If you’re familiar with my writing, you’ve already figured this isn’t a post with advice to fix your relationship by dinnertime. It’s a post about the fallacies in that title. Well, it’s a subtitle from the cover of “O Magazine.”
So before I start my rant, think for a moment. Why might I object – more than just a little – to that subtitle?
Okay, first, there’s the word “fix.” That word sounds like the relationship is a static inanimate object like a car to be acted upon. Relationships are dynamic. If my hubby decided he wanted to fix our relationship, I’d probably run screaming from the room, because the word implies unilateral repair based on his ideas of what our relationship needs. A broken car doesn’t have any say in the matter, but all parties in a relationship do – or should.
Secondly, healing, deepening and improving a relationship is a process. It takes time. Yesterday I posted about a healing among family members that I helped to facilitate over the course of a year. It was a process with dynamic stages. Many pieces needed to be put in place before the relationship could be… not fixed… but mended.
It’s disappointing for me to see Oprah perpetuate the cultural imbalance of treating dynamic systems like objects and promising instant results. But then, it’s because of those attitudes and other like them that the world needs me.
I haven’t read the article. I doubt I will. Even if it redeems itself somehow, to my mind, it doesn’t make up for the perpetuation of false and imbalanced attitudes.
