CHAPTER 1
DANGEROUS LOVE IN THE DESERT
The glue that holds all of our relationships together is the mutual recognition of the desire to be seen, heard, listened to, and treated fairly: to be recognized, understood, and to feel safe in the world. When out identity is accepted and we feel included, we are granted a sense of freedom and independence and a life filled with hope and possibility.
âDONNA HICKS
âBut what if heâs a bad man?â Miriam, a Middle Eastern woman in her early twenties, asked me the second day into our conflict transformation training. âI understand all of this âdangerous loveâ talk. But what if the person that is single-handedly keeping our organization from being successful is evil? Are we just supposed to sit back and let him win?â
Miriam and a small group of young women had recently started a small nonprofit that was struggling to gain traction in the community. Their stated goal was to get young Muslim women interested in sports as a way to create identity and self-worth. But they kept running into a huge obstacle. The nonprofit didnât have enough money to build their own sports facilities. The owner of the only gym in the community, Mahmoud, refused to allow women to play there.
Miriam had gone to Mahmoud several times asking for an exception. Each time she was rebuffed. Without the gym, the group had no permanent place to operate from. People in the community were struggling to take them seriously.
As Miriam spoke about Mahmoud, her frustration was evident. She had tried to be nice to him and to understand what his motivations were. She had offered to pay him in exchange for the use of the gym. When her offer failed, she tried to picket his gym in protest. No matter what she did, he kept refusing, and the more he refused, the more Miriam became convinced that he was their biggest problemâanother sexist, old, stuck-in-his-traditional-ways male refusing women their equal rights.
Miriam and the others in the room were wrestling with the basic ideas taught by the Arbinger Institute. At the heart of Arbingerâs work is the idea that we can see people in one of two waysâas people or as objects.1 See people as objects and we have an inward mindset. See people as people and we have an outward mindset.2
However, seeing people as people is extremely challenging when we are in the midst of a destructive conflict. The women were finding it hard to apply the concepts of dangerous love to themselves.
How do you practice dangerous love when the person you are in conflict with embodies the very evil you are trying to fight? That doesnât feel dangerous. It feels like suicide.
Imagine two people standing back-to-back, elbowing each other, as illustrated in figure 1.
Figure 1. The conflict figure.
They can feel each other, but they canât see each other. Each person blames the other person for not seeing him or her.
The more the two get elbowed, the more convinced they are that they actually see the very people they arenât seeing. They magically know their thoughts, motivations, and characterâand the verdict isnât good.
Both people wait, hopelessly, for the other person to turn and see them. They both decide that if the other person turns, then they will turn too. Unfortunately, they also donât believe the other person will ever actually turn. The longer they wait in vain for the other person to turn, the more frustration, helplessness, and fear they feel.
In these sorts of conflicts, people get stuck in a rut of
Miriam is experiencing both. She has a nonprofit to run. She needs help. The only person in town with the facilities to help her wonât help. No matter what she does, he keeps saying no. All she can think about is how Mahmoud is making her life difficult.
When we get stuck in conflict, we have a hard time seeing other people as people. Our mindset turns inward.3 We start seeing the situation only through the lens of how others affect us. Once that happens, we start exacerbating the very conflict we say we want to end.4 When we try all the ideas that we think should work from that inward, self-absorbed, weak position and they fail, conflict feels intractable.
Intractable is scary. In the face of fear, whether that be toward a teenager, coworker, or community member, we rarely are our best selves.
We run if we can. If we canât, we retaliate. We fight. The situation gets worse. We say we want the conflict to end but only on our terms. And our terms typically require the person we are in conflict with to turn and see us as people first. That will not happen with Mahmoud as long as Miriam is picketing his gym.
The other option is obvious. Itâs also dangerous. We find the strength to loveâto be the first to turn and see the people we are in conflict with as people. This act of turning toward othersâfirst, and without expectation or demand that they turn as wellâis what Arbinger calls âthe most important moveâ (figure 2).5
Figure 2. The most important move.
Ask people why they donât turn first, and safety and vulnerability always come up. Being the first person to turn feels dangerous. âThey started it! What if they donât turn back? What if they take advantage of me or take my turning as a sign of weakness?â
Thatâs where Miriam and Mahmoud were stuck. I suspected there was more going on with Mahmoud than Miriam believed, but each time I pressed her, she resisted.
âYou donât know him,â she said. âNo one, not even the men in the village, likes him. He will never change.â
I asked Miriam what she really wanted.
âThe gym!â she replied.
I asked her why.
âBecause our organization canât work without it!â
Then I asked her why the program was so important to her.
She talked about the struggles she and other women and girls in the village faced. She talked about how she felt her culture and the people in her village saw her as less important and her dreams less real than those of men.
After several more âwhyâ questions, she got there: âI donât ever want other young girls to feel the way I felt. Itâs too late for me. But it isnât too late for them.â
Then I asked her whether the path that she was taking to get to her âwhyâ adhered to the same values of seeing everyone as important and everyoneâs dreams as equally real.
She said she didnât know.
I asked Miriam a number of questions about Mahmoud, and it turned out she knew very little about his backgroundâwhy he owned the gym or even why he was refusing to let the group use it. That was the first clue that maybe she wasnât seeing Mahmoud the same way she wanted him to see her.
However, one interesting tidbit did emerge. Since Mahmoud had the only gym in the village, everyone was constantly asking him to use it for free. There wasnât much money in the village, and most of the villagers could not afford to pay the gym fees.
I asked Miriam to imagine how it must feel to be constantly approached by people asking for helpâeven when giving that help compromised Mahmoudâs ability to run a successful business.
Miriam paused and huddled with the others in her nonprofit. They hadnât thought about the problem that way before. They were the ones with problems, not Mahmoud. Once they saw a potential problem that Mahmoud might be facing, the question they began to ponder was thisââWhat could we do to be helpful to Mahmoud?â By the end of the weekend, they had a plan.
Miriam said that when they got back home, they were going to offer to clean the gym for Mahmoud every night after it closed. They would do it for free. Their hope was that he would see that the girls were both kind and serious and would eventually grant them access to the gym.
Miriam and her colleagues left the workshop encouraged that there might be a way out of the conflict that they hadnât thought of and promised to send updates.
A few weeks later I heard from Miriam.
âGood news,â she wrote in her email. âMahmoud has allowed us to clean the gym. We have been working for several weeks and he seems happy. Each night he brings us tea and thanks us. We want to ask him if we can use the gym now. What do you think?â
Miriam already thought sheâd done enough to begin asking Mahmoud to change.
I wrote back, âThat is great. Are you seeing him as a person yet?â
She replied, âI donât know.â
Gandhi taught that the means are the ends in the making.6 If the group cleaned the gym to truly help Mahmoud, they couldnât failâeven if he wouldnât let them use the gym. If they did it to try to persuade or manipulate him to let them use the gym, it would likely be a disaster. How Miriam saw Mahmoud would ultimately decide their relationship, not what she did.
Miriam thought the way out of the conflict was by helping him see her as a person. Why? Because helping or forcing someone to see you as a person feels much less dangerous than seeing someone as a person regardless of how he or she sees you.
While the move feels authentic, it is still, primarily about me. And if it fails, if she had asked to use the gym and Mahmoud had said no, do you think she would keep seeing him as a person?
Dangerous love canât be contingent on the people we are in conflict with loving us back. If we have to wait for an assurance that others will reciprocate, we could be waiting forever.
I wrote to Miriam, âAre you cleaning the gym because you care about Mahmoud and want to be helpful to him? Or are you doing it because you want him to change? Only you really know whether you are seeing him as a person or not.â The answers to those questions would help Miriam decide whether she was practicing dangerous love yet.
âI think we need to wait,â was her short retort.
A few weeks later, Miriam wrote again: âWe are still cleaning the gym. Mahmoud keeps spending more and more time each night talking to us. We have even been invited to his home for dinner. Can we ask him now? Maybe at dinner?â
âAre you cleaning his gym for the right reasons yet?â I replied. âWhat have you learned about Mahmoud? Do you understand why Mahmoud is turning you away? Do you know what his goals and challenges are? Until you understand what heâs trying to achieve, you wonât know whether itâs even right to ask.â
Several days later, another email came through.
âYou are not going to believe what happened at dinner. We met Mahmoudâs wife. She was especially warm to us. She kept telling us how surprised and delighted she was that her husband had invited us over.â
For privacyâs sake, I canât get into the details of what...