Another example is from Turkish TV series, called “Asmalı Konak”. The male character is dominant to his wife and even, he once tried to rape her. He wanted to show his strenght to her and everytime he can make her obey his rules. She loves him and she cannot resist his rules or ideas. She has longings for happiness I guess, but this TV series shows us how powerful that patriarchy is in the society.
In my opinion, people are longing for happiness, while setting their expectations at high. In Karen Horney’s “ The Distrust Between Two Sexes”, Horney states that “ All of our unconcious wishes, contradictory in their nature and expanding boundlessly on all sides, are waiting here for their fullfillment”(Horney 109). Children are raised to believe that relationships with the opposite sex are their doorway to happiness. Horney says that “ The partner is supposed to be strong, and at the same time helpless, to dominate us and be dominated by us, to be ascetic and to be sensuous” (Horney 109). People expect their partners to be too many things, which will lead them to the disappointment, because your partner may not be your imaginary hero. You have to realize that your partner is just a human like you, and you have to accept him/her that way. Let us say a girl who loves her father so much and has a good relationship with him. Her father dies and when she becomes an adult, she wants to find someone just as her father, but she does not know that no one can be like her father. Karen Horney states that “We take the magnitude of such overvaluation for the measure of our love, while in reality it merely expresses the magnitude of our expectatitons” (Horney 109). Society’s longings for happiness has so many expectations of what love should be, in the end, there may be disappontments, because no one knows the real definition of love so we create this definition and each time this “unhappened” expectations can break our hearts.
Next, Karen Horney states that “childhood reflections cause a certain number of expectations that are handed down by generations” (Horney 110). Reflections that people have from their childhood carve the person into what they are as an adult. For example, if a father beats his daughter, his daughter will be frightened from men when she will be an adult. Horney explains that “The paradise of childhood is most often an illusion with which adults like to decieve themselves” (Horney 110). I agree with the writer at that point because adults, especially parents have a great pressure on their children. For example, let us say a father is a doctor and he wants his son to be a doctor. He always tells him that he must be a doctor, and the other job are meaningless, the child will be drawn his way unwillingly and maybe he will not choose the best job for him. Childhood conflicts may affect the relationship to the opposite sex in later life For example we can say that a the little girl wo was badly hurt through some great dissappointment by her father, will transfer her innate instinctual wish to recieve from the man, into a vindictive one of taking from him by forcing. As you can see, childhood experiences really affect your future life. This is the certain type of woman who is unable to relate to the male because she fears that every male will suspect her of wanting something from her and because of this, fear of love appears. We can tie this subject to the agression/regression from Freud’s defence mechanisms.
Childhood experiences may also affect your love life. Karen Horney states that “ the fear of love will always be mixed with the fear of what we might do to other person, or what the other person might do to us” (Horney 110). For me, she explains that we are trying to portray an imaginary hero under love perspective. This is very dangerous situation because when you are trying to create the “perfect” person inside your partner, fear of love appears suddenly and you broke up with your partner and give up from trying to be in love. For example you found a man just the same as you, but you are in love with your ex-boyfriend. You think that your ex-boyfriend is the “perfect” person but he wasn’t. Because of your obsession to your ex-boyfriend, you may skip and lose your “spiritual partner”.
Horney continues her ideas on love. She tells that “The many-faceted thing called love succeeds in buildings bridges from the loneliness on this shore to the loneliness on the other one. These bridges can be of great beauty, but they are rarely built for eternity and frequently they cannot tolarate too heavy a burden without collapsing”(Horney 111) For me, If we want to build strong bridges, we have to respect to eachother
In conclusion, I want to say that I agree with the writer in childhood experiences. For me, whe have to share this world equally for much happiness. Patriarchy or Matriarchy cannot be a dispersion into two sexes. The solution is only respect to eachother.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Horney, Karen, M.D. Feminine Psychology, USA: WWNorton & Company. 1973.
