Alain De Botton

May 23, 2019 · 

 
ON ARGUING
When in long-term relationships, whatever the pleasures, we
are—statistically speaking—likely to spend up to 10% of our
time caught up in the intoxicating and all-consuming business
of arguing. Each argument will seem to be uniquely about itself.
It will have its distinct flashpoint, features, injustices,
stupidities and what to us appear to be self-evident truths that
the partner is blithely resisting: the absurdity of proposing to
leave at 7.23pm when we had both agreed—only two hours ago
—that we’d leave at no later than 7.10pm; the idiocy of telling
a younger son he could have extra screen time when we’d
already explained to him that he’d breached his limit; the insult
of the partner laughing aloud at our sister-in-law’s cheap jibe
against us at the family reunion...
Faced with such offences, we dig in like eager well-paid
lawyers. Or crash investigators or detectives. We marshall
evidence. We say that on the basis of this or that, they are
obviously going to have to rethink their line and surrender to
our perspective. The first round may begin peacefully enough,
but the urgency and annoyance stand to increase as the second
and third rounds unfold, each team adding a little vengeance
and irritation to their proclamations. Sometimes, with the logic
of the argument so stubbornly resisted by the other party,
voices will be raised, faces will flush, someone (whom we have
named in our will and to whom we have otherwise given our
lives) may be called a c*** or a b******, a door might be
slammed and a gloom could descend that will take a good two
days to clear.
Such rigmaroles are so shameful and dispiriting, we tend not
to mention their entrails to others—and others in turn keep
quiet about their squabbles to us, deepening our feelings of
isolation and embarrassment. We go around saying that we’ve
had a bit of ‘a tiff’ or are ‘going through a bad patch’—in lieu of
confessing openly that the person we love appears, sometimes
at least, to have substantially ruined our lives.
The great error we make is to assume that the way to fix an
argument is to attempt to reach an objective truth that can,
once it has been brought out into the open, neutralise the force
of the fierce offence we feel. But there’s an unfortunate and
somewhat paradoxical side of arguments in relationships: it
substantially doesn’t matter what the truth is. It’s by the by
who has the stronger case. It’s an irrelevance who can ‘win’.
That’s because there is only ever one thing we really want
from our partners behind, or beneath, an argument: we need
to know we are loved. We are arguing so bitterly not because a
client has hired us in a courtroom but because we are
emotionally in pain, because the relationship has forced us—as
they will—to make ourselves awesomely vulnerable in front
another person we depend on. What we are longing for,
beneath our furious eloquence, is reassurance. We are calling
them a c**** in lieu of asking them tearfully if they still love us
and why, in that case, they have hurt us quite so much.
Rather than dwell tirelessly on the surface complaints, we
might therefore learn to cut straight to the emotional
substratum of the situation and raise one of six possible
objections to the partner:
1. I feel you don’t value me.
2. I feel abandoned.
3. I feel not good enough.
4. I feel you are trying to control me.
5. I feel you’re not accepting who I really am.
6. I feel unseen and unheard.
We might, if the words were sometimes too hard to utter,
simply paste the list to the fridge door and point mutely at
them at the height of a dispute. Rather than try to win a proxy
managerial battle over scheduling or bedtimes, we might
immediately disclose the emotional explanation for our upset:
when you are late for something we’d agreed on, I feel unseen
and unheard… When you contradict me in front of my family, I
feel abandoned…
By a grievous logic, it so often seems that the only way to
feel safe is to punch back—when in love we are invariably going
to be so much safer (that is, so much more likely to be a
recipient of affection and atonement) if we manage calmly to
reveal our wound at once to its (usually unwitting) perpetrator.
The best response is not to make ourselves more impregnable,
but to dare to be a little less defended.
Differences of opinion between partners may crop up over
anything, but arguments—the sort of heated matches that end
in slammed doors and insults—are only ever about one thing:
the anxiety of being excessively vulnerable before someone we
adore and can’t control. It may look like a fight over scheduling
or childcare, really it’s a fight about the terror of emotional
abandonment. If we kept this idea in mind, we might save
ourselves so much time in legalistic point scoring, possibly four
hours a week or more which could be put to use gardening,
helping the aged or learning a foreign language.