There’s a really fascinating article in this week’s New York Times Magazine about one particular marriage counseling "group" and about the nature of relationship counseling in general.
I’ve been in counseling with my wife for not quite two years now (since before we were married, actually), so as you can imagine there were any number of moments in the article that were fascinating (and, as it happens, reassuring) to me, but the anecdote that I found most interesting was this one, about a tiff between Marie, a very cold, fairly controlling wife, and Clem, her passive, passive aggressive husband:
the group observed how defeating it would feel to live with someone whose main weapon was to become more passive, more (spitefully) a good guy. Clem and Marie got into a protracted debate about why he had “disregarded” her and taken a basket of clothes to the basement, when the previous night she unambiguously stated that she wanted to do the laundry herself. For at least an hour, the group batted around how Marie could have made the request more gracefully — with Clem chiming in to say he was just trying to help out.
Finally, rather suddenly, Clem conceded that in this instance Marie had made her preference known civilly, that she had thanked him for taking sole responsibility for the job while she was taking a class related to her work. He’d picked up the basket to “poke back” at her, because he felt demeaned by her disdain toward his laundering methods. Moreover, he knew he was taking the same put-upon, saintly role as his father, who was constantly hectored by his mother, and then a little later, he blurted: “I think some of it might even stem from a week ago when you said I didn’t work that hard in the group, and . . . and that really insulted me.” Which he hadn’t told her at the time.
Marie concurred that her comment sounded insulting, in retrospect, but she was despairing over how to get her point across, how to be heard by Clem. Eventually she started to sob, which she’d never done.
“I can’t make things clear enough,” she cried.
“And gentle enough,” Coche added. She — and everyone else in the group — regularly pointed out to Marie how harsh she sounded.
“And, yeah, if I make it more gentle, I’ll dilute it even more.”
“For those of you who are passive,” Coche said, shifting from Clem’s point of view to Marie’s, “who control by withdrawing, this is what it feels like to your partner. This is why they try to boss you around, because they don’t know what else to do.”
Clem’s passive tendencies don’t match up all that precisely with mine (nor is Marie much like Jess), but the "good guy" role is definitely one that I’ve inhabited (unhappily) in relationships before, and I think it’s not as well understood as it might be how such passivity, which seems, on the face of it, very unmanly, can be sustained by, or at the very least easily co-exist with, certain traditional models of masculinity.
For one thing, refusing to assert preferences against those of your very opinionated wife is, by many men, understood as a kind of masculine stoicism, of endurance in the face of adversity for the sake of the greater good. Even if, as is actually the case, your passivity/stoicism compounds rather than alleviates the marital stress, it looks to yourself, and (and perhaps just as significantly, from a relational point of view) to those outside the marriage, as if you’re the one taking one for the team, as if the marriage couldn’t contain two people with strong preferences so you’ve opted out in order to preserve some level of equilibrium.
You also get a lot of a certain kind of props, and an ultimately self-defeating but temporarily gratifying glow of moral superiority, from a lot of the other people in your life. You get a lot of understanding nods, and comments about how wonderful you are, that are implictly a rebuke of your partner. You’re the understanding husband, the good guy, the easygoing one. She’s the high-maintenance one.
I’ve actually had to embark on a sometimes subtle, sometimes very direct educational campaign to make it clear to my friends and family, and perhaps most importantly to my wife’s friends and family, that although it’s true that I’m pretty easy to get along with as long as the interactions remain casual and time-limited, when it gets any deeper than that I’m not easygoing at all. I’m actually a very anxious, indubitably neurotic, frequently passive aggressive, moderately emotionally stunted person with some anger issues.
I have to deal with a lot of shit from my wife, for sure, but my wife has to deal with a lot of shit from me too. And the more we work on our shit together, in therapy and out, the more like each other we become in a lot of ways. She’s become a lot easier going in public, for instance, and I’ve become a lot more demanding of the people around me. I’ve also become more emotionally vulnerable, and much quicker to realize when I’m being overtaken by my neuroses and insecurities, and just more direct in all sorts of ways.
And, to top it all it off, I feel more manly — whatever that means — than I ever have in my life.
