by Jancee Dunn
To my profound discomfort, sudden tears are coursing down my cheeks. “I want to be kinder to Tom,” I say, snuffling. “But I also want him to do more work around the house and not leave it all to me.” I rub my eyes. “I wore mascara, how stupid was I?”
Real pushes a box of tissues toward me. Then he deftly dissects our family and psychological histories, teasing out key issues (I grew up in a very controlled household; Tom was a latchkey kid whose life lacked structure). He moves on to questions about our romantic history with each other, then asks me to walk him through a fight.
I tell him that Tom has just taken a bike trip through the Italian countryside for ten days on a magazine assignment. When he came home, he was jet lagged, so for the ensuing two days, I was once again a single parent as he slept all day. So when he was awake, I yelled.
Real nods. “I got news for ya,” he says. “I’m on your side.”
I stop in the midst of blowing my nose. “Wait, what? You are?”
Real glares at Tom over his reading glasses. “You want to go away for ten days, having the time of your life, biking through the countryside and having pasta at night? You come home, you’re there for the kid, and your wife’s off her feet.”
“But—” Tom puts in weakly.
“—I tell you this as somebody who had little kids myself,” Real barrels on. “Okay? I was on the road a ton and I had to do it, too. I talk to men all the time and say, ‘If you’re away from your wife and kids, working, even if it’s wall to wall work and it’s not pleasurable, and you come home and you’re dog tired, too bad. If anything, you have to be super thoughtful, because it’s really hard to be home with the kids alone.”
My triumph must be visible on my face, because Real stops me with a sharp look. “Not that you have a right to behave the way you behaved,” he barks. “If he goes away on a trip, don’t give it to him and then piss on it on the way out the door. I call that ‘peeing on the gift’! Either let him do it and be okay about it, or don’t!” To my relief, his head swivels back to Tom. “How do you feel about what I said?”
“Well,” Tom says, shifting in his seat, “I guess I haven’t heard this before. I mean, guys talk, but…”
Terry waves him away. “Guys, first of all, get together and they guy it. They reinforce this entitlement in one another: ‘Wow, I would never put up with that—are you kidding me?’ Meanwhile, they go home and they damn well do put up with it! But you wouldn’t know about it! And then women do the big victim thing with each other—how woefully lacking their husbands are. The point being, I’m not surprised you haven’t heard this before because no one will tell you. What else do you fight about?”
“Um, the fact that I tend to, maybe, be self-absorbed about taking time for me,” says Tom. All of a sudden, I feel protective of him, and jump in to add that with Sylvie, he is utterly unselfish, kind, and attentive. No matter what her request—Scrabble, an after-dinner trip to the park, a tea party with her dolls—he cannot say no.
“You sound like a wonderful father,” Real tells him. “So, if I were to ask Jancee if your self-absorption leans into selfishness with her, what do you think she would say?”
Tom furrows his brow. “Well, is ‘selfish’ more volitional, would you say? Whereas in the case of being self-absorbed, the person may be inclined toward acting selfish, but not know that—”
Real cuts him off. “Selfish would be more behavioral: insensitive, putting yourself first, not giving. Is that you?”
Tom, now so squeamish that I pity him again, agrees that it is.
Real asks me my most pressing issue and I tell him it’s my temper. “I hate myself after I yell,” I say.
Real shrugs. “Well, that’s useless.”
“And I think I get too defensive too quickly, because I’m being yelled at,” says Tom. “If I think it’s not a major issue, I almost just want to provoke her. So I shut down.”
“I will say this,” says Real. “Volatile women generally don’t feel heard. So you get into: Can you hear me now? WHAT ABOUT NOW? That’s not going to get you heard. The reciprocal piece of this, Tom, is your walling off and passive aggression. It’s a way of expressing your anger by what you don’t do. And it’s provocative; it actually escalates things.”
We jostle for approval from our stern new father. “In the end, I don’t know why I don’t just do the dishes,” Tom admits. “Because I don’t care that much about them. I don’t know why I wall her off. Maybe it’s some kind of relationship jujitsu? As they say, ‘Use your enemy’s strength against them.’”
Real nods. “You don’t like being told what to do. You don’t like being controlled and attacked. Listen, there’s too much hostility and it’s not good for Sylvie, especially in a small space like that.”
I drift off for a minute. If only our modest Brooklyn apartment had a walk-in closet, like the one in New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s house. Christie told the author of his biography that he and his wife, Mary Pat, vowed never to fight in front of their four children, as his parents did when he was a boy. So, to escape the kids (and the state troopers who drive them places), they head to Mary Pat’s large closet, shut the door, and hash it out.
“—and you’re falling into roles where Jancee’s the aggressor, Tom is seen as the poor victim, and Sylvie’s the peacemaker, and this is how shit gets passed down through generations,” Real is saying. “Tom, the coalition between you and your daughter against Jancee is a really bad dynamic, particularly because you’re so nurturing with Sylvie.”
I tell Real that we almost never fought before we became parents, and he laughs. “Listen, you put a kid in the mix and then there’s this negotiation. I remember counting the minutes when my wife was at the gym and I was stuck with the kids. Like, ‘Where the fuck is she?’ And ‘I have work to do.’ I know that tussle. That’s normal, to some degree. But then throw in your anger and resentment”—he points to me—“and your selfishness and preciousness”—the finger moves to Tom—“and the more angry you get, the more selfish and withdrawn you get. It needs to be nipped in the bud. It’s a toxic, self-reinforcing loop that begins to eat away at everything that’s good between the two of you.” He shakes his head. “You do this pattern for fifteen, twenty years and you turn into the couples I see who are at the end of this, who are about to leave. Forty-three percent of couples divorce.” (In fact, while the national divorce rate has remained steady since the 1980s, it has doubled for those over fifty—when parenting duties are winding down, or over.)
Sylvie knocks on the door with a request for Tom to fix the iPad. When she leaves, Real asks us why we didn’t get a babysitter, and I explain that we couldn’t find anybody. Then I confess that we didn’t try very hard, either.
“She’s easy, so we mostly bring her everywhere,” I say. “She’s nice to be around. I don’t crave time apart from her.”
Real is aghast. “It’s not a craving to be away from her—it’s a craving to be alone with him! What do you do to cherish each other as a couple?”
Not much, we say, exchanging guilty looks.
“Get a babysitter!” he explodes.
Back to our toxic, self-reinforcing loop. “I feel like I do so much for Tom,” I begin. “I bake for him, I—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re very cherishing,” Real says. “We get it.”
“But before Sylvie was born, I did all the cooking,” Tom interjects. “Now Jancee does. How did that happen?” He mimes bewilderment and laughs in a strangled, high-pitched sort of way.
Real leans in. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What?” I can see him gathering force; it is weirdly exciting.
“Also, I am in charge of Sylvie every day after school,” I put in. “That’s what I wanted to do. But if I have a deadline and ask occasionally for Tom to take over, he usually refuses. He guards his time.”
Tom nods. “My instinctive reaction is no,” he admits.
Real frowns. “But she’s the after-school mom and the cook and the cleaner-upper,�
�� he says. “That would be fine if she didn’t work, but not if you’re both working. What I see happening with guys is ‘Don’t mess with me—I need sleep and R&R so I can fight the dragons for my family.’ But she’s fighting the dragons now, too.” In the old days, he goes on, if a man was a good provider, had a steady hand, and didn’t beat anyone, he was a good husband. “And what most men I work with don’t get is that their relationship job description has changed,” he says. “What I hear over and over again from women is ‘I don’t feel like I have a real partner.’ But what most men really think is if their partners would just simmer down and get off their backs, things would be fine.”
Real sits back in his chair and chuckles. “Listen, my wife is a no-bullshit gal. And when the kids were little, I’d be due to give a lecture the next day to a thousand people and nervous as hell. And one of the kids would inevitably wake up in the night, and Belinda, who’s a psychotherapist like me, would have woken up three times already. And she’d say, ‘Go see what he wants.’ And I’d say, “I’ve got this lecture tomorrow—I can’t…” And she’d say, ‘So you’ll give your lecture tired. Go deal with the kid.’ And that was a bit of a revelation.”
He leans forward. “Tom, what you’re not getting, and this is true for most men I see, is that it is in your interest to move beyond your knee-jerk selfishness and entitlement and to take good care of your wife, so she isn’t such a raving lunatic all the time.” He shakes his head. “The idea that withdrawal is going to work is nuts. You’re a sweet guy; I can see you have a sweet soul. But you have to do more. You have it in you; you know how to reach outside yourself with Sylvie. You could be in the chair and be dog tired, and she goes, ‘Daddy,’ and you get out of the chair and see what she wants.”
Real looks steadily at Tom over his glasses. “When your work is done for the day, why wouldn’t you split everything fifty-fifty? It’s not fair. You know that. Tonight you cook; tomorrow she cooks. Tonight you put Sylvie to bed; tomorrow she puts Sylvie to bed. Show up and participate.”
“But I think men have a problem with fifty-fifty,” I put in.
“We’re not talking about men, we’re talking about Tom,” he snaps. “Don’t turn him into a class!” He asks Tom if he has a problem with splitting down the middle.
“Well, entropy takes over sometimes, and I…,” Tom begins.
“Look, I know what you’re talking about,” Real breaks in. “The inertia, the laziness. But it’s also entitlement. And it’s dumb. Because it’s short-term success and long-term resentment. It’s in your interest to give! Learn to be a family man! Because your wife is pissed off!”
I watch as Tom’s face slowly turns gray and put my hand on his arm: Don’t retract like a gastropod. Don’t do it.
Because Real is not done: “And part of being a family man is to help out when it’s needed! If your wife is overburdened, and doing all the cooking and cleaning, get off your ass and help out!”
I try, without success, to hide my exultation. Why didn’t we go to couples therapy sooner?
“You’re right,” says Tom meekly. “And I don’t want Sylvie picking up my passivity. Now she says, ‘In a minute’ like I do when Jancee asks her to do something.”
Real snorts. “Well, she’s learning from her passive-aggressive father! She watches how you handle her. It’s like that sign in my waiting room: children learn what they live.” He lists three reasons why men tend to stonewall: They feel that they need to fix the woman’s negative experience, and when they can’t, they’re caught in a “frustrated freak-out.” They feel entitled (“like, ‘I don’t need this shit’”). And no one educated them on how to handle feelings. “Boys are taught to dampen emotions at the age of three or four,” he says.
And this suppression continues through adulthood. Psychotherapist John Gottman found that during fights, men are more likely than women to experience diffuse physiological arousal, or DPA, as the body responds to the stress with a “fight or flight” response. This reaction makes a person feel “flooded,” or overwhelmed: the heart beats uncomfortably fast, blood pressure soars, and people have trouble processing information, solving problems, or even listening (if a subject’s heart was beating over 100 beats a minute, with some rocketing alarmingly to 168, Gottman found they were literally not able to hear the other person). Not only do men tend to experience DPA more than women, but their heart rate stays escalated for a longer period of time, and takes longer to return to normal.
So it could very well be that while Tom may resemble an impassive Easter Island statue during one of our showdowns, he’s an emotional typhoon on the inside. (This turns out to be true: out of curiosity, I later measure his heart rate after a mild post-Real tiff, and it had zoomed from his usual 60 to 102.)
Real asks Tom if he tends to suppress his emotions during conflict, and he nods. “I think it’s easier to have a release when, say, you’re driving and someone cuts you off and you flip out. Or I tear up at the absolute worst, crappiest movies on airplanes.”
Real laughs. “Men who won’t cry at a funeral will cry at the friendly dinosaur movie.” Then he gets serious again. “So, the best way to make your wife feel heard is to lean into it and disarm her, rather than stonewall her and have a three-hour fight. There are easy ways to do this. It works to say, ‘You’re unhappy; let me hear what you’re talking about,’ instead of going away. Or, “Oh, that must feel bad. I can see why you feel like that.” Or, ‘What can I say or do right now to make you feel better?’ Those are phrases you’re going to have to learn how to speak. Then she feels heard, and they render you a nicer guy to live with.”
“I will do the work,” says Tom solemnly. “It seems selfish to impose this on Sylvie.” He turns to me and says quickly, “And because I care about you.”
Real leans back. “Good,” he says. “Your job walking out of here is to be more giving—physically, with helping around the house, and emotionally. I want you to open your heart, share more, listen better, cherish more. Verbally cherishing your wife with compliments, for example, is a good thing for her, good for Sylvie to see, and a good thing for Sylvie to expect from her guy or gal when she grows up.”
Compliments and sweet words are no small thing. University of Michigan psychologist Terri Orbuch has studied divorced people for decades. As they looked back on their broken marriages, many told her that one of their biggest regrets was that they had not given their mate more of what Orbuch terms “affective affirmation”: kissing, giving compliments such as “I would still choose you” or “You’re a great parent,” saying “I love you,” and making small gestures of affection such as filling your partner’s gas tank. Orbuch has called the neglect of these simple acts an “overlooked relationship-killer.”
I snap back into focus as Real looks at me. “I’m telling you point-blank that this is a good guy, and I’d be shocked if he didn’t come through for you,” he is saying. “So, relax. Trust him.”
Well, I think, that was worth the money. It’s definitely helpful that Terry is a man. What is it, five o’clock? Must be around quitting time. Maybe Italian for dinner? I reach into my purse for my phone so I can check the time.
Then Real turns my way.
“Now,” he says, “let’s talk about your temper.”
Uh-oh.
Real has me shamefacedly repeat the invective I fling at Tom: asshole, dick, I hate you.
He nods. “You’re verbally abusive.”
I frown. “Well, I wouldn’t say that, I mean, I—”
“Yes. You are. And it may get results, intermittently. That’s the seduction of the dark path.” He fastens his unblinking gaze on me. “But the idea that you can haul off and be abusive to your partner and somehow get a pass, that you can’t control it, or whatever you tell yourself to rationalize it, is nuts. Also, your whole ‘angry victim’ role is going to get worse. You are extremely comfortable with your self-righteous indignation.”
He then tells me, in stark terms, that it’s time for
me to climb off the cross. “Stop playing the martyr,” he says. “Just say, ‘Hey, sweetheart, I want you to know that I just cooked dinner, and you’re doing the dishes.’ If you’re in a constant state of Self-Righteous Angry Victim, you’re fucked. It’s over. You’re not a victim. So knock it off.”
He isn’t through. “More importantly, you need to take verbal abuse off the table,” he says. “You can say, ‘I’m angry.’ But you don’t say, ‘You’re an asshole.’ You don’t yell and scream. You don’t humiliate or demean. They’re off the table. You are verbally abusive. You can buy a book called The Verbally Abusive Relationship by Patricia Evans. You’re in it.”
I try for levity. “But isn’t what I do just ‘venting’?”
He doesn’t play along. “It’s not venting,” he says levelly. “Get it? And you’re yelling at your daughter, by the way, when you do that—just so you know. There’s no differentiation for a six-year-old. And you’ve proved that you can stop it. Do you do this to Sylvie?”
“No.”
“Right. Do you ever find her behavior trying?”
“Yes.”
“So if you have the discipline to stop doing it directly to her, you can stop doing it indirectly to her,” he says. “There is a very small group of people who truly can’t control themselves—and, by and large, they’re in mental institutions, or in jail.” He leans forward. “Humiliating and ridiculing have no place whatsoever in a healthy relationship. There’s a world of difference between assertively standing up for yourself and aggressively putting him down. As crazy at it might seem, arguing or complaining can actually feel safer to most of us than simply and directly making a request. So, starting today, you have to tell him what he could do to make you feel better by using the phrase ‘What I’d like you to do now is…’ Okay? Rather than just pounding him into the ground.”