Women Are Too Controlling, She Wrote. Her Message Still Resonates.
Laura Doyle, best-selling author of “The Surrendered Wife” and several other books that promise to teach women to save their marriages, no matter how oafish their husbands might seem, has a question for me, the journalist who has come to Southern California to interview her. “Are you bossy?” she asks me, softly, almost shyly. “Are you controlling?”I flash back to my ex, who labeled me controlling for pushing him to quit smoking, go out more, eat what I wanted to eat and take his shoes off inside my apartment.“Um,” I stammer. “Some people would probably say so.”Ms. Doyle is looking at me from her ivory couch, her husband of 36 years, John Doyle, next to her. “They would?” she says, her voice warm, with no judgment that I can detect.I wouldn’t deny it, I tell her. But I have a question of my own. Given that Ms. Doyle considers herself a feminist, an ambitious, capable woman who was raised to be independent and has run her own company for nearly a quarter-century — given all that — does she hesitate to describe women, including herself, as “bossy” and “controlling”?Because that is the premise of her books, the message she has been publishing, blogging, broadcasting, podcasting and teaching her international network of relationship coaches since 1999. That Ms. Doyle, 59, a self-described “former shrew,” thought she knew better than her husband as a young wife, “nagging” him to eat healthier, maintain the car on schedule and wear what she thought he should wear. That begging and cajoling only made him turn up the TV and drove him from their bed.The message she is spreading is that with her marriage “in a ditch,” she reluctantly started taking the advice she received from happy wives to practice gratitude, apologize to her husband for emasculating and disrespecting him, metaphorically “duct tape” her mouth to curb her criticisms, make herself open to sex anytime, and relinquish control — even of their finances, even if it meant sitting in the dark because he forgot to pay the electricity bill (which actually happened). That taking care of herself (naps, beach volleyball) would help her show up better. That trying to change her husband got her nowhere, but changing herself gave her the marriage she had always dreamed of. That the intimacy returned so strongly that, nine years after marrying, she took her husband’s name. That the “intimacy skills,” as she came to call her findings, would work for other wives, even ones facing abuse, adultery or husbands with addictions.That women are fundamentally different from men, whatever modern notions of gender equality might say. That a lot of women are controlling, and consequently, unhappy. That becoming a “surrendered wife” will save your marriage, but it might also save you.The state of American gender relations is poor. Liberal-leaning straight women complain of heteropessimism, the conviction that dating men will end in tears. Young women increasingly reject marriage; divorce, in certain online spaces, is hot. Gen Z women are the most progressive Americans, speeding further left as more Gen Z men supported President Trump. Many of the far-right online ranters of the manosphere paint women as mere conquests, breeders who exist to serve men.The women of a manosphere splinter sect, the “red pill women,” theorize that men (“captains” in marriage) are naturally dominant, and women (“first mates”) naturally submissive. Self-described red pill women may be a small minority, but they embody an increasingly visible axiom on the American right, that feminism is where it all went wrong. And if anyone asks them what to read, their answer is very often Laura Doyle.Their philosophy has an apparent symmetry with Ms. Doyle’s, which holds that men, with their drive to protect and provide, “need respect like they need oxygen.” Women who want their husbands to desire and cherish them, she says, should “abandon the myth of equality.” Instead of acting like “smaller, less hairy men” and shouldering everything because they think he won’t do it or won’t do it right, they should practice softness, vulnerability and femininity — by which she means receptivity to gifts, compliments and help with suitcase-carrying, driving and household tasks. She used to tell women with abusive, alcoholic or adulterous husbands to leave, but later retracted that advice, saying that she had heard too many stories of such wives using the skills to save their marriages. If you want to leave, leave, she says, but if you want to fix your relationship, you can. You married him for a reason.“Who am I to say?” she says in our interview. “I should have never said to stay, I should never say to leave, I shouldn’t say at all.” One of her mantras is, “you are the expert in your own life.”The problem with reading Laura Doyle as some kind of manosphere apologist is that too many women of all types swear by her. Some would argue that’s only because patriarchy is baked into us all. Be that as it may, the straight women of America, and beyond, evidently crave succor from someone like her: a hetero-optimist in a hetero-fatalist world.Since Ms. Doyle self-released “The Surrendered Wife” in 1999, eventually hitting the New York Times best-seller list, her books have been published in 19 languages across 30 countries. Friends surrendered, then friends of theirs, then women around the country and the world. Orthodox Jewish wives press her books on brides-to-be; evangelical Christian and observant Muslim wives have surrendered. But so have many secular or not particularly religious women who see themselves as strong and self-sufficient, doctors and lawyers and business owners and homemakers alike.“I almost gagged myself when I saw the title,” said Darlene Davis, 66, a graphic designer in New Jersey who found “The Surrendered Wife” when her relationship was floundering. This was soon after Simon & Schuster published the book in 2001, adorning the cover with a red rose. “But within two weeks, I saw the difference.”Pre-surrender, Ms. Davis described herself as a “big man-basher” who joked about male foibles with the best of them. Her post-surrender diagnosis: “Because I’m a strong, independent woman who knows how to get things done, I was doing all these things, telling him what to wear and speaking for him,” she said. “That’s great for business and all these other things, but it wasn’t good for him. He’s a very masculine man. He needs respect.”She soon caught her future husband shopping for engagement rings.Ms. Davis eventually became one of the first Laura-Doyle-certified relationship coaches, a group that now includes more than 600 women worldwide. The company — mission: “End World Divorce” — says more than 15,000 women worldwide have received Laura Doyle coaching through programs including “Ridiculously Happy Wives,” while others are receiving private coaching.Amanda Blaine, 45, a nonviolent communication counselor, spent her 20s surrounded by progressives who embraced polyamory and avoided using gendered words, including “man” and “woman.” Uncomfortable with stereotypical femininity, she briefly identified as genderqueer. During the coronavirus pandemic, a breakup led her to “The Empowered Wife” (published in 2017). Within one chapter, she felt as if Ms. Doyle had been watching her relationship.The skills soon reunited Ms. Blaine with her boyfriend. That December, she started coach training, which she said gave her the self-understanding to leave her boyfriend for good. (She wanted kids; he did not.)Now happily married with a young son, Ms. Blaine coaches the skills to women, including one with a nonbinary partner, encouraging them to look past the old-fashioned language.“You don’t have to be a woman with a man to relinquish control of your partner,” she said. “It’s just how to be a person in a relationship.”But it wasn’t easy, admitting she was “a woman who wants to bear a child and wants to be doted on by a man,” she said.Friends scoffed at the skills. Her coaching-program classmates were headed for divorce, one friend predicted. She fell out with another who asked, “Why do you have to call yourself ‘feminine’?” A mentor said being told to “respect” one’s husband made her recoil. It sounded like subjugation.But Ms. Blaine, watching women in her circle get divorced, wished they had known the skills.“Maybe there’s something you’re missing about what’s possible with this person who you wanted to spend your life with,” she said, “because of this other narrative around women’s empowerment.”Listening to her reminded me of friends of mine who had gotten married despite questioning the institution of marriage, who’d had kids despite critiquing the traditional nuclear family — that classic woman’s quandary, freedom versus love, never resolved and especially fraught in the age of the tradwife. I had read surveys saying that women, in this day and age, still wanted men who could support their families. Reasonable! But also, tradition is hard to shake.In her spacious living room in Corona Del Mar, Calif., the blue-tiled pool her husband built her shimmering through the sliding doors beyond, Laura Doyle tells me she knows she sounds old-fashioned, even backward. But she is no doormat, as she has been accused of telling other women to be.Her ambition and independence remain, “but I think you can actually parse that control out,” she says. Control comes from fear, she says; she would rather put positivity in charge. Surrendering, she says, “helped me honor myself and be more successful in my career than I ever would have been.”Honoring and respecting yourself, not only your husband, is one of Ms. Doyle’s main prescriptions. She and the Laura Doyle coaches I interviewed said the skills helped them prioritize their own desires, stop “martyring” themselves to children or chores, take care of themselves, ditch resentment and blame and gain dignity and humility.“We ask, ‘What do you want?’ We never ask, ‘What does he want?’” said Marissa Zwetow, 49, a coach in Southern California. “That’s not submissive.”They said they, too, wish men would do better. But if we’re stuck with the world we have, not the world we want, the only thing that makes these women feel empowered is changing themselves. It’s a sort of mental magic trick, transmuting what really seemed to me to be a form of hetero-resignation (and hetero-desperation) into hetero-hopefulness. (Though not absolutism: Ms. Doyle emphasizes that women can always leave.)Ms. Doyle lays her hand over her husband’s, saying, “I think it’s OK if we want to be loved, not just have careers.”I ask Mr. Doyle, 70, whether he thinks men could do more. He says his wife’s self-improvement helped him step up.Before, “you feel that nothing that you do is going to be right,” he said. Now, “I feel more willing to help and to do things,” he said, “because there won’t constantly be a rejection or a criticism just for basically being who I am.”Ms. Doyle was raised up the coast in Huntington Beach, Calif., the eldest child of a turbulent marriage. Her mother, a concert violinist and nurse, often pushed her father, who took X-rays at a hospital, to make more money. She raised Ms. Doyle not to depend on a man and played her the 1972 Marlo Thomas record “Free to Be … You and Me,” the groundbreaking children’s album that sang gently of an egalitarian world without traditional gender norms.Ms. Doyle moved out in high school, when her parents’ marriage finally splintered for good. At San Jose State University, she met Mr. Doyle, a video producer who had moved in next door. They married when she was 22.Four years later, she writes, she was convinced she had married the wrong guy. Too embarrassed for divorce, she sought advice from happily married women.Their counsel horrified her.“‘This stuff sounds crazy,’” she remembers thinking. “I was afraid I was letting all feminists everywhere down by staying in a relationship where I was being mistreated.”Desperate, she tried it anyway. When tempted to criticize or micromanage, she writes, she asked herself which she wanted more, control or connection. She repeated “surrender” to herself, shorthand for “stop trying to control everything.”Soon she was spreading the gospel to friends, who asked her to write it down for other friends. The Doyles self-published the result. When Simon & Schuster picked it up, the publisher wanted to dump the did-she-really-say-that title, she said, but it was already generating too much buzz. She went on “The View”; she went on the “Today” show. Later came four more books, a streaming TV show and a podcast, whose video version Mr. Doyle helps produce. “The Surrendered Wife” was reissued for its 25th anniversary this summer. An Adored Wife app is coming.When I visit her, Ms. Doyle is perched on a powder-pink desk chair in her floral-wallpapered home office, nodding and beaming affirmations at the assembled acolytes on a Zoom call for coach trainees. She raises her arms and cheers as she calls each name (“Tess! Tess is heeere!”). There’s a lot to celebrate. In her world, the wives are ridiculously happy, and the husbands are all great guys.“So sweet,” she tells one woman who recounts using the intimacy skills to allow her husband to deal with the dishes when she was exhausted and the dishwasher was broken. “You have a great guy, Catherine. That’s awesome.”“Sounds like you’re just the princess at your house, like I am at mine,” she tells another woman whose husband cleaned the kitchen unasked. I can’t help but think of the feminist complaint that men get applause for every chore they do, while women are just expected to do it.“Very, very surrendered, I’ve got to say,” she says to a third. Streams of red hearts keep floating across the screen as the other participants show support.It’s hard not to be happy for all these women, even if some of the things they said startled me. (One coach told me a client ended up in bankruptcy after relinquishing the finances to her husband. She prioritized preserving the relationship over blaming him.) Still, I wondered: Is it really this easy? And also, does it have to be this hard?A few interviewees acknowledged that it did not work for some women they knew, recalling one or two who had left their husbands. Then I found Jennifer Phoenix Allen, 45, a trauma therapist outside Minneapolis.Her 12-year marriage hit rock bottom in February. She had spent years frustrated with his parenting; he had spent years lying about using porn. She’d caught him secretly recording her. He wanted a divorce.She felt she needed to stay for their 8-year-old son, who has autism and A.D.H.D. Enter Laura Doyle. And … it worked.“Cue the moral dilemma,” Ms. Allen said.Because she was a feminist and she wanted her man, all men, to step up without her having to practice what often felt sneaky, like wearing a mask. Because she thought Laura Doyle advised being meek and demure, which grated. Because Laura Doyle told her to yield control of the finances, and she needed a separate bank account for security. Because she wasn’t even sure that monogamy and marriage were anything but artifices that capitalism had foisted upon us all. Because if she had to be married, couldn’t marriage be between two equal adults who made it work together?“Why is it me having to do all these things, whereas he can keep on keeping on the way he always has?” Ms. Allen said. “I have a hard time not just taking a giant step back and looking sociologically at, how the F did we get here? Why are gender relations so incredibly messed up?”But, indisputably: He had changed. And nothing else she had tried had worked.“It’s been a shift from viewing him as, ‘Oh my God, you’re an abusive narcissist,’ to realizing I was being so critical and I needed to clean up my side of the street better,” she said. “Looking back, was I more harsh to my husband than I needed to be? I believe that I was.”Was I harsher to my ex-boyfriend than I needed to be? Maybe. Probably.The thing is, I’m no surrendered wife, and my current boyfriend is great anyway. I tell this to all the interviewees. Ms. Davis, the longtime coach, told me I must be practicing the skills subconsciously, and, after all this time in Laura Doyle’s world, who knows!Ms. Doyle doesn’t tell me that. But she does seem to suggest, gently, that unless I change my ways, I might repeat the same mistakes. That’s what would have happened to her if she had exchanged husbands instead of changing herself, she says.Instead: The morning before our interview, Mr. Doyle cleans the kitchen. He does the dishes, as always. He makes her tea. When a photographer arrives to take their portrait, they pose together. “Your eyes are so blue!” Laura Doyle exclaims, and smiles up at her husband.
تم النشر: 2026-07-22 18:46:00
مصدر: www.nytimes.com
