"Be The Hammer Or The Anvil"

While reading Coldness and Cruelty by Gilles Deleuze/Venus In Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch for my essay on Tanizaki (incidently I found myself listening to The Velvet Underground's song "Venus In Furs" a lot while reading this), I came across a quote from Goethe, which states: "Be the anvil or the hammer." I think this idea suggests that all love relationship have a sort of adversarial nature to them. I think it was described by Carson McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, as being a relationship between "the beloved" and "the lover." More recently the power imbalance was identified by Seinfeld as identifying who has "hand" in a relationship (ie. this denotes possession of controlling interest in a two-person relations). It has made me wonder if every relationship is an unequal power struggle with power tipped toward the one with" hand."