A few days ago, I stumbled across a New York Times article with a title almost perfectly designed to irritate me: “Women Are Too Controlling, She Wrote. Her Message Still Resonates.”
Well, obviously I clicked.
The article revisits Laura Doyle’s 2001 bestseller The Surrendered Wife, a book now being released in a revised 2026 edition. Doyle’s central proposition is deceptively simple: heterosexual women who are unhappy in their marriages should stop trying to change their husbands and start changing themselves. Relinquish control. Stop criticizing. Show respect. Express appreciation. Take responsibility for your own happiness.
Doyle argues that when women stop managing their husbands, something magical happens: the distant husband re-engages. Affection returns. He steps up. The relationship becomes peaceful.
And I have thoughts…
I have spent a good chunk of my academic life thinking about marriage, intimacy, gender and the ways seemingly private relationships reproduce larger structures of power. I also emerged from a 4-year relationship about a year ago. These two things have a funny way of talking to each other.
Near the end of my relationship, I found myself trying to explain to my partner how devastating it was for me when he would unilaterally decide not to honour agreements we had made (some of these agreements were negotiated in therapy). On numerous occasions he had given me his word on something, then withdrew his commitment to me without apology or consideration and accused me of trespassing on his “boundaries” when I insisted that our agreements mattered.
I was angry. I am still angry.
After nights of ruminating how best to have a conversation with him about the impact of broken agreements on my sense of trust (news flash, if you spend hours ruminating how to raise something with your partner, you may want to seriously reflect upon the emotional safety of your relationship), I entered the conversation as lightly as I could while standing firm in my position that I needed to be able to count on him to honour the agreements we make with each another. For me, this wasn’t about controlling his choices. He remained entirely free to make them. But I was equally free to decide that I could not remain in a relationship with someone whose word I could not rely upon.
His response was fascinating.
He reframed his unilateral breaking of agreements as a righteous “boundary” necessary to protect his health and wellbeing. My raising of objections to broken agreements was thus recast as violating his boundaries (yes, this felt crazy making). At the end of one such conversation he suggested that I investigate something called the “Be His Peace” movement. He thought I would find it really helpful in understanding what he was asking for in our relationship.
I assure you, his recommendation did not have the intended effect.
But I have been thinking about it ever since. Because “be his peace” contains an extraordinarily revealing assumption about heterosexual intimacy: What happens when his peace requires her silence?
This is where Doyle makes me profoundly uncomfortable.
There is nothing inherently wrong with telling women to relinquish control over other adults. We should. I don’t want to monitor what a grown man eats, tell him what clothes to wear and remind him to make his dentist appointment. Frankly, that sounds icky and exhausting.
But there is an enormous difference between relinquishing control and having expectations of relational reciprocity. And this is where things can become dangerously muddled.
A woman raises a concern. He becomes defensive. She learns to “soften” her approach.
He withdraws. She learns not to pursue.
He experiences normal relational needs as pressure. She learns to take care of her own needs.
He feels criticized. She learns to communicate greater appreciation.
And holy fuck, she is busy.
She is learning his triggers, regulating her emotions, monitoring her language, reading books, listening to podcasts, going to therapy, understanding attachment styles and figuring out how to express legitimate dissatisfaction without making the man responsible for some portion of that dissatisfaction feel uncomfortable.
During the final months of our relationship, the relational asymmetry was no longer okay with me and my attempts to address the imbalance became evidence, according to him, that I was the problem. My attempts to hold him to account were disruptive to his peace.
Imagine inserting Doyle’s advice into that dynamic.
Suppose I had stopped questioning him. Suppose I had expressed more appreciation, relinquished my expectations of care, respected every broken agreement between us as an expression of his autonomy and concentrated exclusively on making myself happy….?
It is entirely possible our relationship would have improved, and that is exactly what troubles me more than the possibility that Doyle’s advice simply does not work.
Because what if it does work?
What if conflict decreases when a woman stops objecting to inequality? What if the relationship had become more peaceful because I had learned to become more comfortable with conditions that violated my values and sense of justice?
We might then call Doyle’s advice successful, but I am not convinced we should.
What I’ve learned in therapy over the last year is that sometimes discomfort is information.
Anger tells us that something we value has been violated. Resentment alerts us to inequality. Anxiety can emerge because someone is actually being unreliable.
The emotional labour of changing a man shouldn’t be replaced with the emotional labour of becoming a woman who can tolerate icky relationships.
Doyle might reasonably respond that we cannot change other people, and I would wholeheartedly agree. And when repeated attempts at mutual negotiation have failed, there are two options: 1) learn to accept someone as they are; or 2) decide that who someone “is” is wrong for you.
The second possibility is equally engaged with surrender. It is surrendering the toxic hope that if I communicate perfectly enough, regulate myself sufficiently, become agreeable enough, appreciate enthusiastically enough, I can manufacture reciprocity from someone who lacks the capacity or interest in providing it.
And this brings me back to that conversation near the end of my relationship and the suggestion that I should learn to “be his peace”.
I keep returning to those words because there is something deeply gendered hiding inside such an apparently lovely sentiment which, to be frank, I was first introduced to as a child raised in a patriarchal faith.
But why should a woman be a man’s peace? Not his partner. Not the person who challenges him, disagrees with him, expects things from him and occasionally makes him profoundly uncomfortable. But his PEACE?
There is a long history of imagining women as the emotional refuge from the difficult world men inhabit: the soothing wife, the supportive girlfriend, the woman who understands.
She absorbs tension rather than creating it. She regulates herself so he does not have to regulate himself. She becomes the place where he is protected from discomfort.
Yet… being told that you have hurt someone is uncomfortable. Taking responsibility for that hurt is uncomfortable. Being held to an agreement when it becomes inconvenient is uncomfortable. Learning that your autonomy has consequences for another person is uncomfortable.
And this is why “be his peace” troubles me so much when placed alongside Doyle’s prescription for heterosexual relationship repair. Both locate the solution to relational conflict in women becoming less disruptive to men: less critical, less controlling, less demanding, more appreciative, more accepting.
And perhaps that does produce peace. But it’s a peace maintained through asymmetry and accommodation.
At the end of my relationship I was less willing to explain away behaviour that hurt me. I became more willing to say that broken agreements had consequences. I became increasingly unwilling to accept the proposition that another person’s autonomy required me to suspend judgement about how their choices impacted me.
In other words, I became considerably less peaceful. This meant the end of a relationship that was once meaningful to me ushering in (somewhat ironically) my own inner peace.