Exercising Emotional Restraint by ‘Loving Like a Man’

Marketing executive Hasegawa Hanako is one of the strongest proponents of ‘love’ among several of my informants, who perceive love as a prerequisite of a long-term, intimate relationship; as important to loving the self; and as the main explanation for their extramarital relationships. Despite having married a man she loved against h-e-r parents’ wishes, Hanako and h-e-r husband managed to realize the ‘middle-class dream’ that was widely promoted by the Japanese government in the 1980s by purchasing their own apartment, although they did so as a dual-income couple, and not as the ideological male breadwinner family model. However, the demands of performing a ‘double shift’ (daburu shifuto) as a marketing executive during the day, and as moth-e-r in the evening, while h-e-r husband mainly worked and did little to help with the children’s welfare, gradually led Hanako to see h-e-r marriage as a realm of duties and obligations, and no longer of love and intimacy. Even though she had enjoyed receiving affection and companionship from h-e-r lover Uemura Shinji, a former coworker, Hanako later realized that discrepancies exist between men’s expectations of sexual relations and those of women, and she eventually refrained from investing too much of h-e-r emotions, and learned to ‘love like a man’ by keeping h-e-r extramarital relationship free from commitments. By not exerting any demands on each oth-e-r, they managed to keep their 9-year relationship loving, romantic, passionate, and comfortable. As Hanako said to me, ‘extramarital love’ (kongai renai)

. . . is not the same as ordinary love. Women and men understand the meaning of
‘love’ very differently. If the sex is good, men easily confuse it with love. A woman,
however, tends to enjoy sex only when she loves the man. It is not easy, but once
a woman has learned to love like a man, and play like a man, she can then enjoy
both love and the sexual pleasure that an extramarital relationship can offer, and
also the freedom from being judged as a wife or as a moth-e-r . . .

Changing h-e-r expectations of love by exercising emotional detachment is Hanako’s way of not overextending h-e-rself emotionally as she struggles to
keep both h-e-r extramarital relationship and marriage viable. She has learned over the years that managing h-e-r emotions can be more difficult than managing time, especially when she also has to manage h-e-r feelings of guilt and even shame, as well as h-e-r self-image as a person and a moth-e-r. Yet, being able to manage h-e-r emotions well also enhances Hanako’s self-confidence and self-image. Managing time, on the oth-e-r hand, is not a major concern for Hanako. Since she has a demanding full-time job, which often requires h-e-r to work late, she is able to explain h-e-r time away from home in terms of work. Indeed, unlike many dependent housewives, working women such as Hanako have crossed the
private/public divide, moving from the uchi (inside), or the private realm of domesticity, to the soto (outside), or the male realm of paid work and play in the public sph-e-re (Ho 2008: 45). For some women, being able to contribute to the household income enables them to negotiate a fairly egalitarian marital arrangement, and ensures economic security should they ever get a divorce. Even if Hanako also faces the risk of losing h-e-r marriage, and of incurring social disgrace should h-e-r extramarital liaison be exposed, she is able to approach h-e-r extramarital relation with a high-e-r degree of self-confidence, and adopt a more pragmatic attitude towards love, than many women with limited economic means.