Unhealthy Relationships

Zora Neale Hurston, an acclaimed African-American writer, wrote the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God during a time when women did not have a large say in their marriages. The novel follows the main character Janie in her quest to find what she thinks is true love and happiness. Hurston highlights the idea of healthy and unhealthy relationships throughout Janie’s three marriages. Each marriage had its advantages but they were largely overshadowed by their disadvantages resulting in Janie learning the hard truth about married life for a women of color in the 1920s. Ultimately the reader and Janie learn that in order to be happy in a marriage you must love, learn, and lose from past relationship experiences to figure out what truly makes you

To todays standards, the marriages Janie experienced in Their Eyes Were Watching God would most likely be considered unhealthy, even at their highest points. There are different kinds of unhealthy relationships, Janie experiencing more than one. The more obvious unhealthy marriage she experiences is the abusive kind. In her two later marriages to Joe Starks and Tea Cake, she, unfortunately undergoes a kind of relationship in which her husbands choose to dominate her physically. She does, however, experience a kind of relationship that is much more subtle and just as harmful. This is the kind of relationship in which one partner has emotional domination over the other. These types of dysfunctional relationships are brought on by a lack of communication from one or both partners. The only words that are communicated from one partner to the other are often rude or degrading comments that can render someone emotionally unstable (Angulo, Brooks and Swann

Her marriage to Logan Killicks initially taught her that not all marriages consist of love. Being married to Joe Starks taught her that people change and you shouldn’t suppress your feelings and Tea Cake taught her to finally love, truly and fully. Similarly to Janie, the reader takes from her experience that its better to love and lose than to never have loved at