MarriageWhen I try to have a discussion with him, I feel so uptight that the words don’t come out right and it only makes him more upset with me. Of course, that messes me up even more.
I don’t understand why she can’t get her story straight. How come she can remember something I did wrong twelve years ago but can’t describe what really happened to us yesterday?
I hate it when he corrects me in front of our friends or the children. It’s really a serious issue with the kids because he wants to be seen as their pal and that makes me into the “evil parent” that the children don’t respect because he doesn’t respect me. They learn it from him!
I need some down time when I come home. She starts in as soon as I walk in the door. I don’t think she really understands how stressful my job is.
If I bring up anything that makes him uncomfortable he either gets angry, and I pay a terrible price for that, or he just withdraws, and I feel so abandoned.
She gets so emotional whenever we try to discuss something. She cries a lot. I think she’s depressed. Probably should be on some kind of medication.
He thinks expressing feelings is a sign of weakness. I’m the one who has a problem. He thinks everything would be fine if I would just go and get my problems taken care of.
This is but a sampling of the statements made by couples who are participating in a very common marital dance. Husbands whose style is to use anger, criticism, and/or withdrawal to manage their underlying frailties; Women whose self-doubts about being loveable make them especially vulnerable to chronic negative messages from their husbands. Now you might think these are especially troubled people being discussed here. But that’s often not the case. Many of these couples appear to others as confident and self-sufficient people.
Our nature is such that we all are plagued with a degree of self-doubt. For some, it is pervasive, cutting across everything we engage in. But for most we are a mixed bag of strengths and weaknesses. Yet even where we are usually confident, where are skilled and successful, we still have moments of dread and uncertainty. I’m reminded of Seinfeld in “The Comedian” and the amount of anxiety he was going through working on a return to stand-up comedy; Or the stories of outstanding athletes who literally vomit before a game. Who doesn’t get anxious, if they are honest with themselves, before a presentation (or trying to write a column!), even if they have done it many times before.
The challenge in many marriages is that men and women generally deal with their insecurities very differently. Men have been trained over centuries to act strong and deny their vulnerabilities. A key way to do that is to identify and focus on exploiting the vulnerabilities of their “opponent.” Deborah Tannen in her excellent book on gender issues in communication, “You Just Don’t Understand”, notes that men use conversation to establish that they are one-up on the other person. Thus, the joke about never asking for directions, part of the generic never asking for help, “I always need to appear right.” syndrome.
If the core anxiety for men is about competence, the core anxiety for women is about being loveable. Tannen claims women use conversation to affirm relationships. Thus, they are much more attuned to the process then the content, reacting sharply to facial expressions, tone of voice, and general sense of “Am I really being listened to?” the cornerstone of does this person really love me, do I really matter to him, can I really trust him with my private self?
Put these two sets of dynamics into an important conversation and women suffer. They are so much more focused on their relational needs that every negative is a possible red flag about the relationship. It has the potential to take things that are just about the moment and over-generalize it into the state of the marriage. Their self-consciousness about the risks and meaning of the conversation puts women on the defensive in exchanges with their husbands. That heightened sensitivity may show it self with a quickness to be hurt and turn into expressed sadness or anger that often befuddles her husband and makes the wife an easy target for the man who keeps his cool and one-ups with his rational, though often hurtful, criticism of the way his wife is reacting.
Repeat this pattern for years and it becomes deeply entrenched into a dance where the wife anticipates not being heard and being criticized, sometimes in very hurtful ways. So she establishes a tendency to either avoid sharing what is important to her or, when she tries, she does so lacking the confidence she might ordinarily demonstrate with others. Many husbands genuinely think of their wives as very competent and admire them, but don’t understand why they don’t experience that competence in marital exchanges, failing to understand their role in creating the problem.
On the flip side of this, many husbands try to contribute to the marriage in ways they learned to be of value in the world, i.e., by what they accomplish as opposed to the quality of the relationship. They are task oriented and tend to define their marital competence through the tasks they believe are their primary responsibilities. When that competence is questioned by complaints about lack of sensitivity to the needs of the wife or children, they defend themselves as they must because being wrong is a sign of being weak. So they express a feeling of being underappreciated for working hard to be a good provider, for doing many chores including taking care of the yard, for not being unfaithful, for not being an alcoholic, and for not being out with the boys. They counterattack with poking holes in their wives’ complaints and twisting it around into being her problem. If all else fails, they just become frustrated and withdraw, leaving the issue once again unresolved.
So how does a couple break out of this harmful dance, rebuild trust, and strengthen intimacy. It starts with taking the time, with help from books or a third party, to understand the dance. Then it requires a mutual commitment to work on changing the process. Sometimes there have been so many hurts and disappointments that the scars are too deep and hardened to allow for change. But many couples can work through this. The wife rediscovers her voice and the husband learns to really listen as well as to appreciate his own need to express his vulnerabilities.
To some extent, we never lose that little child’s need to be taken care of by someone who is approving and perceived as strong. Those couples where each can express that need and have it responded to as a valid feeling that is treated with caring rather than disdain, will not only have a stronger marriage, but will have much less stressed out lives and be both physically and emotionally healthier. There is a lot at stake here. Much to lose; much to gain. The winners will be those couples who are able to break the constraints of social, biological, and anthropological roles, creating more equitable and caring ways of listening and responding to each other.
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