Being Excessively Logical in a Course of Human-Relationship

It seems odd at first to imagine that we might get angry, even maddened, by a
partner because they were, in the course of a discussion, proving to be too reasonable
and too logical. We are used to thinking highly of reason and logic. However, people are
not normally enemies of evidence and rationality, but how then could being too
reasonable and too logical become problematic in the course of a relationship?

Being excessively logical commonly happens to people and they most probably
only at least subconsciously know about it. This exists when people apply logic to
situations where it should not be applied or where it is unnecessary. However, we all
know that Logic and Ethics go hand in hand but only when your logic has a sense of
morality in it, then it is considered ethical. We have emotion and logic for a reason. If a
person gets used to thinking too logically, it may cause poor communication between
you and others. According to Dr. Bernstein, in over 30 years of family counseling, he
noticed that people grow apart not because they don’t love each other but because they
cannot understand each other. This is the reason why this topic is important to address
to people and even I myself barely knows this before about how being too logical affects
my relationship with the people who are very important to me.

For a deeper perspective, considered with sufficient imagination, our suspicion

can make a lot of sense. When we are in difficulties what we may primarily be seeking
from our partners is a sense that they understand what we are going through. We might
are not looking for answers as we sometimes feel like the problems may be too large for
there to be any obvious ones, but so much as comfort, reassurance, and fellow-feeling.
In the circumstances, the deployment of an overly logical stance may come across not
as an act of kindness, but as a species of disguised impatience.

Another example is when someone comes to their partner complaining of vertigo.

The fear of heights is usually manifestly unreasonable: the balcony obviously isn’t about
to collapse, there’s a strong iron balustrade between them and the abyss, and the
building has been repeatedly tested by experts. We may know all this intellectually, but
it does nothing to reduce our sickening anxiety in practice. If a partner were to patiently
begin to explain the laws of physics to us, we wouldn’t be grateful. We would simply feel
they were misunderstanding us. Much that troubles us has a structure of vertigo; our
worry isn’t exactly reasonable but we’re unsettled all the same.

We can, for example, continue to feel guilty about letting down our parents, no
matter how nice to them we’ve actually been. Or we can feel very worried about money
even if we’re objectively economically quite safe. We can feel horrified by our own
appearance even though no one else judges our face or body harshly. Or we can be
certain that we’re failures who’ve messed up everything we’ve ever done – even if, in
objective terms, we seem to be doing pretty well. Or we may feel that our life will fall
apart if we have to make a short speech even though thousands of people make quite
bad speeches every day and their lives continue as normal. When we recount our
worries to our partner, we may receive a set of precisely delivered, unimpassioned
logical answers – answers that are both entirely true and yet unhelpful as well, and so in
their own way enraging. It feels as if the excessive logic of the other has led them to
look down on our concerns. Because, reasonably speaking, we shouldn’t have our fears
or worries, the implication is that no sane person would have them; our partners make
us feel a bit mad. The one putting forward the ‘logical’ point of view shouldn’t be
surprised by the angry response they receive. They are forgetting how weird and
beyond the ordinary rules of reason all human minds can be, their own included. The
logic they are applying is really a species of brute common sense that refuses the
insights of psychology. Of course, our minds are prey to fantasms, illusions, projections,
and neurotic terrors. People could be afraid of many things that don’t exist in the so-
called real world. But such phenomena are not so much ‘illogical’ as deserving of the
application of a deeper logic based on sympathy for the complexities of emotional life.
The fear of public speaking is bound up with long-buried and tortuous emotions of
shame and fear of competing and dealing with another’s envy. An excessively logical
approach to fears discounts their origins and concentrates instead on why we shouldn’t
have them, which is maddening when we are in pain. It’s not that we actually want our
partners to stop being reasonable; we want them to apply their intelligence to the task of
reassurance. We want them to enter into the weirder bits of our own experience by
remembering their own. We want to be understood for being the mad animals we all are
and then comforted and consoled that it will (probably) all be okay anyway.

Then again, it could be that the application of excessive logic isn’t an accident or
form of stupidity. It may just be an act of revenge. Perhaps the partner is giving brief
logical answers to our worries because their efforts to be more sympathetic towards us
in the past have gone nowhere. Perhaps we have neglected their needs. What were
they saying might be correct but what were they doing is not correct. The major problem
with logical answers is that it ignores the origins of our troubles and instead focus on
why we shouldn’t be feeling that way. Empathy with one another is very important, if
one thinks that they are being inappropriately logical with oneself, inform them.
Understanding isn’t just about using logic to deduce something or “solving an issue”. It
goes beyond that. It is one’s ability to put themselves in the other’s shoes and relate
while being sensitive, and intuitive. If two people were being properly ‘logical’ in the
deepest sense of the word – that is, truly alive to all the complexities of emotional
functioning – rather than squabbling around the question of ‘Why are you being so
rational when I’m in pain?’. The person on the receiving end of superficial logic should
gently change the subject and ask: ‘Is it possible I’ve hurt or been neglecting you?’, that
would be real logic.