Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [81]
Nor is this marriage deteriorating because Frank and Debra get angry at one another. Successful couples have conflicts and get angry, just as unhappy couples do. But happy couples know how to manage their conflicts. If a problem is annoying them, they either talk and fix the problem, let it go, or learn to live with it. 3 Unhappy couples are pulled further apart by angry confrontations. When Frank and Debra get into a quarrel, they retreat to their familiar positions, brood, and stop listening to each other. If they do listen, they don’t hear. Their attitude is: “Yeah, yeah, I know how you feel about this, but I’m not going to change because I’m right.”
To show what we think Frank and Debra’s underlying problem is, let’s rewrite the story of their trip home. Suppose that Frank had anticipated Debra’s fears and concerns, which he knows very well by now, and expressed his genuine admiration for her sociability and ease with new people. Suppose he anticipated that she would compare their marriage unfavorably with this appealing couple’s relationship and said something like “You know, tonight I realized that even though we don’t live in the luxury they do, I am awfully lucky to have you.” Suppose that Frank had admitted candidly to Debra that being with this new couple made him feel “down on himself” about his participation that evening, a revelation that would have evoked her concern and sympathy. For her part, suppose that Debra had short-circuited her own self-pitying ruminations and paid attention to her husband’s low mood, saying something like “Honey, you didn’t seem to be up to par tonight. Are you feeling okay? Was it something about that couple you didn’t like? Or were you just tired?” Suppose she, too, had been honest in expressing what she dislikes about herself, such as her envy of the other couple’s affluence, instead of expressing what she dislikes about Frank. Suppose she had turned her attention to the qualities she does love about Frank. Hmmm, come to think of it, he’s right about being a “sensitive lover.”
From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is. Frank and Debra’s evening with the new couple might have ended very differently if each of them had not been so busy spinning their own self-justifications and blaming the other, and had thought about the other’s feelings first. Each of them understands the other’s point of view perfectly, but their need for self-justification is preventing them from accepting their partner’s position as being as legitimate as their own. It is motivating them to see their own way as the better way, indeed the only reasonable way.
We are not referring here to the garden-variety kind of self-justification that we are all inclined to use when we make a mistake or disagree about relatively trivial matters, like who left the top off the salad dressing or who forgot to pay the water bill or whose memory of a favorite scene in an old movie is correct. In those circumstances, self-justification momentarily protects us from feeling clumsy, incompetent, or forgetful. The kind that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: “I’m right and you’re wrong” and “Even if I’m wrong, too bad; that’s the way I am.” Frank and Debra are in trouble because they have begun to justify their fundamental self-concepts, the qualities about themselves that they value and do not wish to alter or that they believe are inherent in their nature. They are not saying to each other, “I’m right and you’re wrong about that memory.” They are saying, “I am the right kind of person and you are the wrong kind of person. And because you are the wrong kind of person, you cannot appreciate my virtues; foolishly, you even think some of my virtues are flaws.”
Thus, Frank justifies