Making a drama about no drama

This article is a complaint about an apparently growing trend for online daters (more men than women) to state that they’re looking for drama-free relationships.

What do we mean by drama? The author assumes people mean ‘bad events’ and rightly suggests that this is unrealistic. But that slight twist on what the dictionaries say isn’t what people mean. They mean the worry and over-emotionality part of ‘making a drama out of’ things.

We live in a society in which drama is very gendered. Women’s stories and films focus on emotional journeys, often at the expense of anything actually happening. There are whole industries (publishing magazines, books and films) devoted to encouraging an interest in this sort of story, and you can certainly find a general attitude, if you dare to dip into one of these glossy magazines, for example, that this is mature and reasonable.

It isn’t.

It is true that we are a social animal, and that we are stronger in groups. It’s true that focusing many minds on a problem can help to solve it, and that sympathy and understanding are comforting. But it’s also true that we claim that what sets us apart from baser animals is our ability to think and reason and not be controlled by instinct and emotion.

It is this last point that people who want to avoid drama are looking to emphasize, and it’s not sexist. The sexist part of society is the part that teaches/allows women to be overly emotional and indulge in abusive behavior while calling it mature. It is not sexist to want your life to be one of reason and peace.

Drama in relationships is when someone comes home after a hard day and takes it out on their partner. It’s when someone has a tantrum and wastes a few hours of two people’s lives because their partner happened to smile widely when talking to someone new and they got jealous. Drama is jealousy, emotional outbursts and making mountains out of molehills. It’s being needy and insecure and constantly doubting, insulting or undermining your partner. Drama is what underlies relationship abuse, and is on the spectrum with it. Sure, abusive men are often violent and splitting domestic violence off as a separate category of problem is reasonable, but drama and abuse do exist apart from that extreme.

Physical violence outweighs anything, but we have taught more women than men to think it’s reasonable to go part-way along this spectrum of abuse. In fact, society expects women to go further along this spectrum, and for men to accept it. But it’s not reasonable to make anyone suffer because of your problems. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a stranger on the street or someone close who wants to support and help you. You still have a responsibility to treat people fairly and nicely.

Yes, self-control has almost become a rude phrase in most relationship columns. All the advice and popular ‘wisdom’ says that you should share and support, and you have your tantrums and the other person does too, living life like a vile soap opera every day. This is bad advice. Emotional intelligence is based on self-control: on the ability to identify and understand one’s own emotions, to control their influence over your behavior, and express them in thoughtful, reasonable ways.

If I have had a bad day, I would expect to tell a partner, but how I do it is what creates drama or not, not whether I do it. I can flounce about, be grumpy, make a snide comment about my partner, demand to be fetched a drink with some emotional blackmail (‘if you love me you’ll…’) and then rant about things. Or I can walk in, collapse on the sofa and state that I’ve had a bad day without demanding anything. I can control myself well enough to go through normal rituals, such as making my own drink and then discuss my bad day with my partner reasonably.

This isn’t heroic self-sacrifice. It isn’t buttoned-up repression. It’s mature, emotionally intelligent and respectful behaviour. And pre-judging it as disgraceful in a ‘if you don’t want what I want then you must be inferior and nasty’ way, without even considering whether it’s equal but different, or whether it can be justified, is the real bigotry on display here. We know that the more people sacrifice for something sacred, the more committed to it they feel. But if people no longer think that relationships are sacred, that’s not sexist. That’s a result of our liberation from outdated beliefs. Young people clearly don’t want to be asked to sacrifice for their relationship to look after some sort of stunted princess-complex womanchild: they want to meet someone who’s a fully-developed human being already.

If almost half of young people are now hoping to avoid drama, it shows an amazing rejection of the bad behavior modelled for them by the media, and is something to be celebrated.