3 Dealing with Problems
ARGUMENTS
An average couple will have between thirty and fifty significant arguments a year, ‘significant’ meaning an encounter which departs sharply from civilized norms of dialogue, would be uncomfortable to film and show friends, and might involve screaming, rolled eyes, histrionic accusations, slammed doors and liberal uses of terms like ‘arsehole’ and ‘knobhead’.
Given the intensity of the distress that arguments cause us, we could expect modern societies to have learned to devote a great deal of attention and resources to understanding why they happen and how we might more effectively defuse or untangle them. We might expect there to be school and university courses on how to manage arguments successfully and official targets for reducing their incidence.
But there are some strong reasons for our collective neglect. The first is that our Romantic culture sentimentally implies that there might be a necessary connection between true passion and a fiery temper. It can seem as if fighting and hurling insults might be signs, not of immaturity and a woeful incapacity for self-control, but of an admirable intensity of desire and strength of commitment.
Romanticism also conspires to suggest that arguments might be part of the natural weather of relationships and could never therefore be fairly analysed through reason or dismantled with logic. Only a pedant would seek to think through an argument – as opposed to letting it run its sometimes troubling and rowdy but ultimately always necessary course.
At a more intimate level, it may be that we cannot quite face what arguments show us about ourselves, presenting an unbearable insult to our self-love. Once the argument is over, the viciousness, self-pity and pettiness on display are repulsive to think about and so we artfully pretend to ourselves and our partner that what happened last night must have been a peculiar aberration, best passed over in silence from the calmer perspective of dawn.
We are further stymied in our investigations because there is so little public evidence that a version of what occurs in our union might unfold in everyone else’s as well. Out of shame and a desire to seem normal, we collectively shield each other from the reality of relationships – and then imagine that our behaviour must be uniquely savage and childish and therefore incapable of redemption or analysis. We miss out on a chance to improve because we take ourselves to be the mad exceptions.
None of this needs to be the case. We argue badly and regularly principally because we lack an education in how to teach others who we are. Beneath the surface of almost every argument lies a forlorn attempt by two people to get the other to see, acknowledge and respond to their emotional reality and sense of justice. Beyond the invective is a longing that our partner should witness, understand and endorse some crucial element of our own experience.
The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (‘I need you to love me, know me, agree with me’) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm, exaggerated gesticulations and forceful ‘fuck you’s).
A bad argument is a failed endeavour to communicate, which perversely renders the underlying message we seek to convey ever less visible. It is our very desperation which undermines us and ushers in the unreasonableness that prevents whatever point we lay claim to from making its way across. We argue in an ugly way because, in our times of distress, we lose access to all better methods of explaining our fears, frustrated hopes, needs, concerns, excitements and convictions. And we do this principally because we are so scared that we may have ruined our lives by being in a relationship with someone who cannot fathom the inner movements of our souls. We would do things so much better if only we cared a little less.
We don’t, therefore, end up in bitter arguments because we are fundamentally brutish or resolutely demented but because we are at once so invested and yet so incapable. It is the untutored force of our wish to communicate that impedes our steady ability to do so.
And yet, though arguments may be destructive, avoiding points of conflict isn’t straightforwardly the answer either. An argument is about something, so its content needs eventually to be faced up to if a relationship is to survive. The priority is not so much to skirt points of contention as to learn to handle them in less counterproductively vindictive and more gently strategic ways.
Some of the reason why we argue so much and so repetitively is that we aren’t guided to spot the similarities that run through our arguments; we do not have to hand an easy typology of squabbles that could be to domestic conflict what an encyclopedia of birds is to an ornithologist.
Though fights can from the outside look generic, with similar displays of agitation and aggression, we should come to recognize the very distinct kinds of rows in operation. Each type listed here foregrounds a particular way in which we typically fail to communicate a vital and intense truth to a partner.
By examining them in turn, we may gradually assemble an understanding of some of the obstacles we face, and greet moments of dissent with a little less surprise and rather more tolerance and humorous recognition. We will be reminded – once more – that love is a skill, not an emotion.
The Interminable Argument
One of the hardest to unpick, this type of argument looks, from a distance, as though it is always new and always unique. One day it is about something someone said to a friend, the next about a family reunion. Sometimes it centres around a stain that’s appeared on the sofa, sometimes around the bank’s approach to the setting of interest rates.
What is hard to imagine is that we may unwittingly – all along – be having the same argument in disguise. The flashpoints of agitation may superficially seem diverse but are in fact all reconfigurations of the same basic conflictual material.
Arguments about whether to take the train or the bus, or about putting out the bins, or about the economic potential of Africa, or about a scratch on a wooden table, or about whether it’s OK to be five minutes late for a dental appointment, or about what to give a friend as a wedding present, or about the difference between a serviette and a napkin – all of these may be emerging from the repeated frustrated attempt to transmit a single intimate truth: I feel you don’t respect my intelligence.
We keep arguing because we never manage to identify and address the key issue we’re actually cross about. Irritability is anger that lacks self-knowledge.
Why should it be so hard to trace the origins of our rage? At points because what offends us is so humiliating in structure. It can be shameful for us to realize that the person in whom we have invested so much may not actually desire us physically, or may not fundamentally be kind, or could be exploiting us financially or gravely impeding our professional aspirations. We come under immense internal pressure not to square up to truths that would require us to accept a range of practically difficult and emotionally devastating realizations. We prefer to let our anger seep out in myriad minor conflicts over seemingly not very much rather than have to argue over the direction of our lives.
We may, furthermore, not have grown up with a sense that our dissatisfactions ever deserved expression. Our parents might have been too anxious, too vulnerable or too bullying to allow much room for our early needs. We might have become masters in the art of not complaining and of accepting what we are given as the price of survival and of protection of those we loved. This doesn’t now spare us feelings of frustration. It simply makes us incapable of giving them a voice.
We are hence doomed to keep having small or diversionary squabbles so as not to have to touch the fundamental truth at the core of our complaints: You don’t show me enough physical affection. My life is harder than your life. Your family are much worse than you think they are. I’m threatened by your friends. You have the wrong approach to money.
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 Parental-Resemblance Argument
There is a move many of us make in the heat of an argument with our partner that is at once devastating, accurate and entirely uncalled for. In a particularly contemptuous, sly and yet gleeful tone, partners are inclined to announce, as if a rare truth were being unearthed, ‘You’re turning into your mother’ or ‘You’re turning into your father.’
The claim is apt to silence us because, however much we may have tried to develop our own independent characters, we can’t help but harbour a deep and secret fear that we are prey to an unconscious psychological destiny. In one side of our brains, we are aware of a range of negative qualities we observed in our parents which we sense are intermittently hinted at in our own personalities. And we are terrified.
We catch ourselves rehearsing opinions that once struck us as patently absurd or laughable. At moments of weakness, we find ourselves replaying just the same sarcastic or petty, vain or angry attitudes we once felt sure we would never want to emulate. The accusations of our partner hurt so much because they knock up against a genuine risk.
At the same time, the criticism is deeply underhand. First, because even if we ourselves occasionally share an account of our parents’ failings with our partners, the universal rules of filial loyalty mean that we – and only we – are ever allowed to bring these up again in an aggressive tone.
Second, the accusation is unfair because it is attempting to push us into denying something that is invariably partly correct. How could we not be a little like our parents, given the many years we spent around them, the untold genes we share with them and the malleability of the infant mind?
We should never get railroaded into protesting that we are unlike those who put us on the earth; we should undercut the implicit charge by immediately candidly admitting that we are – of course – very much like our parents, as they are akin to theirs. How could we be anything else? Why wouldn’t we be? But, in a twist to the normal argument, we should then remind our partners that we chose to be with them precisely in order to attenuate the risks of an unexamined parental destiny. It was and remains their solemn duty not to mock us for being like our parents, but to assist us with kindness to become a little less like them where it counts. By hectoring and accusing us, they aren’t identifying a rare truth from which we hide away in shame; they are stating the obvious and then betraying the fundamental contract of adult love. Their task as our partner isn’t to bully us into making confessions that we would have been ready to accept from the start, but to help us evolve away from the worst sides of people who have inevitably messed us up a little and yet whom we can’t – of course, despite everything – stop loving inordinately.
The Argument from Excessive Logic
It seems odd at first to imagine that we might get angry, even maddened, by a partner because they are, in the course of a discussion, proving to be too reasonable and too logical. We are used to thinking highly of reason and logic. We are not normally enemies of evidence and rationality. How, then, do these ingredients become problematic in the course of love? But from close up, considered with sufficient imagination, our suspicion can make a lot of sense.
When we are in difficulties, what we may primarily be seeking from our partners is a sense that they understand what we are going through. We are not looking for answers (the problems may be too large for there to be any obvious ones) so much as comfort, reassurance and fellow feeling. In the circumstances, the deployment of an overly logical stance may come across not as an act of kindness, but as a species of disguised impatience.
Let’s imagine someone who comes to their partner complaining of vertigo. The fear of heights is usually manifestly unreasonable: the balcony obviously isn’t about to collapse, there’s a strong iron balustrade between us and the abyss, the building has been repeatedly tested by experts. We may know all this intellectually, but it does nothing to reduce our sickening anxiety in practice. If a partner were patiently to begin to explain the laws of physics to us, we wouldn’t be grateful; we would simply feel they had misunderstood us.
Much that troubles us has a structure akin to vertigo: our worry isn’t exactly reasonable, but we’re unsettled all the same. We can, for example, continue to feel guilty about letting down our parents, no matter how nice to them we’ve actually been. Or we can feel very worried about money, even if we’re objectively economically quite safe. We can feel horrified by our own appearance, even though no one else judges our face or body harshly. Or we can be certain that we’re failures who’ve messed up everything we’ve ever done, even if, in objective terms, we seem to be doing pretty well. We can obsess that we’ve forgotten to pack something, even though we’ve taken a lot of care and can in any case buy almost everything at the other end. Or we may feel that our life will fall apart if we have to make a short speech, even though thousands of people make quite bad speeches every day and their lives continue as normal.
When we recount our worries to our partner, we may receive a set of precisely delivered, unimpassioned logical answers – we have been good to our parents, we have packed enough toothpaste, etc. – answers that are entirely true and yet unhelpful as well, and so in their own way enraging. It feels as if the excessive logic of the other has led them to look down on our concerns. Because, reasonably speaking, we shouldn’t have our worries, the implication is that we must be mad for having them.
The one putting forward the ‘logical’ point of view shouldn’t be surprised by the angry response they receive. They are forgetting how weird and beyond the ordinary rules of reason all human minds can be, theirs included. The logic they are applying is really a species of brute common sense that refuses the insights of psychology. Of course our minds are prey to phantasms, illusions, projections and neurotic terrors. Of course we’re afraid of many things that don’t exist in the so-called real world. But such phenomena are not so much ‘illogical’ as deserving of the application of a deeper logic. Our sense of whether we’re attractive or not isn’t a reflection of what we actually look like; it follows a pattern that goes back to childhood and how loved we were made to feel by those we depended on. The fear of public speaking is bound up with long-standing shame and dread of others’ judgement.
An excessively logical approach to fears discounts their origins and concentrates instead on why we shouldn’t have them – which is maddening when we are in pain. It’s not that we actually want our partner to stop being reasonable; we want them to apply their intelligence to the task of sensitive reassurance. We want them to enter into the weirder bits of our own experience by remembering their own. We want to be understood for being the mad animals we are, and then comforted and reassured that it will all be OK anyway.
Then again, it could be that the application of excessive logic isn’t an accident or a form of stupidity. It might be an act of revenge. Perhaps our partner is giving brief, logical answers to our worries because their efforts to be sympathetic towards us in the past have gone nowhere. Perhaps we have neglected their needs. If two people were being properly ‘logical’ in the deepest sense of the word – that is, truly alive to all the complexities of emotional functioning – rather than squabbling around the question ‘Why are you being so rational when I’m in pain?’, the person on the receiving end of superficial logic would gently change the subject and ask, ‘Is it possible I’ve hurt or been neglecting you?’ That would be real logic.
The No-Sex Argument
It could, on the surface, be an argument about almost anything: what time to leave for the airport, who forgot to post the tax form, where to send the children to school … But in reality, in disguise, unmentioned and unmentionable, it is typically the very same argument, the no-sex argument, the single greatest argument that ever afflicts committed couples, the argument which has powered more furious oblique exchanges among lovers than any other, the argument that, right now, explains why one person is angrily refusing to speak to another over a bowl of udon noodles in a restaurant in downtown Yokohama and another is screaming in an apartment on an upper floor of a block in the suburbs of Belo Horizonte, why a child has acquired a step-parent and a person is crying over a bottle or at their therapist’s office.
The real injury – you have ceased to want me and I can no longer bear myself or you – can’t be mentioned because it cuts too deep; it threatens too much of our dignity; it is bigger than we are. Late at night in the darkness, time after time, our hand moved towards theirs, tried to coax theirs into a caress and was turned down. They held our fingers limply for a moment and then, as if we were the monster we now take ourselves to be, curled away from us and disappeared into the warren of sleep. We have stopped trying now. It may happen once in a blue moon, a few times a year, but we understand the score well enough: we are not wanted. We feel like outcasts, the only ones to be rejected in this way, the victims of a rare disease. We are nursing an emotional injury far too shaming to mention to others, let alone ourselves, the only ones not to be having sex in a happy, sex-filled world. Our anger aggravates our injury and traps us in cycles of hostility. Perhaps they don’t want us in the night because we have been so vile in the day; but so long as our hand goes unwanted, we can never muster the courage to be anything but vindictive in their presence. It hurts more than being single, when at least the neglect was to be expected. This is a sentence without end. We can neither complain nor let the issue go. We feel compelled to fight by proxy about anything we can lay our hands on – the washing powder and the walk to the park, the money for the dentist and the course of the nation’s politics – all because we so badly need to be held and to hold, to penetrate or to be penetrated.
It is in a sense deeply strange, even silly, that so much should hang on this issue, that the future of families, the fate of children, the division of assets, the survival of a friendship group should depend on the right sort of frottage of a few centimetres of our upper limbs. It’s the tiniest thing and at the same time the very largest. The absence of sex matters so much because sex itself is the supreme conciliator and salve of all conflict, ill feeling, loneliness and lack of interest. It is almost impossible to make love and be sad, indifferent or bitter. Furious perhaps, in a passionate and ardent way. But not – almost never – truly elsewhere or beset by major grievances. The act forces presence, vulnerability, honesty, tenderness, release. It matters inordinately because it is the ultimate proof that everything is, despite everything, still OK.
As ever, so much would change if only we could be helped to find the words to fight our way past our shame and not feel so alone (this should be proof enough that we aren’t); if we could point to the problem without fury, without humiliation, without defensiveness; if we could simply name our desperation without becoming desperate; if the one who didn’t want sex could explain why in terms that made sense and were bearable and the one who felt cast aside could explain without giving way to vindictiveness or despair.
We would ideally, alongside physics and geography, learn the basics of all this in our last year at high school: learn how to spot and assuage the no-sex argument with an in-depth course and regular refreshments throughout our lives. It is the paradigm of all arguments. Those who can get over it can surmount pretty much any dispute; those who cannot must squabble to the grave.
Were our species to learn how to do this, the world would be suddenly and decisively calmer: there would be infinitely fewer fights, alcoholic outbursts, divorces, affairs, rages, denunciations, recriminations, civil wars, armed conflicts and nuclear conflagrations. At the first signs of no-sex arguments, couples would know how carefully to locate the words that would address their sorrows. There would not always be an answer, but there would always be the right sort of conversation.
PESSIMISM
Whatever disappointing experiences we have lived through in love, we tend to console ourselves with a highly reasonable-sounding thought: that our problems to date have resided not with our expectations, but with the people they were directed towards. It feels profoundly implausible that the difficulties might be structural, might lie with relationships in general, when issues have manifested themselves so distinctly in relation to particular people we were with.
The solution to our agitation lies, strangely, in a philosophy of pessimism: in the expectation of a blunt inevitability that two people will never understand more than a fraction of each other’s minds. We are all, in diverse ways, highly arduous propositions. Love begins with the discovery of harmony in very specific areas, but widespread disagreement, misunderstanding, boredom, a certain amount of rage and loneliness are what happens when love finally truly succeeds.
The only people we can think of as profoundly admirable are those we don’t yet know very well.
For many of us, love starts rapidly, often at first sight: with an overwhelming impression of the other’s loveliness. This phenomenon – the crush – goes to the heart of the modern understanding of love. It could seem like a small incident, a minor planet in the constellation of love, but it is in fact the underlying secret central sun around which our notions of the Romantic revolve. A crush represents in pure and perfect form the essential dynamics of Romanticism: the explosive interaction of limited knowledge, outward obstacles to further discovery and boundless hope.
We wouldn’t be able to develop crushes if we weren’t so good at allowing a few details about someone to suggest the whole of them. From a few cues only, perhaps a distant look in the eyes, a forthright brow or a generous wit, we rapidly start to anticipate an intense connection and stretches of happiness, buoyed by profound mutual sympathy and understanding.
We cannot be entirely wrong, there are surely genuine virtues to hand, but the primary error of the crush is to ignore the fact that life will in important ways have twisted us all out of shape. No one has come through completely unscathed. The chances of a perfectly admirable human walking the earth are non-existent. Our fears and our frailties play themselves out in a thousand ways – they can make us defensive or aggressive, grandiose or hesitant, clingy or avoidant – but we can be assured that unfortunate tendencies exist in us all and will make everyone much less than perfect and, at moments, extremely hard to live with.
Every human can be guaranteed to frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us – and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. This is a truth chiselled indelibly into the script of romantic life. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is therefore merely a case of identifying a specific kind of dissatisfaction we can bear rather than an occasion to escape from grief altogether.
UNREQUITED LOVE
When love remains unreciprocated for too long, a particular agony can descend. We are haunted by a sense of all that might have been. Epochal happiness seemed tantalizingly close yet is now maddeningly out of reach. We are often kindly counselled to try to forget the beloved and to think of something or someone else. Yet such kindness is misguided. The cure for love does not lie in ceasing to think of the fugitive lover, but in learning to think more intensely and constructively about who they might really be.
What prevents us from loosening our grip on love is simply a lack of knowledge. This is what can make unrequited love so vicious. By denying us the chance to grow close to the beloved, we cannot tire of them in the cathartic and liberating manner that is the gift of requited love. It isn’t their charms that are keeping us magnetized; it is our lack of knowledge of their flaws.
The cure for unrequited love is, in structure, therefore very simple. We must get to know them better. The more we learn about them, the less they will ever look like the solution to our uneasy lives. We will discover the endless small ways in which they are irksome; we’ll get to know how stubborn, how critical, how cold and how hurt by things that strike us as meaningless they can be. That is, if we get to know them better, we will realize how much they have in common with everyone else.
Passion can never withstand too much exposure to the full reality of another person. The unbounded admiration on which it is founded is destroyed by the knowledge that a properly shared life inevitably brings.
The cruelty of unrequited love isn’t really that we haven’t been loved back, rather that our hopes have been aroused by someone who can never disappoint us, someone whom we will have to keep believing in because we lack the knowledge that would set us free.
In a position of longing for a new person when we are constrained within an existing relationship, we must beware too of the ‘incumbent problem’: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing – or, as we put it, incumbent – ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home and our committed workplace and can inspire us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations and resignations.
When we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realizing that we are mistaking an asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality: we are failing to see that our partner, home and job are not especially awful, but rather that we know them especially well.
The corrective to insufficient knowledge is experience. We need to mine the secret reality of other people and places and so learn that, beneath their charms, they will almost invariably be essentially ‘normal’ in nature: that is, no worse yet no better than the incumbents we already understand.
We should extrapolate what we already know of people and apply it to those we don’t yet.
THE LAUNDRY
In the history of Western literature, in hundreds of poems and novels, no Romantic hero or heroine has ever ironed their underpants. This might seem a trivial point, but it is crucial and personally urgent, because it signals that we’ve taken our cues about what belongs to love from a societal narrative that is radically incomplete and misleading in nature.
Romantic culture takes no interest in the myriad challenges that fall within the realm of the ‘domestic’, a term that captures all the practicalities of living together, extending across a range of small but vital issues, including who one should visit at the weekend, when to empty the bins, who should clean the oven and how often to have friends over for dinner.
From the Romantic point of view, these things cannot be serious or worth the attention of intelligent people. Relationships are made or broken over grand, dramatic matters: fidelity and betrayal, the courage to face society on one’s own terms or the tragedy of being ground down by the demands of convention. The day-to-day minutiae of the domestic sphere seem entirely unimpressive and humiliatingly insignificant by comparison.
Partly as a result of this neglect, we don’t go into relationships ready to perceive domestic issues as important potential flashpoints to look out for and devote sustained attention to. We don’t acknowledge how much it may end up mattering whether we can maturely resolve issues around how to clean the kitchen floor or the conundrum of whether it is stylish or a touch pretentious to give a cocktail party.
When a problem has high prestige, we are ready to expend energy and time trying to resolve it. This has often happened around large scientific questions. It was entirely understood that mapping the human genome would be enormously difficult, as is the puzzle of artificial intelligence. This respect leads to an unexpected but crucial consequence. We don’t panic around the challenges, because we understand the difficulty of what we are attempting to do. We are a lot calmer around prestigious problems. It’s problems that feel trivial or silly but nevertheless take up large sections of our lives that drive us to heightened states of agitation. Such agitation is precisely what the Romantic neglect of domestic life has unwittingly encouraged: its legacy is overhasty conversations about the temperature of the bedroom and curt remarks about which news programme to watch, matters which can – over many years – contribute to a critical erosion of our capacities to love.
At certain points in history artists have attempted to correct the distribution of prestige. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch specialized in portraying high-status, interesting-looking people engaged in domestic chores. He wanted to show the relevance of such activities to having a good life and to convey that these were not in any way degrading or unworthy tasks. Organizing a linen cupboard was, de Hooch was proposing, no less a task than checking the accounts of a major corporation or making sure that a load-bearing wall was sufficiently strong to support the weight of an attic storey.
Domestic preoccupation isn’t really a sign of the death of love. It’s what awaits us when love has succeeded. We will only be reconciled to the reality of love when we can accept without rancour the genuine dignity of the ironing board.
IT WAS MEANT TO BE NICER
Often, our partner isn’t necessarily being terrible in overt ways, but we feel a growing sadness about the character of our relationship: they’re not as focused on us as we’d hoped; there are often times when they don’t understand us properly; they’re often busy and preoccupied; they can be a bit offhand or abrupt; they’re not hugely interested in the details of our day; they call their friends rather than talk with us. We feel disenchanted and let down. Love was supposed to be lovely. But, without any one huge thing having gone wrong, it doesn’t much feel that way day to day.
This sorrow has a paradoxical source: we’re upset now because at some point in the past we were really rather fortunate. We’re sad because we’ve been lucky. To explain the seeming paradox we need to have a look at the intimate origins of love.
Our idea of what a good, loving relationship should be like (and what it feels like to be loved) doesn’t ever come from what we’ve seen in adulthood; it arises from a stranger, more powerful source. The idea of happy coupledom taps into a fundamental picture of comfort, deep security, wordless communication and our needs being effortlessly understood that comes from early childhood. Some of the most popular pictures in the world show a mother very tenderly holding a small child, with an expression of complete devotion on her face. Officially, these are pictures of one specific and very unusual child and one very holy and good mother. But the religious background to the Mother and Child images isn’t the key to their appeal. We’re moved because we recognize a paradisiacal moment in our own personal story; because we’re being brought into semi-conscious contact with a delightful memory of how we were once cared for.
At the best moments of childhood (if things went reasonably well) loving parents offered us extraordinary satisfaction. They knew when we were hungry or tired, even though we couldn’t explain. We did not need to strive. They made us feel completely safe. We were held peacefully. We were entertained and indulged. And even if we don’t recall the explicit details, the experience of being cherished has made a profound impression on us; it has planted itself in our deep minds as the ideal template of what love should be.
As adults, without really noticing, we continue to be in thrall to this notion of being loved, projecting the best experiences of our early years into our present relationships and finding them sorely wanting as a result – a comparison that is profoundly corrosive and unfair.
The love we received from a parent can’t ever be a workable model for our later, adult, experience of love. The reason is fundamental: we were a baby then, we are an adult now – a dichotomy with several key ramifications.
For a start, our needs were so much simpler. We needed to be washed, amused, put to bed. But we didn’t need someone to trawl intelligently through the troubled corners of our minds. We didn’t need a caregiver to understand why we prefer the first series of a television show to the second, why it is necessary to see our aunt on Sunday or why it matters to us that the curtains harmonize with the sofa covers or bread must be cut with a proper bread knife. The parent knew absolutely what was required in relation to basic physical and emotional requirements. Our partner is stumbling in the dark around needs that are immensely subtle, far from obvious and very complicated to fulfil.
Secondly, none of it was reciprocal. Our parents were intensely focused on caring for us, but they knew and wholly accepted that we wouldn’t engage with their needs. They didn’t for a minute imagine that they could take their troubles to us or expect us to nurture them. They didn’t need us to ask them about their day. Our responsibility was blissfully simple: all we had to do to please them was to exist. Our most ordinary actions – rolling over on our tummy, grasping a biscuit in our tiny hand – enchanted them with ease. We were loved and didn’t have to love – a distinction between kinds of love which language normally artfully blurs, shielding us from the difference between being the privileged customer of love or its more exhausted and long-suffering provider.
Furthermore, our parents were probably kind enough to shield us from the burden that looking after us imposed on them. They maintained a reasonably sunny facade until they retired to their own bedroom, at which point the true toll of their efforts could be witnessed (but by then we were asleep). This was immensely kind, but did us one lasting disservice: it may unwittingly have created an expectation of what it would mean for someone to love us which was never true in the first place. We might in later life end up with lovers who are tetchy with us, who are too tired to talk at the end of the day, who don’t marvel at our every antic, who can’t even be bothered to listen to what we’re saying – and we might feel (with some bitterness) that this is not how our parents were. The irony, which has its redeeming side, is that in truth this is exactly how our parents were, they simply saved it until their bedroom, when we were asleep and realized nothing.
The source of our present sorrow is not, therefore, a special failing on the part of our adult lovers. They are not tragically inept or uniquely selfish. It’s rather that we’re judging our adult experiences against a very different kind of childhood love. We are sorrowful not because we have landed up with the wrong person but because we have – sadly – been forced to grow up.
SECRETS
Many relationships begin with a deeply misleading but beguiling sense that we can tell a partner everything. At last, there is no more need for the usual hypocrisies. We can come clean about so much that we had previously needed to keep to ourselves: our reservations about our friends, our irritation over small but wounding remarks by colleagues, our interest in less often-mentioned sexual practices. Love can seem founded on the idea of an absence of secrecy.
Then, gradually, we become aware of so much we cannot say. It might be around sex: on a work trip, there was a flirtation; late one evening, we discovered a porn site that beautifully targeted a special quirk of our erotic imagination; we find their brother (or sister) very alluring. Or the secret thoughts can be more broad-ranging: the blog they wrote for work, about their experience in client care, was very boring to read; the dark green scarf they so love wearing is hideous; their best friend from school, to whom they are still very loyal, is excessively silly and dull; in the wedding photo of their parents (lovingly displayed in a silver frame in the living room) their mother looks unbearably smug.
Love begins with a hope of – at last – being able to tell someone else everything about who we are and what we feel. The relief of honesty is at the heart of the feeling of being in love. But this sharing of secrets sets up in our minds, and in our collective culture, a powerful and potentially problematic ideal: that if two people love one another, then they must always tell each other the truth about everything.
The idea of honesty is sublime. It presents a deeply moving vision of how two people can be together and it is a constant presence in the early months. But in order to be kind, and in order to sustain love, it ultimately becomes necessary to keep a great many thoughts out of sight.
Keeping secrets can seem like a betrayal of the relationship. At the same time, the complete truth eventually appears to place the union in mortal danger.
Much of what we’d ideally like to have recognized and confirmed is going to be genuinely disturbing even to someone who is fond of us. We face a choice between honesty and acceptability and – for reasons that deserve a great deal of sympathy – mostly we choose the latter.
We are perhaps too conscious of the bad reasons for hiding something; we haven’t paid enough attention to the noble reasons why, from time to time, true loyalty may lead us to say very much less than the whole truth. We are so impressed by honesty, we have forgotten the virtues of politeness, this word defined not as a cynical withholding of important information for the sake of harm, but as a dedication to not rubbing someone else up against the true, hurtful aspects of our nature.
It is ultimately no great sign of kindness to insist on showing someone our entire selves at all times. A dedication to maintaining boundaries and editing our pronouncements belongs to love as much as a capacity to show ourselves as we really are. The lover who does not tolerate secrets, who in the name of ‘being honest’ divulges information so wounding it cannot be forgotten, is no friend of love. Just as no parent should ever tell a child the whole truth, so we should accept the ongoing need to edit our full reality.
And if one suspects (and one should, rather regularly, if the relationship is a good one) that one’s partner might be lying too (about what they are thinking about, about how they judge one’s work, about where they were last night …), it is perhaps best not to take up arms and lay into them like a sharp, relentless inquisitor, however intensely one yearns to do just that. It may be kinder, wiser and perhaps more in the true spirit of love to pretend one simply didn’t notice.
THE WISDOM OF COMPROMISE
We reserve some of our deepest scorn for couples who stay together out of compromise; those who are making a show of unanimity, but who we know are, deep down, not fully happy. Maybe they’re primarily together because of the children; maybe they’re sticking around because they’re scared of being lonely; or maybe they’re just worried that anyone else they found wouldn’t be much better.
These seem like disgraceful motives to be with anyone – disgraceful on account of a background belief that circulates powerfully through the collective modern psyche: the idea that anyone who puts their mind and will sufficiently to it doesn’t have to compromise in love; that there are pain-free, profoundly fulfilling options available for all of us – and the only things that could stand in the way of discovering them would be laziness and cowardice, flaws of character that deserve no particular sympathy or forgiveness. Our high romantic expectations have made us notably impatient around and censorious about those who can’t attain them.
But imagine if we were to tweak the premise of the argument a little and for a moment explore the notion that there really might be a pain-free and entirely fulfilling option available for all of us at all times. What if our choices were, in many contexts, in fact often rather more limited than Romanticism proposes? Maybe there aren’t as many admirable unattached people in our vicinity as there might be. Maybe we lack the charm, the personality, the career, the confidence or the looks ever to attract the ones who do exist. Maybe time is running out. Or maybe our children really would take it extremely badly if we abandoned the family for the sake of better sex and greater cheer elsewhere.
At the same time, maybe the current situation – while clearly a compromise – is not without its virtues. A partner may be only half-right, quite often maddening and properly disappointing in certain areas, but – humblingly – still more satisfying than being alone. Having children to bring up together may be worth it even with a co-parent about whom one has a long, only semi-private list of reservations. A few cuddles and occasional moments of cosiness may retain a small but decisive edge over a life alone interspersed with humiliating dates.
The capacity to compromise is not always the weakness it is described as being. It can involve a mature, realistic admission that there may – in certain situations – simply be no ideal options. And, conversely, an inability to compromise does not always have to be the courageous and visionary position it is held to be by our impatient and perfectionist ideology. It may just be a slightly rigid, proud and cruel delusion.
Mocking people who compromise is, of course, emotionally very handy. It localizes a problem that it’s normal to want to disavow. It pins to a few scapegoat couples what we are all terrified about in our relationships: that a degree of sadness may just be an intrinsic and unavoidable part of them.
Wiser societies would be careful never to stigmatize the act of compromise. It is painful enough to have to do it; it is even more painful to have to hate oneself for having done so. We should rehabilitate and honour the ability to put up with a flawed fellow human being, to nurse our sadness without falling into rage or despair, to reconcile ourselves to our damaged appearance and character and to accept that there may be no better way for us to live but partly in pain and longing, given who we are and what the world can provide. Couples who compromise may in reality not be the enemies of love; they may be at the vanguard of understanding what lasting relationships truly demand.
THE CONSOLATIONS OF FRIENDSHIP
One of the most subtly hurtful and quietly damning of all remarks, perhaps softly and sweetly delivered on the doorstep at the end of a long evening, with the taxi still hovering somewhere just out of sight, is the suggestion that we should in the end probably remain ‘just good friends’.
We know exactly what to understand by this. The path towards a tender future is being gently but firmly closed off. We are, with a smile, being shunted into the category of the failed, the ignored and the lightly despised. The other must in some way have worked out the despicable truths about us – all the ones that we tried so hard to disguise and even to believe didn’t exist – and has logically decided to take their leave. We return crushed to an apartment which we had left with butterflies and elevated hopes only a few hours before.
We hear the offer of friendship as something synonymous with insult because our Romantic culture has, from our youth, continuously made one thing clear: love is the purpose of existence; friendship is the paltry, depleted consolation prize.
Though this seems like unsurprising common sense, what should detain us and encourage us to probe a little at the claims made on love’s behalf is one basic source of evidence: the behaviour, level of satisfaction and state of mind of those who engage in it.
If we were to judge love chiefly by its impact, by the extent of the tears, the depths of the frustrations, the viciousness of the insults that unfold in its name, we would not continue to rate it as we do and might indeed mistake it for a form of illness or aberration of the mind. The scenes that typically unfold between lovers would scarcely be considered imaginable outside conditions of open hostility. Those we love, we honour with our worst moods, our most unfair accusations, our most wounding insults. It is to our lovers that we direct blame for everything that has gone wrong in our lives; we expect them to know everything we mean without bothering to explain it; their minor errors and misunderstandings occasion our sulks and rage.
By comparison, in friendship – the supposedly worthless and inferior state whose mention should crush us at the end of a date – we bring our highest and noblest virtues. Here we are patient, encouraging, tolerant, funny and, most of all, kind. We expect a little less and therefore, by extension, forgive infinitely more. We do not presume that we will be fully understood and so treat failings lightly and humanely. We don’t imagine that our friends should admire us without reserve, sticking by us whatever we do, and so we put in effort and behave, pleasing ourselves as well as our companions along the way. We are, in the company of our friends, our best selves.
Paradoxically, it is friendship that often offers us the real route to the pleasures that Romanticism associates with love. That this sounds surprising is only a reflection of how underdeveloped our day-to-day vision of friendship has become. We associate it with a casual acquaintance we see only once in a while to exchange inconsequential and shallow banter. But real friendship is something altogether more profound and worthy of exultation. It is an arena in which two people can get a sense of each other’s vulnerabilities, appreciate each other’s follies without recrimination, reassure each other as to their value and greet the sorrows and tragedies of existence with wit and warmth.
Culturally and collectively, we have made a momentous mistake which has left us both lonelier and more disappointed than we ever needed to be. In a better world, our most serious goal would be not to locate one special lover with whom to replace all other humans but to put our intelligence and energy into identifying and nurturing a circle of true friends. At the end of an evening, we would learn to say to certain prospective companions, with an embarrassed smile as we invited them inside – knowing that this would come across as a properly painful rejection – ‘I’m so sorry, couldn’t we just be … lovers?’
A MODEST ARGUMENT FOR MARRIAGE
It has become, for many of us, ever harder to know what the point of marriage might be. The drawbacks are evident and well charted. Marriage is a state-sanctioned legal construct, fundamentally linked to matters of property, progeny and pension entitlements – a construct which aims to restrict and control how two people might feel towards one another over fifty or more years. It places a cold, unhelpful, expensive and entirely emotionally alien frame around what is always going to be a private matter of the heart. We don’t need a marriage certificate to show affection and admiration. And indeed, forcing commitment only increases the danger of eventual inauthenticity and dishonesty. If love doesn’t work out, being married simply makes it much harder to disentangle two lives and prolongs the agony of a dysfunctional union. Love either works or it doesn’t – and marriage doesn’t help matters one iota either way. It is completely reasonable to suppose that the mature, modern and logical move is to sidestep marriage entirely, along with the obvious nonsense of a wedding.
It would be hopeless to try to defend marriage on the grounds of its convenience. It is clearly cumbersome, expensive and risky, as well as arguably at junctures wholly archaic. But that is the point. The whole rationale of marriage is to function as a prison that it is very hard and very embarrassing for two people to get out of.
The essence of marriage is to tie our hands, to frustrate our wills, to put high and costly obstacles in the way of splitting up and sometimes to force two unhappy people to stay in each other’s company for longer than either of them would wish. Why do we do this?
Originally, we told ourselves that God wanted us to stay married. But even now, when God looms less large in the argument, we continue to ensure that marriage is rather hard to undo. For one thing, we carefully invite everyone we know to watch us proclaim that we’ll stick together. We deliberately invite an elderly aunt or uncle whom we don’t even like so much to fly around the world to be there. We are willingly creating a huge layer of embarrassment were we ever to turn round and admit it might have been a mistake. Furthermore, even though we could keep things separate, marriage tends to mean deep economic and legal entanglements. We know it is going to take the work of a phalanx of accountants and lawyers to prise us apart. It can be done, of course, but it may be ruinous.
It is as if we somewhere recognize that there might be some quite good, though strange-sounding, reasons to make it harder than it should be to get out of a public lifelong commitment to someone else.
One: Impulse is Dangerous
The Marshmallow Test was a celebrated experiment in the history of psychology designed to measure children’s ability to delay gratification, and track the consequences of being able to think long-term. Some three-year-old children were offered a marshmallow, but told they would get two if they held off from eating the first one for five minutes. It turned out that a lot of children just couldn’t make it through this period. The immediate benefit of gobbling the marshmallow in front of them was stronger than the strategy of waiting. Crucially, it was observed that these children went on to have lives blighted by a lack of impulse control, faring much worse than the children who were best at subordinating immediate fun for long-term benefit.
Relationships are no different. Here too many things feel very urgent. Not eating marshmallows, but escaping, finding freedom, running away, possibly with the new office recruit … Sometimes we’re angry and want to get out very badly. We’re excited by a stranger and feel like abandoning our present partner at once. And yet as we look around for the exit, every way seems blocked. It would cost a fortune, it would be so embarrassing, it would take an age …
Marriage is a giant inhibitor of impulse set up by our conscience to keep our libidinous, naive, desiring selves in check. What we are essentially buying into by submitting to its dictates is the insight that we are (as individuals) likely to make very poor choices under the sway of strong short-term impulses. To marry is to recognize that we require structure to insulate us from our urges. It is to lock ourselves up willingly, because we acknowledge the benefits of the long-term – the wisdom of the morning after the storm.
Marriage proceeds without constant reference to the moods of its protagonists. It isn’t about feeling. It is a declaration that it’s crucially impervious to our day-to-day desires. It is a very unusual marriage in which the couple don’t spend a notable amount of time fantasizing that they aren’t in fact married. But the point of marriage is to make these feelings not matter very much. It is an arrangement that protects us from what we desire and yet know, in our more reasonable moments, that we don’t truly need or want.
Two: We Grow and Develop Gradually
At their best, relationships involve us in attempts to develop, mature and become ‘whole’. We often get drawn to people precisely because they promise to edge us in the right direction.
But the process of our maturation can be agonizingly slow and complicated. We spend long periods (decades perhaps) blaming the other person for problems which arise from our own weaknesses. We resist attempts at being changed, naively asking to be loved ‘for who we are’.
It can take years of supportive interest, many tearful moments of anxiety, much frustration, until genuine progress can be made. With time, after maybe 120 arguments on a single topic, both parties may begin to see it from the other’s point of view. Slowly we start to get insights into our own madness. We find labels for our issues, we give each other maps of our difficult areas, we become a little easier to live with.
Unfortunately, the lessons that are most important for us – the lessons that contribute most to our increasing wisdom and rounded completeness as people – are almost always the most painful to learn. They involve confronting our fears, dismantling our defensive armour, feeling properly guilty for our capacity to hurt another person, being genuinely sorry for our faults and learning to put up with the imperfections of someone else.
It is too easy to seem kind and normal when we keep starting new relationships. The truth about us, on the basis of which self-improvement can begin, only becomes clear over time. Chances of development can increase hugely when we stay put and don’t succumb to the temptation to run away to people who will falsely reassure us that there’s nothing too wrong with us.
Three: Investment Requires Security
Many of the most worthwhile projects require immense sacrifices from both parties and it’s in the nature of such sacrifices that we’re most likely to make them for people who are also making them for us.
Marriage is a means by which people can specialize – perhaps in making money or in running a home. This can be hugely constructive. But it carries a risk. Each person (especially if one stays at home) needs to be assured that they will not later be disadvantaged by their devotion.
Marriage sets up the conditions in which we can take valuable decisions about what to do with our lives that would be too risky outside its guarantees.
Over time, the argument for marriage has shifted. It’s no longer about external forces having power over us: religions, the state, the legal idea of legitimacy, the social idea of being respectable …
What we are correctly now focused on is the psychological point of making it hard to throw in the towel. It turns out that we benefit greatly (though at a price) from having to stick with certain commitments, because some of our key needs have a long-term structure.
For the last fifty years, the burden of intelligent effort has been on attempting to make separation easier. The challenge now lies in another direction: in trying to remind ourselves why immediate flight doesn’t always make sense; in trying to see the point of holding out for the second marshmallow.
Tethering ourselves to our partner, via the public institution of marriage, makes our unavoidable fluctuations of feeling have less power to destroy a relationship, one that we know, in calmer moments, is supremely important to us. The point of marriage is to be usefully unpleasant – at least at crucial times. Together we embrace a set of limitations on one kind of freedom, the freedom to run away, so as to protect and strengthen another kind, the shared ability to mature and create something of lasting value, the pains of which are aligned to our better selves.