" There are Three Fundamental States of Social Being : Tyranny ("You Do What I Want), Slavery ("I Do What You Want), or Negotiation.
Tyranny is obviously not so good for the person enslaved, but it is also not good for The Tyrant — because he or she becomes A Tyrant, and there is nothing ennobling about that.
There is nothing but cynicism, cruelty, and the hell of unregulated anger and impulsivity.
Slavery is not good either, likewise for The Slave and The Tyrant. Slaves are miserable, wretched, angry, and resentful. They will take any and all chances whatsoever available to them to take revenge on their tyrants, who will in consequence find themselves cursed and damaged by their slaves.
It is not easy to get the best out of someone by arbitrarily brandishing A Stick at them, particularly when they try to do Something Good (and that diminution of spirit is the cruelest trick of the tyrant).
But you can be certain, you want-to-be tyrants, that your slaves will take their revenge where they can, even if that means merely being much less than they could be.
My wife told me a terrible story once, about a couple she observed while volunteering in a palliative care ward. The husband was dying, and his wife was trimming his nails—a little too close. With each clip, there was blood, as she trimmed close enough to damage the quick. You see something like that, and wisdom speaks its terrible truth: “I know exactly what is going on there.”
That is the end stage of an unbelievably deceitful and brutal relationship. It is subtle. It does not announce itself loudly as murderous. No one knows, except the couple (even though they are perhaps striving with all their might, under the circumstances, not to know) and the careful observer, who sees a dying man and a wife who has determined, for whatever reasons, to make his death a little worse.
That is not a desirable outcome. You do not want to end up in that situation, or anything like it. You want to negotiate. The question is, “What is going to make you desperate enough to negotiate?”
And that is one of the mysteries that must be addressed if you wish to keep the romance alive in your relationship.
Negotiation, Tyranny, or Slavery
Negotiation is exceptionally difficult. We already discussed the problems associated with determining what you want and then mustering up the courage to tell someone exactly that. And there are the tricks that people use, too, to avoid negotiation.
Perhaps you ask your partner what he or she wants — perhaps during a difficult situation. “I don’t know” is a common answer (you get that from children, too, and even more often from adolescents).
It is not acceptable, however, in a discussion that cannot in Good Faith be avoided.
Sometimes “I don’t know” truly means what it is supposed to mean—the person who utters the phrase is at a genuine loss — but often it means, instead :
“I don’t want to talk about it,
so go away and leave me alone.”
Irritation or outright anger, sufficient to deter The Questioner, often accompanies this response. That brings the discussion to a halt, and it can stay halted forever.
Maybe that has happened once or twice or a dozen times too often, so you — The Questioner, in this instance — have had enough of your partner’s refusal, or you have decided that you are done being cowardly or a victim of your own misplaced compassion and you are not about to take “I don’t know” for an answer.
In consequence, you persist in pursuing your target.
“Well, guess,” you might say. “Throw something on the table, for God’s sake. I do not care what it is. Even if it is wrong, it is at least a start.”
“I don’t know” means not only “Go away and leave me alone.”
It also frequently means “Why don’t you go away, do all the work necessary to figure out what is wrong, and come back and tell me—if you’re so smart,” or “It is intolerably rude of you to refuse to allow me to remain in my willful or dangerous ignorance, given that it obviously bothers me so much to think about my problems.”
It is not rude, though — or even if it is, you still need to know what your partner wants, and so does he or she, and how in the world are either or both of you going to figure it out if you cannot even get the conversation off the ground?
It is not rude. It is a cruel Act of Love.
Persistence under such conditions is a necessity, a terrible necessity, akin to surgery. It is difficult and painful because it takes courage and even some foolhardiness to continue a discussion when you have been told in no uncertain terms by your partner to go the hell away (or worse).
It is A Good Thing, however — an admirable act — because a person bothered by something they do not wish to talk about is very likely to be split internally over the issue at hand.
The Part that wants to avoid is the part that gets angry.
There is a part that wants to talk, too, and to settle the issue. But doing so is going to be cognitively demanding, ethically challenging, and emotionally stressful.
In addition, it is going to require Trust, and people test Trust, not least by manifesting anger when approached about something touchy just to determine if the person daring the approach cares sufficiently to overcome a serious barrier or two or three or ten to get to the horrible bottom of things.
And avoidance followed by anger is not the only trick in the book.
The next serious hurdle is Tears.
Tears are easily mistaken for the distress due to sadness, and they are very effective at bringing tenderhearted people to a dead halt as a consequence of their misplaced compassion.
(Why misplaced? Because if you leave the person alone because of their tears, they quit suffering right then, but continue with their unresolved problem until they solve it, which might be never.)
Tears, however, are just as often anger (perhaps more often) as they are sadness or distress. If the person you are chasing down and cornering is red-faced, for example, in addition to their tears, then he or she is probably angry, not hurt (that is not inevitably the case, but it is a reasonably common sign).
Tears are an effective defense mechanism, as it takes a heart of stone to withstand them, but they tend to be the last-ditch attempt at avoidance.
If you can get past tears, you can have A Real Conversation, but it takes a very determined interlocutor to avoid the insult and hurt generated by anger (defense one) and the pity and compassion evoked by tears (defense two). It requires someone who has integrated their shadow (their stubbornness, harshness, and capacity for necessary emotionless implacability) and can use it for long-term benefit.
Do not foolishly confuse “nice” with “good.”
Remember the options previously discussed: negotiation, tyranny, or slavery. Of those, negotiation is the least awful, even though it is no joke to negotiate, and it is perhaps the most difficult of the three, in the short term, because you have to fight it out, now, and God only knows how deep you are going to have to go, how much diseased tissue you will have to remove. For all you know, you are fighting with the spirit of your wife’s grandmother, who was treated terribly by her alcoholic husband, and the consequences of that unresolved abuse and distrust between the sexes are echoing down the generations.
Children are amazing mimics. They learn much of what they know implicitly long before they can use language, and they imitate the bad along with the good.
It is for this reason that it has been said that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation (Numbers 14:18).
Hope, of course, can drive us through the pain of negotiation, but hope is not enough. You need desperation, as well, and that is part of the utility of “till death do us part.” You are stuck with each other, if you are Serious — and if you are not Serious, You are Still A Child.
That is the point of the vow: the possibility of mutual salvation, or the closest you can manage here on Earth. In a truly mature marriage, if your health holds out, you are there for the aforementioned sixty years, like Moses in the desert searching for the Promised Land, and there is plenty of trouble that must be worked through—all of it—before peace might be established.
So, you grow up when you marry, and you aim for peace as if your soul depends upon it (and perhaps that is more serious than your life depending on it), and you make it work or you suffer miserably.
You will be tempted by avoidance, anger, and tears, or enticed to employ the trapdoor of divorce so that you will not have to face what must be faced. But your failure will haunt you while you are enraged, weeping, or in the process of separating, as it will in the next relationship you stumble into, with all your unsolved problems intact and your negotiating skills not improved a whit.
You can keep the possibility of escape in the back of your mind. You can avoid the commitment of permanence. But then you cannot achieve the transformation, which might well demand everything you can possibly muster. The difficulty, however, that is implicit in the negotiation carries with it a tremendous promise, which is part of a radically successful life: You could have a marriage that works. You could make it work. That is an achievement—a tangible, challenging, exceptional, and unlikely achievement. There are not many genuine achievements of that magnitude in life; a number as small as four is a reasonable estimate. Maybe, if you strive for it, you have established a solid marriage. That is achievement one. Because of that, you have founded a solid and reliable, honest and playful home into which you could dare bring children. Then you can have kids, and with a solid marriage that can work out for you. That is achievement two. Then you have brought upon yourself more of the responsibility that will demand the best from you. Then you will have new relationships of the highest quality, if you are fortunate and careful. Then you will have grandchildren so that you are surrounded by new life when yours begins to slip away. In our culture, we live as if we are going to die at thirty. But we do not. We live a very long time, but it is also all over in a flash, and it should be that you have accomplished what human beings accomplish when they live a full life, and marriage and children and grandchildren and all the trouble and heartbreak that accompanies all of that is far more than half of life. Miss it at your great peril.
You meet people, usually young, unwise but laden with the unearned cynicism that substitutes for wisdom in youth, and they say, categorically—even pridefully—“I do not want children.” Plenty of nineteen-year-olds say that, and that is acceptable, in some sense, because they are nineteen, and they have time, and what do they know at nineteen, anyway? And some twenty-seven-year-olds say that, but not so many, particularly if they are female and the least bit honest with themselves. And some forty-five-year-olds say the same thing, in the past tense, and some of them, perhaps, are telling the truth; but most are celebrating closing the barn door after the cattle have bolted. No one will speak the truth about this. To note outright that we lie to young women, in particular, about what they are most likely to want in life is taboo in our culture, with its incomprehensibly strange insistence that the primary satisfaction in the typical person’s life is to be found in career (a rarity in itself, as most people have jobs, not careers). But it is an uncommon woman, in my clinical and general professional experience, regardless of brilliance or talent, training, discipline, parental desire, youthful delusion, or cultural brainwashing who would not perform whatever sacrifice necessary to bring a child into the world by the time she is twenty-nine, or thirty-five, or worse, forty.
Here is a pathway to misery I would strongly recommend avoiding, aimed primarily at the women who read this book (although wise boyfriends and husbands should take equal note). Decide that you want children when you are twenty-nine or thirty, and then be unable to have them: I would not recommend that. You will not recover. We are too fragile to play around with what life might offer us. Everyone thinks, when they are young and do not know any better, “Well, pregnancy can be taken for granted.” That is only true if you absolutely do not want and should not have a child, and you have sex in the backseat of a car when you are fifteen. Then, for sure, you will find yourself in trouble. But a successful pregnancy is not a foregone conclusion, not by any stretch of the imagination. You can push trying for children to the older end of that spectrum—and many people are encouraged or encourage themselves to do exactly that—but up to 30 percent of couples experience trouble becoming pregnant.6
You encounter something similar—that is, the incaution about what life will and will not offer—when people whose marriages have stagnated begin to develop the delusion that a romantic affair will address their unmet needs. When I had clients considering such a move—or perhaps involved in an affair, currently—I tried to bring them back down to earth.
“Let us think it through, all the way. Not just for this week, or this month. You are fifty. You have this twenty-four-year-old, and she is willing to break up your marriage. What is she thinking? Who must she be? What does she know?”
“Well, I am really attracted to her.”
“Yes, but she has a PERSONALITY Disorder — Seriously, because what the hell is she doing with you, and why is she willing to break up this marriage?”
“Well, she DOES NOT CARE if I stay married.”
“Oh, I see. So, she does not want to have an actual relationship with someone, with any degree of long-term permanency.
Somehow that is going to work out well for you, is it? Just think about that.
It is going to be a little rough on your wife. A lot of lies are going to go along with that.
You have children — how are they going to respond when all this comes out, as it most certainly WILL?
And what do you think about the ten years in court that are now beckoning, that are going to cost you a third of a million dollars and put you in a custody battle that will occupy all your time and attention?”
I have seen people who were in custody battles who would seriously have preferred cancer.
It is no joke to have your arm caught in the dangerous machinery of the courts. You spend much of the time truly wishing you were dead. So that is your “affair,” for God’s sake. It is even more delusional than that, because, of course, if you are married to someone, you often see them at their worst, because you have to share the genuine difficulties of life with them. You save the easy parts for your adulterous partner: no responsibility, just expensive restaurants, exciting nights of rule breaking, careful preparation for romance, and the general absence of reality that accompanies the privilege of making one person pay for the real troubles of existence while the other benefits unrealistically from their absence. You do not have a life with someone when you have an affair with them. You have an endless array of desserts (at least in the beginning), and all you have to do is scoop the whipped cream off the top of each of them and devour it. That is it. You see each other under the best possible conditions, with nothing but sex in your minds and nothing else interfering with your lives. As soon as it transforms from that into a relationship that has any permanency, a huge part of the affair immediately turns right back into whatever it was that was bothering you about your marriage. An affair is not helpful, and people end up horribly hurt. Particularly children—and it is to them you owe primary allegiance.
I am not trying to be unreasonably categorical about marriage and family. You cannot expect every social institution to work out for everyone. Sometimes, you have married someone who is a psychopathic brute, a congenital and incorrigible liar, a criminal, an alcoholic, a sadist (and maybe all five at once). Then you must escape. But that is not a trapdoor. That is a catastrophe, like a hurricane, and you should move out of its path. You might be tempted to conclude: “Well, how about we live together, instead of getting married? We will try each other out. It is the sensible thing to do.” But what exactly does it mean, when you invite someone to live with you, instead of committing yourself to each other? And let us be appropriately harsh and realistic about our appraisal, instead of pretending we are taking a used car for a test jaunt. Here is what it means: “You will do, for now, and I presume you feel the same way about me. Otherwise we would just get married. But in the name of a common sense that neither of us possesses we are going to reserve the right to swap each other out for a better option at any point.” And if you do not think that is what living together means—as a fully articulated ethical statement—see if you can formulate something more plausible.
You might think, “Look, Doc, that is pretty cynical.” So why not we consider the stats, instead of the opinion of arguably but not truly old-fashioned me? The breakup rate among people who are not married but are living together—so, married in everything but the formal sense—is substantially higher than the divorce rate among married couples.7 And even if you do get married and make an honest person, so to speak, of the individual with whom you cohabited, you are still much more rather than less likely to get divorced than you would be had you never lived together initially.8 So the idea of trying each other out? Sounds enticing, but does not work.
It is of course possible that people who are more likely to get divorced, for reasons of temperament, are also more likely to live together, before or without marriage, rather or in addition to the possibility that living together just does not work. It is no simple matter to disentangle the two causal factors. But it does not matter, practically. Cohabitation without the promise of permanent commitment, socially announced, ceremonially established, seriously considered, does not produce more robust marriages. And there is nothing good about that—particularly for children, who do much worse in single parent (generally male-absent) families.
Period. So, I just do not see it as a justifiable social alternative. And I say that as someone who lived with my wife before I married her. I am not innocent in this regard. But that does not mean I was right. And there is something else, and it is far from trivial. You just do not have that many chances in life to have an intimate relationship work out properly. Maybe it takes you two or three years to meet the potential Mr. or Ms. Right, and another two or three to determine if they are in fact who you think they are. That is five years. You get old a lot faster than you think you will, no matter how old you are now, and most of what you could do with your family—with marriage, children, and so forth—is from twentysomething to about thirty-five. How many good five-year chances do you therefore have? Three? Four, if you are fortunate?
This means that your options decrease as you wait, rather than increase. If you are a widower, or a widow, and you must hit the dating scene when you are forty or fifty, so be it. You have been struck by tragedy, and that is life. But I have watched friends do it, and it is not a fate I would casually wish on anyone I loved. Let us continue to be reasonable about this: All sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds have much in common. They are unformed. They are malleable. That is not an insult. It is just a fact. It is also why they can go off to college and make a lifelong friend (no cynicism whatsoever intended) from a roommate within a single semester. By the time you are in your midforties, however—if you have lived at all—you have become somewhat of a singular and unique person. I have known people I met at that time of my life for a decade or more whom I still seem to consider new acquaintances. That is a pure function of the complexity of increasing age. And that is mere friendship, not love—not a joint life and perhaps even the bringing together of two disparate families.
And so you have your marriage and your children, and that is working out well because you are stubborn and sufficiently terrified of the hell that awaits anyone who fails to negotiate for peace and make the sacrifices necessary to establish it. You are undoubtedly more prepared now for your career—or more likely, your job. That is the third of the four achievements you might manage, with good fortune and an undaunted spirit, in the brief flash of your existence. You have learned how to establish productive harmony in the close confines of your most intimate and private relationships, and some of that wisdom spills over into your workplace. You are a mentor for younger people, a helpful peer and reliable subordinate, and instead of the hash you could so easily make of the place you inhabit, you improve it. And if everyone did that the world would be a much less tragic and unhappy place. Maybe it would even be a self-evidently good place. And perhaps you learn how to make good use of your time away from family and work—your leisure—and you make that meaningful and productive. And that is the fourth of the four achievements—and one, like the others, that can grow. Perhaps you get better and better at such things so that you can work on solving more and more difficult problems, and become a credit, in your own way, to the spirit of humanity itself. And that is life.
Back to marriage. How do you plan and diligently maintain the romance in your relationship? Well, you have to decide: “Do you want some romance in your life or not?” If you really think about it, without resentment—without the joy of depriving your partner, now alienated, of the pleasure that might come with such an attempt—the answer is generally yes. Sexual romance: the adventure, pleasure, intimacy, and excitement people fantasize about experiencing, when they are feeling in need of a touch of the divine. You want that. The joys of life are rare and precious, and you do not want to forsake them without due cause. How are you going to accomplish that? With luck, it will happen between you and someone you like; with better luck, and sufficient commitment, it will happen between you and someone you love. Little about this is easy. If you set up a household with someone, you are going to have to do an awful lot of negotiation to keep both “like” and “love” alive. "
