In Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women, a forlorn Jo March stares doe-eyed at her older sister Meg March as she prepares to be the first of four daughters in her family to get married. Her face framed with youthful crimson ripples of hair and her eyes wide and full of affliction, she bargains with her sister, begs her to change her mind.
“You will be bored of him in two years and we will be interesting forever.”
Jo insists.
The mainstream culture of the United States is noisily gendered. With about the subtlety of a tap-dancing elephant, before they can even complete full sentences, in one room, a toy excavator is dropped in the hands of every boy in America while a baby doll is dropped into the lap of every girl. Build, fix, destroy, we whisper to the boys. Nurture, we tell the girls. Tend to, look after, sacrifice for. Care.
Before we know it, a typical “boy” playdate involves building LEGO cities, just to knock them down with tiny sneaker-clad feet. And a typical “girl” playdate echoes a quaint suburban neighborhood: two young moms push plastic toddlers in mini strollers before being picked up by their own moms and pushed in their own normal-sized strollers. Babies looking after babies. Real tiny life responsible for tinier synthetic life.
There is a reason why your mom is likely the one to squeeze your hand and brush the hair out of your eyes when you’re crying. She’s been practicing it since before you were born. Since before she could ride in a car without a car seat.
It’s not that men don’t know how to care or don’t care about that type of care. It’s that the expectations of care for either gender are, often recklessly, dissimilar. Women’s inclination to care isn’t just a tendency, it’s a standard. When women don’t care, they’re an unsettling oddity and when men care, they’re the sparkly exception. If your best friend remembers your favorite movie after mentioning it once, she’s hitting the benchmark. If your boyfriend does, he’s a gem.
These two genders are expected to communicate, express, and respond to emotions and conflicts in entirely different ways. And yet, when their relationships reach a certain shelf life, we stick one in a white dress, the other in a tux, and throw them in a house together to live life for sixty-some years. It’s no wonder Jo proposes what she proposes to Meg. She isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong, she’s leaving home at an appropriate age to live with a man who’s learned to care for her. It’s just that her sisters have always cared. Without being rewarded with a gilded ceremony.
Mainstream media outlets and professional development books will tell you that the conditioned inclination for women to care is a weakness. If women were more concerned with their careers than their families, they could propel up a rung or two on the corporate ladder. If women would just “lean in” a bit more, and speak a little louder, disregarding the men’s booming voices, they may actually be heard. Build yourself up. Fix the volume of your voice. Destroy the competition. Furl those doting hands into fists, harden your heart, and you might just have a chance to advance.
And yet, care helped get modern society to the place it is today. Before women were allowed entrance to “official” institutions of learning and innovation and before their own inventions and thoughts were taken seriously by those in power, they were at home reproducing the worker. Preparing food, sanitizing the home, squeezing hands, and wiping tears. Without these things, there would be no worker, no hardened hands to stack bricks and throw grenades. Care is the foundation, the backbone, of our world. What would happen if men were asked to lower their own voices? Care replacing Destroy.
There is a certain rhythm, a synergy, I feel when I spend time with my sisters. It’s palpable. Instead of stiff threads of tension, it’s like a jump rope. A beach ball padded back and forth on warm sand - energetic, buoyant, in constant motion, and light. We listen to each other (most of the time) with active ears, and watch each other with alert eyes that turn frenzied at the crack of an inside joke we’ve heard five hundred times. A childhood story we’ve retold one thousand times. And then there are times when one of us is in distress, in pain, sometimes as a result of each other. After the tears and the howling, a stillness emerges. Like a swan gliding through a grove of lily pads on a still pond, after a raging storm. The synergy is still there, it’s just quieter. Not demanding anything. Not asking. Not trying to build, fix, or destroy. Just there. It’s a synergy that never grows dull. “Interesting forever.”
This isn’t a divine signal to call off your engagement or make efforts to repair an unsafe relationship. It’s a magnifying glass. You just may find that the type of love written about in Taylor Swift songs and Jane Austen novels is actually all around us. Has been all around us, and has perhaps been one of the world’s greatest strengths. Has persevered in face of unwarranted rejection. In hair tucked behind ears. In a folded basket of laundry. In tired hands smoothing out knots in shoulders. Blowing out an overroasted marshmallow. Red-in-the-face silent laughter on a summer porch. A tissue passed between hands. Fruit sliced up in a bowl at the foot of your closed door.