’t vanity.
I had always read the male-respect thing as mostly ego maintenance — a demand for deference dressed up in Pauline language, a supply issue. Wounded pride with a theological warrant.
And I now think that reading is not just uncharitable but wrong about the size of the thing. What’s actually at stake is not being deferred to.
It's being permanently reclassified in the mind of someone whose regard helps organize your self-concept and therefore your life — a wife, yes, but also a brother, a best friend of thirty years, a father, the colleague whose good opinion you check yourself against without meaning to. The marriage case is simply the only the one with a book deal.
If that is what a man is protecting when he does the thing that looks like touchiness, then the touchiness is proportionate.
It’s the correct response to a real and irreversible danger, and I only know that it’s irreversible because I’ve now spent some time on the other end of it, unable to reverse it.
So the industry makes sense to me now in a way it didn’t before. Two million copies of a book telling women that respect is the thing to protect at all costs — I used to read that as a machine for extracting compliance, and I still think it functions that way. But I no longer think it’s only that.
I think a lot of people bought that book because they had felt something true and had no language for it, and Eggerichs was the only person selling language.
Whether he’s selling the right language is a fight I’ll leave to other people.
But Eggerichs prescribes it. The instruction at the center of the book is that a wife owes her husband respect unconditionally — not earned, not contingent, not withdrawable. Yet everything I've described happened outside a marriage. If his prescription is meant only for husbands and wives, it has nothing to say about the experience I'm describing. If it's meant to capture something more fundamental about how women and men relate, then it necessarily extends beyond marriage.
But I didn’t withdraw respect. I discovered it was gone. It was never a gift I was giving and could stop giving; it was an assessment that had changed underneath me, and I found out about it after the fact. I could not have decided otherwise.
I know, because I would have. In much the same way that I am an atheist because I am incapable of believing in any gods, and for no other reason, I would have chosen the comfort of finding a way not to do the internal realignment.
Which makes the instruction unfollowable, and the cruelest of those consequences fall on men. A woman who obeys the book perfectly produces a flawless imitation of the thing he most needs — tone, deference, no contempt, on schedule, forever, decoupled by design from any underlying verdict.
He can no longer tell whether he’s been reclassified.
The book, and the whole paradigm in general, promises to protect the one thing it renders undetectable, unfalsifiable, and ultimately devalues.
This is my own term for how Americans swing from extreme to extreme — from a war on drugs to legalizing everything so much so that a non-stoned employee at a store is a novelty; from Obama to Trump to Biden and back to Trump. I have written about it many times.
What? You don’t?
If you have complex PTSD issues and you find yourself badly triggered, I cannot recommend re-arranging your furniture highly enough. It ends disassociation because if everything is in a new physical place, your muscle memory becomes useless. You have to constantly re-orient yourself to your body.