But naturally, in the course of not having the big discussion, we poison everything else. No day is free of the marks of the conflict that has not been expressed.
We should learn to have the courage of our frustrations – and of our fears. It is always better to touch the ur-argument than for a relationship to die by a thousand squabbles. We will cease to fight so much when we can face up to, and voice, what we’re really furious about.
The Defensive Argument
We often operate in romantic life under the mistaken impression – unconsciously imported from law courts and school debating traditions – that the person who is ‘right’ or has the stronger case should, legitimately, ‘win’ an argument. But this is fundamentally to misunderstand the point of relationships, which is not so much to defeat an opponent as to help each other evolve into the best versions of ourselves.
There’s a kind of argument that erupts when one partner has a largely correct insight into the problems of their partner. With a stern and gleeful tone, they may declare, ‘You’ve been drinking too much’, ‘You hogged the conversation at the party’, ‘You’re always boasting’, ‘You don’t take enough responsibility’, ‘You waste too much time online’ or ‘You never take enough exercise.’
The insights are not wrong; that’s what is so tricky. The critic is correct, but they are unable to ‘win’ because there are no prizes in love for correctly discerning the flaws of our partners – other than self-satisfied loneliness. For paradoxically, by attacking a partner with clinical energy, we reduce our chances of ever reaching the real goal: the evolution of the person we have to live with.
When we’re on the receiving end of a difficult insight into our failings, what makes us bristle and deny everything isn’t generally the accusation itself (we know our flaws all too well), it’s the surrounding atmosphere. We know the other is right, we just can’t bear to take their criticism on board, given how severely it has been delivered. We start to deny everything because we are terrified: the light of truth is shining too brightly. The fear is that if we admit our failings, we will be crushed, shown up as worthless, required to attempt an arduous, miserable process of change without sympathy or claim on the affections of the other.
We feel so burdened with shame and guilt already, a lover’s further upbraiding is impossible to listen to. There’s too much pre-existing fragility in our psyches for us to admit to another difficult insight into what’s wrong with us.
Plato once outlined an idea of what he called the ‘just lie’. If a crazed person comes to us and asks, ‘Where’s the axe?’ we are entitled to lie and say we don’t know – because we understand that if we were to tell the truth they would probably use the tool to do something horrendous to us. That is, we can reasonably tell a lie when our life is in danger. In the same way, our partner might not literally be searching for an axe when they make their accusation, but psychologically this is precisely how we might experience them – which makes it understandable if we say we simply don’t know what they are talking about.
It may feel unfair to ask our partner to take our fears on board. But if they want to help the relationship they will need to make it clear that they won’t ever use the truth (if it is acknowledged) as a weapon.
What is so sad is how easily we the accused might, if only the circumstances were more sympathetic, confess to everything. We would in fact love to unburden ourselves and admit to what is broken and wounded in us.
People don’t change when they are gruffly told what’s wrong with them; they change when they feel sufficiently supported to undertake the change they – almost always – already know is due.
The Spoiling Argument
There is a kind of argument that begins when one partner deliberately –and for no immediately obvious reason – attempts to spoil the good mood and high spirits of the other.
The cheerful partner may be making a cake for their visiting nephew or whistling a tune while they rearrange the kitchen. They may be making plans for the weekend or discussing what fun it will be to see an old school friend again soon. Or they may be expressing unusual optimism about their professional future and financial prospects.
Despite our love for them, something about the situation may suddenly grate with us. Within a short time, we may find ourselves saying something unusually harsh or critical: we may point out a flaw in their school friend (they tell very boring anecdotes, they can be pretty snobbish); we may take exception to their rearrangement of the cupboards; we may find fault with the cake; we may bring up an aspect of their work that we know our partner finds dispiriting; we may complain that they haven’t properly considered the roadworks when planning the weekend. We do everything to try to induce a mood of anxiety, friction and misery.
On the surface it looks as if we’re simply monsters. But if we dig a little deeper a more understandable (though no less regrettable) picture may emerge. We are acting in this way because our partner’s buoyant and breezy mood can come across as a forbidding barrier to communication. We fear that their current happiness could prevent them from knowing the shame or melancholy, worry or loneliness that presently possesses us. We are trying to shatter their spirits because we are afraid of being lonely.
We don’t make this argument explicitly to ourselves but a dark instinct in our minds experiences our partner’s upbeat mood as a warning that our uncheery parts must now be unwelcome. And so we make a crude, wholly immature but psychologically comprehensible assumption that we will never be properly known and loved until our partner can feel as sad and frustrated as we do, a plan for the recalibration of their mood that we put into motion with malicious determination.
But of course that’s not how things pan out. We may succeed in making our partner upset but we almost certainly won’t thereby secure the imagined benefits of their gloom: they won’t – once their mood has been spoilt – emerge with any greater appetite for listening to our messages of distress or for cradling us indulgently in their consoling arms. They will just be furious.
The better move, if only we could manage it, would be to confess to, rather than act out, our impulses. We should admit to our partner that we have been seized by an ugly fear about their happiness, laughingly reveal how much we would ideally love to cause a stink and firmly pledge that we won’t. We would all the while remind ourselves that every cheerful person has been sad and that the buoyant among us have by far the best chances of keeping afloat those who remain emotionally at sea.
The spoiling argument is a wholly paradoxical plea for love that leaves one party ever further from the tenderness and shared insight they crave. Knowing how to spot the phenomenon should lead us, when we are the ones cheerily baking or whistling a tune, to remember that the person attempting to ruin our mood isn’t perhaps just nasty (though they are a bit of that too); they are, childishly but sincerely, worried that our happiness may come at their expense and are, through their remorseless negativity, in a garbled and maddening way begging us for reassurance.
The Pathologizing Argument
There are arguments in which one person gets so upset that they start to behave in ways that range far beyond the imagined norms of civilized conduct: they speak in a high-pitched voice, they exaggerate, they weep, they beg, their words become almost incoherent, they pull their own hair, they bite their own hand, they roll on the floor.
Unsurprisingly, it can be supremely tempting for their interlocutor to decide that this dramatic behaviour means they have gone mad – and to close them down on this score. To press the point home, the unagitated partner may start to speak in a preternaturally calm way, as if addressing an unruly dog or a red-faced two-year-old. They may assert that, since their partner has grown so unreasonable, there doesn’t seem to be any point in continuing the conversation – a conclusion which drives the distressed partner to further paroxysms and convulsions.
It can feel natural to propose that the person who loses their temper in the course of an argument thereby loses
any claim to credibility. Whatever point they may be trying to make seems automatically to be invalidated by the fact that they are doing so while in a chaotic state. The only priority seems to be to shift attention to how utterly awful and immature they are being. It is evident: the one who is calm is good; the one who is frothing and spluttering is a cretin.
Unfortunately, both partners end up trapped in an unproductive cycle that benefits neither of them. There’s a moment when the calm one may turn and say, ‘Since you are mad, there’s no point in talking to you.’ The awareness – in the raging lover’s mind – that, as they rant and flail, they are ineluctably throwing away all possibility of being properly attended to or understood feeds their ever-mounting sense of panic: they become yet more demented and exaggerated, further undermining their credibility in the discussion. Hearing their condition diagnosed as insane by the calm one serves to reinforce a suspicion that perhaps they really are mad, which in turn weakens their capacity not to be so. They lose confidence that there might be any reasonable aspect to their distress which could, theoretically, be explained in a clear way if only they could stop crying.
‘I’m not going to listen to you any further if you keep making such a fuss,’ the calm partner might go on to say, prompting ever more of precisely this ‘fuss’. The frustrated one is gradually turned into a case study fit only for clinical psychology or a straitjacket. They are, as we might put it, ‘pathologized’, held up as someone who is actually crazy, rather than as an ordinary human who is essentially quite sane but has temporarily lost their self-possession in an extremely difficult situation.
On the other side of the equation, the person who remains calm is automatically cast – by their own imperturbable nature and subtle skills at public relations – as decent and reasonable. But we should bear in mind that it is at least in theory entirely possible to be cruel, dismissive, stubborn, harsh and wrong – and keep one’s voice utterly steady. Just as one can, equally well, be red-nosed, whimpering and incoherent – and have a point.
We need to keep hold of a heroically generous attitude: rage and histrionics can be the symptoms of a desperation that sets in when a hugely important intimate truth is being blatantly ignored or denied, with the uncontrolled person being neither evil nor monstrous.
Obviously the method of delivery is drastically unhelpful; obviously it would always be better if we didn’t start to cry. But it is not beyond understanding or, hopefully, forgiveness if we were to do so. It’s horrible and frightening to witness someone getting intensely worked up, but with the benefit of perspective, their inner condition calls for deep compassion rather than a lecture. We should remember that only someone who internally felt their life was in danger would end up in such a mess.
We should keep this in mind, because sometimes we will be the ones who fall into a deranged state; we won’t always be the aggrieved, cooler-headed party. We should all have a little film of ourselves at our very worst moments from which we replay brief highlights and so remember that, while we looked mad, our contortions were only the outer signs of an inner agony at being unable to make ourselves understood on a crucial point by the person we relied on.
We can stay calm with almost everyone in our lives. If we lose our temper with our partners, it is – at best, in part – because we are so invested in them and our joint futures. We shouldn’t invariably hold it against someone that they behave in a stricken way; it isn’t (probably) a sign that they are mad or horrible. Rather, as we should have the grace to recall, it is just that they love and depend on us very much.
The Absentee Argument
There are so many ways in which the world wounds us. At work, our manager repeatedly humiliates and belittles us. We hear of a party to which we were not invited. A better-looking, wealthier person snubs us at a conference. We develop a skill that turns out not to be much in demand in the world; some people we were with at university set up a hugely successful business.
Our hurt, humiliation and disappointments accumulate – but almost always, we cannot possibly complain about them to anyone. Our managers would sack us if we told them how we felt. Our acquaintances would be horrified by the depth of our insecurities. No one gives a damn about an admirable company that has hurt our feelings through its success. There is no way to take out our distress on geopolitics or economic history or the existential paradox that we are required to make decisions about our lives before we could possibly know what they will entail. We cannot rave at the cosmos or at the accidents of political power. We need, most of the time, simply to politely swallow our hurt and move on.
But there is one exception to this rule: we can rant and moan at a person who is more reliably kind to us than anyone else, a person whom we love more than any other, a blessed being who is waiting for us at home at the end of every new gruelling day …
Unfortunately, we don’t necessarily always tell our partner that we are causing problems because we are sad about things that have nothing to do with them; we just create arguments to alleviate our distress – we are mean to them because our boss didn’t care, the economy wasn’t available for a chat and there was no God to implore. We reroute all the humiliation and rage that no one else had time for on to the shoulders of the one person who most cares about our well-being. We tell them that if only they were more supportive, were less intrusive, made more money, were less materialistic, were more imaginative or less naive, less fussy or more demanding, more dynamic or more relaxed, sexier or less obsessed with sex, more intelligent or less wrapped up in the world of books, more adventurous or more settled … then we could be happy – our life would be soothed and our errors redeemed. It is, as we imply and occasionally even tell them, all their fault.
This is, of course, horrible and largely untrue. But enfolded within our denunciations and absurd criticisms is a strangely loving homage. Behind our accusations is an inarticulate yet large compliment. We complain unfairly as a tribute to the extent of our love and the position the partner has taken in our lives.
We pick a fight with them over nothing much, but what we are in effect saying is: Save me, redeem me, make sense of my pain, love me even though I have failed. The fact that we are blaming our partner in ridiculous ways is a heavily disguised but authentic mark of the trust we have in them. We must be civilized and grown up with everyone else, but with one person on the planet, we can at points be maddeningly irrational, utterly demanding and horribly cross – not because they deserve it, but because so much has gone wrong, we are so tired and they are the one person who promises to understand and forgive us. No wonder we love them.
The Argument of Normality
Being in a relationship, even a very good one, requires us constantly to defend our preferences and points of view against the possibility of a partner’s objections. We can find ourselves having to argue about what time to go to bed, where to put the sofa, how often to have sex, what to do in a foreign city or what the best colour for a new car might be. In previous eras, the sorts of justifications we wielded were far simpler. The person with more power would simply assert with haughty indifference: Because I say so … or Because I want it this way … But we live in a more rational age focused on discussion, where only well-founded and articulated reasons are expected to swing a point.
Because we live in a democratic age too, one of the tools to which warring couples most often have resort when attempting to justify their choices is majority opinion. That is, in the heat of a fight, we remind our opponent that what we want to do, think or feel is normal. We suggest that they should agree with us, not only or primarily because of what we happen to say, but because they’ll find – once they stop to consider the matter with appropriate humility – that all right-thinking people agree with us too. Our position (on travel plans, sexual routines or car colours) isn’t mere idiosyncrasy; it is synonymous with that lodestar of contemporary ethics, ‘normality’.
As we fight, we bolster our personal and therefore fragile opinion with
the supposed impregnable voice of the entire community: It is not simply that I – one solitary, easily overlooked person – find your attitude very displeasing. All reasonable people – in fact, an electoral majority of the world – are presently with me in condemning your ideas. You are – in your opinion on how to cook pasta, when to call your sister or the merit of the prize-winning novel – utterly alone.
In a pure sense, what is ‘normal’ shouldn’t matter very much at all. What is widespread in our community is often wrong and what is currently considered odd might actually be quite wise. But however much we know this intellectually, we are profoundly social creatures; millions of years of evolution have shaped our brains so as naturally to give a great deal of weight to the opinions of those around us. In reality, it almost always feels emotionally crucial to try to retain the broad goodwill and acceptance of our community. So the claim to ‘normality’, however approximately and unfairly it is made, touches on a sensitive spot in our minds – which is precisely why our partner invokes it so deftly.
Nevertheless, we should hold on to the counter-arguments. When it comes to personal life, we have no sound idea of what is normal, because we have no easy access to the intimate truths of others. We don’t know what a normal amount of sex really is, or how normal it is to cry, sleep in a different bed or dislike a partner’s best friend. There are no reliable polls or witnesses.
In addition, and more importantly, we should cease cynically lauding the idea of the normal when it suits us by acknowledging that almost everything that is beautiful and worth appreciating in our relationship is deeply un-normal. It’s very un-normal that someone should find us attractive, should have agreed to go out with us, should put up with our antics, should have come up with such an endearing nickname for us that alludes to our favourite animal from childhood, should have bothered to spend some of their weekend sewing on buttons for us – and should bother to listen to our anxieties late into the night. We are the beneficiaries of some extremely rare eventualities and it is the height of ingratitude to claim to be a friend of the normal when most of what is good in our lives is the result of awesomely minuscule odds. We should stop badgering our partners with phoney democratic arguments and admit to something far truer and possibly more effective in its honest vulnerability: We would love something to happen because, and only because, it would make us very happy if it did – and very upset if it didn’t.
The School of Life Page 17