Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (7 page)

“When Larry does something that you disapprove of, like the dressing-table incident, how do you let him know?”

“It’s impossible!” Sandra said emphatically. “It’s simply impossible!”

“
What
is impossible?” I persisted.

“Talking to him! Confronting him! He doesn’t talk about feelings. He doesn’t know how to discuss things. He just doesn’t respond. He clams up and wants to be left alone. He doesn’t even know how to fight. Either he talks in this superlogical manner, or he refuses to talk at all. He’d rather read a book or turn on the television.”

“Okay,” I said, “I think I understand how you see the problem.” It was Larry’s turn now: “How do you define the problem in your marriage, Larry?”

Larry proceeded to speak in a controlled and deliberate voice that almost masked the fact that he was as angry as his wife: “Sandra isn’t supportive enough, she doesn’t give enough, and she’s always on my back. I think that’s the main problem.” Larry fell silent, as if he was finished for the day.

“In what ways does Sandra fail to support you or give to you? Can you share a specific example?”

“Well, it’s hard to say. She cuts me down a lot, for one thing. Or, I walk in the door at six o’clock, and I’m tired and wanting some peace and quiet, and she just rattles on about the kids’ problems or her problems, or she just complains about one thing or another. Or, if I sit down to relax for five minutes, she’s on my back to discuss some earthshaking matter—like the garbage disposal is broken.” Larry was angry, but he managed to sound as if he was discussing the Dow-Jones average.

“Are you saying that you need some space?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” replied Larry. “I’m saying that Sandra is very overreactive. She’s very overemotional. She creates problems where they don’t even exist. Everything is a major case. And, yes, I suppose I am saying that I need more space.”

“What about the kids? Do you—“ I had not finished my question when Larry interrupted:

“Sandra is a very overinvolved mother,” he explained carefully, as if he were describing a patient at a clinical conference. “She worries excessively about the children. She inherited it from her mother. And, if you could meet her mother, you would understand.”

“Do you worry about the kids?” I inquired.

“Only when there’s something to worry about. For Sandra, it seems to be a full-time job.”

Although one would not have guessed it from this first session, Sandra and Larry were deeply committed to each other. At our initial meeting, however, they appeared to share only one thing in common—blaming. Like many couples, each spouse saw the locus of his or her marital difficulties as existing entirely within the other person, and each had the same unstated goal for marital therapy—that the
other
would be “fixed up” and “straightened out.”

Let’s take a closer look at the details of Sandra and Larry’s story, for there is much to be learned. Though couples differ markedly in how they present themselves, the ways in which they get stuck are very much the same.

As typically happens, the very qualities that each partner complains of in the other are those that attracted them to each other to begin with. Sandra, for example, had been drawn to Larry’s orderly, even-keel temperament, just as he had admired her capacity to be emotional and spontaneous. Her reactive, feeling-oriented approach to the world balanced his distant, logical reserve—and vice versa. Opposites attract—right?

Opposites do attract, but they do not always live happily ever after. On the one hand, it is reassuring to live with someone who will express parts of one’s own self that one is afraid to acknowledge; yet, the arrangement has its inevitable costs: The woman who is expressing feelings not only for herself but also for her husband will indeed end up behaving “hysterically” and “irrationally.” The man who relies on his wife to do the “feeling work” for him will increasingly lose touch with this important part of himself, and when the time comes that he needs to draw upon his emotional resources, he may find that nobody’s at home.

In the majority of couples, men sit on the bottom of the seesaw when it comes to emotional competence. We all know about the man who can tie good knots on packages and fix things that break, yet fails to notice that his wife is depressed. He may have little emotional relatedness to his own family and lack even one close friend with whom honest self-disclosure takes place. This is the “masculinity” that our society breeds—the male who feels at home in the world of things and abstract ideas but who has little empathic connection to others, little attunement to his own internal world, and little willingness or capacity to “hang in” when a relationship becomes conflicted and stressful. In the traditional division of labor, men are encouraged to develop one kind of intelligence, but they fall short of another that is equally important. The majority
underfunction
in the realm of emotional competence, and their underfunctioning is closely related to women’s
overfunctioning
in this area. It is not by accident that the “hysterical,” overemotional female ends up under the same roof as the unemotional, distant male.

The marital seesaw is hard to balance. When couples do try to balance it, especially under stress, their solutions often exacerbate the problem. The emotional, feeling-oriented wife who gets on her husband’s back to open up and express feelings will find that he becomes cooler and even less available. The cool, intellectual husband who tries calmly to use logic to quiet his overemotional wife will find that she becomes even more agitated. True to stereotype, each partner continues to do the
same old thing
while trying to change the other. The solution for righting the balance
becomes
the problem.

Although it was not her conscious intent, Sandra helped Larry to maintain his underemotional stance by expressing more than her share of emotionality. The unconscious contract for this couple was that Sandra would be the emotional reactor and Larry the rational planner. And so, Sandra reacted
for
Larry. She did so in response not only to family stresses that concerned them both but also to problems that were really Larry’s to struggle with. Here are two examples of how Sandra protected Larry by doing the feeling work for him:

Of course Larry had feelings about it. It was his career and the injustice had been done him. However, his style of reacting, as well as his tempo and timing, was very different from his wife’s. Also, Larry was using Sandra to react
for
him. Her quick outburst actually took him off the hook. He did not have to feel upset about the incident because she was doing all the work. The more emotion Sandra displayed, the less Larry felt within himself.

Sandra was consciously angry and frustrated at Larry’s apparent lack of feelings about the incident, yet she was unconsciously helping him to maintain his strong, cool, masculine position. By criticizing him for not showing feelings and demonstrating the appropriate degree of distress, she was applying a solution that only reinforced the very problem she complained of. Sandra could not
make
Larry react differently. However, she could do something different herself. When Sandra stopped doing the feeling work for Larry, the circular dance was broken.

It was not easy for Sandra to change her behavior, but eventually she did make an important shift: Sometime later, when Larry shared a crisis at work, Sandra listened calmly and quietly. She did not express feelings that appropriately belonged to Larry, nor did she offer solutions to a problem that was not hers. Given sufficient time and space around him, Larry did, indeed, begin to react to his own problem and struggle with his own dilemma. In fact, he became depressed. But, while this was the very reaction Sandra had overtly sought and wished for (“That cool bastard doesn’t react to anything!”), she was uncomfortable seeing her husband vulnerable and struggling. She realized, to her surprise, that part of her wanted Larry to maintain the role of the cool, strong, unruffled partner.

Sandra also protected Larry from recognizing his anger at his own parents. She did this by criticizing them and fuming at them
for
him. Larry, then, was left with the simpler job of coming to their defense.

This pattern began at the time of the birth of their first child. Larry’s parents, who were quite wealthy, were spending the year in Paris and did not acknowledge their new granddaughter with enthusiasm or show interest in seeing her. Sandra reacted with outrage, declaring to Larry that they were cold and selfish people who thought only of themselves. Years later she still spoke heatedly about their neglectful attitude, although always to Larry and never to his parents.

What did Larry do? He made excuses for his parents and found logical reasons for their behavior, which only made Sandra angrier. It was another circular dance in which the behavior of each provoked the other into doing more of the same. The more Sandra criticized her in-laws to Larry, the more Larry came to their defense; the more Larry came to their defense, the more openly critical Sandra became.

Deep down, of course, Larry was considerably more affected than Sandra by his parents’ behavior. They were, after all, his parents, and he was their son. But because of Sandra’s readiness to do the feeling work for him, Larry was in touch only with his loyalty to his parents who were under his wife’s attack.

Sandra’s focus on Larry’s behavior with
his
parents, as opposed to her own relationship with
her
in-laws, complicated the problem and the solution. In fact, Sandra’s focus on her husband obscured her own need to change matters.

Larry’s parents, who traveled a great deal, visited once a year. These visits were initiated by Larry’s father, who would write a letter informing the couple when they would arrive and for how long they would stay. Being told rather than asked annoyed Sandra no end. She then put pressure on Larry to confront his parents regarding this matter and he would refuse. In the face of Sandra’s anger and criticisms, Larry predictably sided with them, putting forth logical arguments as to why his parents needed to schedule visits as they did.

Sandra felt helpless, and for good reason: First, she was trying to make Larry do something and it wasn’t working. Second, she was doing the feeling work for him. Down the road a bit, Sandra changed both of these patterns.

At some point Sandra recognized that if the behavior of Larry’s parents upset her, it was her job to deal with this herself. So she did. In a letter that was neither attacking nor blaming, Sandra explained to her in-laws that it was important to her to be consulted in arranging a mutually agreeable time for their visits. She stated her position warmly but with clarity and directness, and she did not back down in the face of their initial defensiveness. Much to her surprise, her long-pent-up anger at her in-laws began to dissipate as she became more confident that she could speak effectively to issues that were not to her liking. Also to her surprise, Larry’s parents, in the end, responded warmly and affirmatively, thanking Sandra for her straightforwardness. This was the first step in Sandra’s taking care of her own business with her in-laws, and, in the process, opening up a more direct person-to-person relationship with each of them.

Larry, threatened by the new assertiveness that his wife was expressing, initially protested the very idea that she would write such a letter. In his typical style, he presented her with a dozen intellectual arguments to back his disapproval. Sandra, however, was clear in her resolve to change things and resisted fighting back, since her experience had taught her that such arguments led nowhere. Instead, she explained to Larry that although she appreciated his point of view, she needed to make her own decisions about how, when, and if she would deal with issues that were important to her.