Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [88]
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Our colleague Leonore Tiefer, a clinical psychologist, told us about a couple in their late thirties, married ten years, whom she saw in therapy. They could not make a decision about having children because each wanted to be sure before even raising the issue with the other. They could not make a decision about how to balance her demanding business career with their activities together, because she felt justified in working as much as she wanted. They could not resolve their quarrels over his drinking, because he felt justified in drinking as much as he wanted. Each had had an affair, which they justified as being a response to the other’s.
Yet their normal, if difficult, problems were not what doomed this marriage; their obstinate self-justifications were. “They do not know what to give up in order to be a couple,” says Tiefer. “They each want to do what they feel entitled to do, and they can’t discuss the important issues that affect them as a pair. And as long as they stay mad at each other, they don’t have to discuss those matters, because discussion might actually require them to compromise or consider the partner’s point of view. They have a very difficult time with empathy, each one feeling completely confident that the other’s behavior is less reasonable than their own. So they bring up old resentments to justify their current position and their unwillingness to change, or forgive.”
In contrast, the couples who grow together over the years have figured out a way to live with a minimum of self-justification, which is another way of saying that they are able to put empathy for the partner ahead of defending their own territory. Successful, stable couples are able to listen to the partner’s criticisms, concerns, and suggestions undefensively. In our terms, they are able to yield, just enough, on the self-justifying excuse “That’s the kind of person I am.” They reduce the dissonance caused by small irritations by overlooking them, and they reduce the dissonance caused by their mistakes and major problems by solving them.
We interviewed several couples who have been together for many years, the kind of couples Frank and Debra admired, who by their own accounts have an unusually tight and affectionate marriage. We didn’t ask them, “What is the secret of your long marriage?” because people rarely know the answer; they will say something banal or unhelpful, such as “We never went to bed angry” or “We share a love of golf.” (Plenty of happy couples do go to bed angry because they would rather not have an argument when they are dead tired, and plenty of happy couples do not share hobbies and interests.) Instead, we asked these couples, in effect, how, over the years, they reduced the dissonance between “I love this person” and “This person is doing something that is driving me crazy.”
One especially illuminating answer came from a couple we will call Charlie and Maxine, who have been married more than forty years. Like all couples, they have many small differences that could easily flare into irritation, but they have come to accept most of them as facts of life, not worth sulking about. Charlie says, “I like to eat dinner at five; my wife likes to eat at eight; we compromise—we eat at five to eight.” The important thing about this couple is how they handle the big problems. When they first fell in love, in their early twenties, Charlie was attracted to a quality of serenity in Maxine’s soul that he found irresistible; she was, he said, an oasis in a tumultuous world. She was attracted to his passionate energy, which he brought to everything