As we've seen, "Nice Men" are portrayed as tamed, defanged and declawed; they are the domestic as opposed to the exotic.
Better, certain advice has it, to choose the domestic over the exotic, since it is familiar and apparently offers fewer risks.
To live with a man to whom you are not truly vulnerable emotionally appears to offer a balance to the power the guy will exercise in all other aspects of emotional life.
To be vulnerable emotionally to a man offers him your private life as well as your public one; it is best, according to some women's mythologies, to keep something to yourself.
Personally, I don't buy it.
Perhaps you know stories of women who, while financially dependent on their husbands, nevertheless squirreled away hundreds, even thousands of dollars, by skimming small amounts of money off their usual "allowance" for household costs.
I had an aunt who could have bought a Ferrarri on what she managed to "put away." She didn't see this as cheating her husband or family, but instead she regarded it as prudent. It made her feel safe; it made her feel like she could plan for an emergency or a "rainy day."
Sometimes this packet of private information can include the serious secrets of an affair or a undisclosed sexual history.
But it can also encompass everyday secrets, like not admitting exactly how much a purchase actually cost, saying it was on sale when it wasn't, explaining it was a gift when it wasn't, or saying a dress had been hanging in the closet for months rather than admitting it was bought that day.
These "white lies" offer some women an emotional buffer-zone from their husbands which in turn enables them to feel more in control of their relationship. She ciphers out of the relationship anything she feels will not be missed. She appears to be a "team player" while refusing to pool her emotional or other resources. She comes to mistake her "withholding" for genuine independence.
Such a pattern of even minor deceits offers, however, only a dangerous method of securing a sham form of independence.
Some women go through similar motions in terms of their emotional lives: keeping feelings of happiness or sadness, shame or guilt, pleasure or joy to themselves in order to keep something back from their husbands. The create a version of an emotional I.R.A.; they believe that if their husband doesn't know everything about them, the better off everyone will be.
They put their genuine wishes and dreams into a form of "self-storage" in order to keep them free from the contamination of the everyday.
Women were often told to avoid emotional dependence since financial dependence, for example, was assumed. We could hold something back for ourselves in order to retain a small measure of autonomy--although nobody would have thought of it in those terms.
Women found ways, in many cases, to subvert the authority they felt they had to hand over to their husbands. It also permitted them a form of breathing room. And, perhaps most importantly, it provided insulation against the pain that someone you loved deeply would be capable of inflicting.
But, c'mon, keeping yourself in "self storage" is no way to go through life.
to be continued...
