Fights take energy to start and escalate, and they also take energy to stop. Wars, be they between nations or tribes or individuals, have inertia. This applies to couples in distress. Couples do not start out in a war. If they did, they’d never bond. Also, it’s not adaptive to waste energy and risk damage in a pointless war. There must be some perceived reason to invest the energy it takes to fight (true anywhere in the animal kingdom). The war begins and escalates after some bonding already occurred.
How does a relationship war start?
A war starts because one side sees something to gain from it, even if the gain is simply defense against further damage. Many times people aggress simply because they want the other party to back off. Other times, they are looking for changes in a way that benefits them, because the status quo isn’t working anymore. He wants more time in the man cave, she wants more help around the house, or vice versa. She wants more romantic nights out, he wants more nights of sex, or vice versa. She wants more time with friends, he wants more time paid attention to him, or vice versa.
Wars usually start as small offenses. This is true of nations as well as individuals. Some country breaks another countries laws. A leader is offended. Tariffs are imposed to coerce one side into advancing the benefits of another. The other side responds with an opposite and often more intense reaction. Then another increased opposite response, and so on. Eventually, there is an official war. With couples, it might be one side feeling neglected, and responding with nags, which is met with dismissal (more neglect), which is met with contempt, which is met with stonewalling, and so on. In the beginning, a good night’s sleep and a new sunrise might be enough of a reset. But when the blows and indifference escalate enough, the morning brings a rush of reminders of hurt, anger, and pathological strategy formation for need fulfillment, as the healthy and appropriate means of communication and cooperation no longer seem viable.
Once a couple is in a war, it can be very difficult to stop. Each partner punctuates the war by labeling their neglect or aggression as a necessary response to the other’s, and labeling their partner’s aggression as the instigating, unprovoked act that echoes every other such initiation, traced back to the beginning of the couple’s distress. A common, unproductive protestation is, “you started it”, which is inevitably an unverifiable claim, if the couple has been together more than a few weeks. That is like saying that one company started a stock market crash, or one country started international tensions. These assessments are tempting to believe, as they can seem plausible with only a superficial look. But accountability exists in all parts of a dynamic system, as does power to change things. Of course the proportion of accountability and power is not equal among system components, ether. But quantifying the degree of such is almost never worthwhile. It is far better, as part of a system, to identify our own degree of accountability and power and work within that. As a partner in a couple, that means focusing on:
- Our mistakes, rather than our partners, and how to remedy them and prevent them
- Our ability to care for the relationship, rather than what (we think) our partner should do.
Relationships, like economies, are dynamic systems with too much memory and complexity to track. All we can do is observe what is happening, identify patterns, make hypotheses as to what will perpetuate them and what will disrupt them, and try experiments (changing it up) to affect change.
In a couple, each tends to see themselves as the justified defendor, and the other as the unjustified antagonist. An eye for an eye, as long as the last eye is theirs, not ours. And so the war continues, with each fight sparking like one more stroke of an engine piston, like one more seesaw push off.
When a couple first gets together, they put their individual existential angst on hold (unconsciously) and revel in the bliss of new union, in the honeymoon stage. Eventually, this energetically unsustainable state gives way to reality again, and the angst settles back into the partners, in what is sometimes known as the “power struggle” stage of couplehood. I think that a type of bait-and-switch occurs in which the partners actually forget (experientially) how they felt when single, before the honeymoon stage. Although hedonic adaptation returns their levels of happiness and unhappiness (e.g. anxiety) back to their respective baselines, they mistake their prior, honeymoon stage uphoria for their baseline, and their baseline for a new low that can only be explained by the increasingly obvious defectiveness of their partners. They think, “I really remember being happier than this before I was with him/her.” Usually they are seeing their past singlehood through a rose-colored selective filter, and remembering the good (e.g. freedom, options, control) more than the painful (e.g. loneliness). Now, beginning to see the partner as a source of pain and obstacle to contentedness, they begin to feel anxious and start to attempt to change their partner to be more ideal and less flawed, in order to compensate for individual problems that are disavowed and projected on to the relationship. For example, someone might feel lonely, and then unconsciously decide that it’s their partner’s fault, citing their partner’s lack of interest in their hobbies, or seeming inability to relate to them.
How can a couple war stop?
Just like it takes energy to stop a runaway train, it takes energy to stop a war, be it between nations, tribes, or individuals. This can happen in two fundamental ways:
- “Turning the other cheek”, i.e., ceasing to retaliate (which takes internal energy), sometimes for multiple iterations
- Offering an “olive branch” to the other side, also sometimes for multiple iterations.
Both of these are repair gestures, and, depending the nature, duration, and intensity of the war, they may need to be large and repeated. Also, both of these strategies can be used concurrently. A spouse may simply remain silent an attentive after being harshly criticised or spoken to with contempt, and later, offer their partner help with a difficult task. Sometimes, it’s a matter of one side being the first to sincerely apologize (key word is sincere) for their mistakes and rough edges, and not immediately expecting or demanding an apology in return.
Often it feels like doing such things is going to make us weaker. While it does make us temporarily more vulnerable, in the long term we become stronger than the alternative of waiting for the other side to apologize first. This is because apologizing gives us practice recognizing the truth that we aren’t perfect, and making peace with ourselves for that. We are not just admiting to another that we screwed up and have flaws. We are admitting it to ourselves, with our partner as a witness.
“But what if they don’t accept the apology?”
Then your work becomes harder and even more important. When we bare our flaws to a loved one and they exploit it, we now have to give ourselves double the self-love:
- Love to deal with the immediate rejection (experienced after the apology)
- Love to accept ourselves despite our mistakes/flaws, even without the emotional support of another person in that moment
This might sound like a tall order, and that’s because it is. But the potential reward is that you may realize that you are more emotionally self-sufficient than you ever realized previously, and that can be a life-changing shift of perspective. So much of the stress in our lives is looking outward to external sources of love (like a spouse or partner) when what we were looking for was available inside any time. That’s not to say that rejection won’t hurt. It likely will (it still does for me). But on the other side of that hurt is freedom, if we can recognize that the hurt is an expected, normal reaction, and gracefully bear it as it passes. When it does, we realize that we can withstand it and don’t need to worry as much about getting what we want (and think we need) from our partners. Paradoxically, this insight tends to make make relationships more fun, healthy, and likely to succeed, as they can breathe easier with less strain.
“What if my partner doesn’t reciprocate”?
Firstly, this is unlikely if you continue to refrain from unkind words and behaviors (including emotional withdrawal / distance) even in the face of their continued unkindness. A war, like a tennis game, can’t continue for long without two willing sides. And unlike literal war, you won’t be defeated by turning the other cheek. I’m not saying be a doormat. You will need to continue to stand up for your needs, but always with respect and kindness for your partner. With time, odds are they will eventually simmer down and return the good will.
But… if they don’t, then it’s up to you to decide how long to stick around — days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the nature of the bond (dating, married, kids, etc). In any case though, maintaining a war takes two, and any aggressive or passive aggressive gesture we make will hurt us. And any we refrain from will build our confidence and maturity. In a very troubled relationship, this can be the saving grace that can carry us through: either our relationship heals (most likely case), or it doesn’t and we part ways peacefully, but either way we’ll get though it with more love and kindness available in our hearts, for ourselves and for others. A win-win.