Intimate terrorism

by Michael Vincent Miller

It is almost impossible in our time to think about love, sex, intimacy, and marriage without thinking about power. With our rampant divorce rate and heightened awareness of abuse in all its forms, the phrase "the war between the sexes" has never sounded more menacingly accurate. In Intimate Terrorism therapist and writer Michael Vincent Miller explores this crisis of intimacy in American life with the eye of a clinician and the eloquence of a poet. He demonstrates how our cultural myths about romance are arrested in adolescence, and how the inevitable disappointments result in bitter struggles between men and women, fueled by anxiety and resentment, that he terms "intimate terrorism." In his view, when romance, like politics, fails, what remains is the desire not to change or persuade one's partner, but to demoralize him or her, to gain the upper hand. The bonds of love have become so intertwined with this quest for power that we have created what Miller calls "the culture of abuse" -