Protection Without Freedom Isn't Protection

The popular picture of protection is a burning building: danger appears, he acts, she is safe. Most women don't spend their relationships being carried out of fires. They drive to work, take trips, change jobs, make bad decisions and disagree with partners who love them enough to think they're wrong. So what does protection mean then?

In one of the files I worked from, a woman had written about the man who drove her to the airport for a three-month trip he didn't want her to take: He didn't make me prove I needed him before he helped me. The evidence that came with it was a garage receipt, a list of emergency numbers and an airport parking ticket from just after six in the morning. Protection, it turns out, mostly looks like paperwork.

A man who deals with danger for a living

I went looking for someone who knew about danger first-hand. I'll call him Michael. He is a paramedic, forty-six, divorced, remarried, with three children, and he is suspicious of the word protective. "Women like that word," he said, "until they meet a man who thinks he's protective."

His twenty-year-old daughter had travelled through South America with two friends. He told her not to go. She went. He spent three weeks sending crime statistics. "Were you protecting her or controlling her?" I asked. "Both."

Then she left anyway, and he helped. He checked her insurance, photocopied her documents, drilled her on emergency numbers and bought her a power bank. He worked two double shifts to pay for the insurance. "It wasn't approval," he said. "Helping someone do a thing you hate feels like joining in. It's the worst feeling I know, and it's still the job."

When she rang late one night, stranded with a phone on four percent, he didn't say I told you so. "That would have been about me." He got her somewhere safe, and told her she was an idiot the next morning.

Responsible to, and responsible for

Then he talked about his wife, and said the thing I wrote down in capitals. "I owe my wife things because we're married. Loyalty. Care. Showing up. But I'm not responsible for her as though she were under my authority."

What does he do when his wife makes a decision he thinks is wrong? "I tell her." And if she does it anyway? "I decide whether I can live with it." Unless she's in real danger, impaired or in an emergency. "Then I'd take the keys."

The trouble starts when emergency logic becomes the everyday logic of a relationship. I'd stop you driving drunk quietly becomes I decide which places are too dangerous for you. I care whether you get home safely becomes I'm entitled to know where you are. Both people can keep using the same word the whole way.

A short test for protective men

• When she decides something you disagree with, do you help her do it well, or make it harder?
• Does your protection leave her more able to act, or less?
• Are you treating a normal day like an emergency?
• Would you accept the same protection from her?

I wrote about generous men whose care slowly removed a woman's options in Quit Your Job, I'll Take Care of You, and about the location version of the same drift in Send Me Your Location. For men, there's also What Women Mean by Take Charge. Michael's story is chapter eighteen of Become My Papi.

Questions people ask

What does it mean to be a protective partner?

Warning, preparing, standing beside someone and helping afterwards, while leaving the decision with them. Intervening without consent belongs to real emergencies.

When does protection become control?

When emergency logic becomes everyday logic: deciding where a partner may go, whom they may see, or expecting to know where they are at all times.

Where is Michael's story from?

It is chapter eighteen of Become My Papi by Nora Vellick.