Love as Superglue

There are myths about love which influence us all.

"Love is never having to say you are sorry."

This is a lie. As most of us know only too well, love is having to say you're sorry rather too often. But love is the time when you really mean it.

Great Lovers never argue. Great Lovers have their problems - with cruel parents, jealous rivals, wicked tyrants - but never with each other.

Another lie.

Love is that powerful magical bond that just happens to you out of the blue, and which lasts for ever. And if it does not last, well it must have been that the lovers were not true lovers after all.

Yet another lie. As psychologist Maryon Tysoe wrote:

"Myth has endowed mutual love with the power of a psychological superglue."

Vivian and Simon

Vivian is nearly 30 and a senior secretary in a university department. She and Simon are in a long-term love affair. On Tuesday morning they woke in the same bed and she told him of her plans to go to a concert with a woman friend on Wednesday, which led to a heated argument: She told me:

He reacted in anger due to feeling excluded. When I reasoned with him, he calmed down and saw that he was being over-possessive.

She felt 'very angry, but only for two minutes or so', and blamed herself for the argument because 'I'm generally more argumentative first thing in the morning.'

However, over the rest of the week they have a series of arguments about trivia. On Thursday evening a progressively more angry and more heated argument goes on and on:

Everything I did or had ever done was being criticised, or so it seemed. I put up with the criticisms at first, because I knew he was in a bad mood and thought it would blow over. But it didn't and I grew angry because it wasn't justified.

On Friday, they have a "blazing row" because she won't drop her plans and go lunch with him as he suggests at the very last minute. Their annoyance and irritation with each other continue over the weekend.

What is going on here?

Vivian blames herself for her own "impatience" and "nagging".

Simon is feeling taken for granted and fears he is unloved.

But why does Vivian not recognize Simon's fears? Why is it that Simon cannot tell her how he feels? .

The superglue of Love is supposed to keep two lovers together and transform conflict into understanding by some magical osmosis.

Vivian believes that men are fundamentally cool, rational and logical, because that is what our culture teaches. So when Simon tried to express his hurt feelings that she was planning to take a woman friend to a concert and not him, Vivian "reasoned with him". Whereas with a woman, she might very well have acknowledged her friend's hurt by saying, "I'm really sorry you're feeling left out," Vivian tells us she argued with Simon so as to persuade him he was wrong to be "over-possessive".

Simon, by the same token, believes women are "good at feelings", and so Vivian should "know" when he is hurt. The argument continues for days, because Simon finds she ignores his hurt feelings even though she says she cares for him, and Vivian finds that the man who is supposed to be cool, calm and rational is being irrational and unreasonable.

The widespread myth that men are "no good at feelings" is particularly damaging when feelings are the issue, because men like Simon may find it very difficult to say - or sometimes even to be aware of - how they feel, so hurt comes out as anger; and women like Vivian assume that men don't have problems with feelings in the way women do, because men are cool and unemotional. If he did get upset momentarily about her concert arrangements, this was quickly dealt with on a rational basis. She "reasoned with him" and he saw the error of his ways.

At the same time, Vivian knows it is her task to protect their relationship, so she decides to "put up with his bad mood" on the evening following the concert, "because it will blow over".

The offering women make to men is to take responsibility for bad feelings between them, which is why she blames herself when they both get angry.

Why did things go from bad to worse?

First, Vivian was herself feeling annoyed with Simon for what she experienced as possessiveness, and resented his assumption that he could phone her and expect her to drop everything to be with him.

Second, Simon's own impulsive idea that lunch together would be a pleasure felt to him like one of those things that lovers do - most of us would like sometimes to feel like great lovers, and great lovers want to be together. The fact that Vivian did not respond in the right way only confirmed his growing feeling that something was radically wrong between them. Her anger almost certainly left him with a sense of betrayal (she was not a true lover) and a growing desire to escape: his resistance to her over the following weekend and her interpretation of it simply as reactions to her own irritability and nagging mean that communication between them is seriously breaking down.

So what could they have done?

Vivian is right to explain that his resentment of her taking a woman friend to the concert feels like possessiveness to her, if that is how it feels. Simon is right to explain that this makes him feel unwanted and upset, if that it how he feels. Emotions are the issue here, not logic and rationality.

Lovers need to be able to say how they feel, and have these feelings acknowledged.

Here, because Simon is a man, he is expected to be able to deal with his feelings rationally: therefore, when Vivian reasons with him, this is supposed to make the feelings go away. Reason does not have that kind of power.

This may, of course, look like blaming the woman. But it is not. It is blaming - if blame is relevant - our myths.

It is a myth that men are rational and not emotional: if lovers can only acknowledge each other as emotional, they will at least be confronting what is really distressing one or both of them. When lovers have opposing feelings about a situation, as here with Simon and Vivian, then they do have a difficulty which needs to be resolved together. And it can be done more easily by expressing the feelings that each has, rather than by arguing supposedly rationally "about" feelings.

No one person's feelings should be considered more important than the other's. Simon's feelings of hurt are as important as Vivian's feelings that he was being possessive. The magic of being able to acknowledge each other's feelings as feelings and therefore important seems to be that this opens the door to a solution. When both have been acknowledged, people really do find it easier to find a way through the conflict which leaves both feeling in balance.

Shall we open the champagne?

Mind-reading with Tony and Cathy

Tony, a 28-year-old accountant, tells of an argument over the telephone with his 25-year-old lover Cathy "about whether to open a bottle of champagne I gave her for Xmas".

For Cathy, the champagne was a symbol of their love: when she suggested opening the bottle that night, he surely must have understood she did not want to drink it alone. His reaction "well go ahead if you want to" was hurtful. He, on the other hand, thought she should "say" what she meant. He writes:

"Bottle opening was secondary issue. I thought she was teasing, but she really just wanted to come over to my place that evening. Unfortunately, I didn't realize it until it was too late. While I suspected the "real" reason, I wanted an "explicit" statement and "played the game" instead."

Both are expecting the other to "mind-read".

He refuses to acknowledge the hints he does in fact pick up because he finds the "fact that women never say what they mean" tiresome, and expects her to realize that he wants her to state explicitly what is on her mind.

She believes he should know what the champagne means to her, and that anyway she has given enough hints, and if he ignores them it is because he does not care enough about her. If she had come out clearly with the statement, "I want to come over and open the champagne with you tonight," she could not then know whether his agreement was compliance for the sake of peace or what he really wanted too.

They do not trust each other.

This argument too has long-term effects, and they niggle and snipe at each other over the next week.

Cathy accuses him of being moody, they argue about trivial practical matters (using pancake mix, the inadequacy of his kitchen), he feels "more confused than angry". They are not communicating and this is at least partly because of the myth that love should bind them without effort on their part, and each should be able to read the other's mind.

Some writers suggest that men focus on the simple "message" of the argument, whereas women focus on the "metamessage": what does this argument mean to our relationship? Was this the case here?

It is true that an outside listener might have thought that Tony was focussing on the immediate question "should she open the bottle now?" whereas Cathy was more concerned with what his answer to that question meant, i.e. did he really not care?

However, Tony's account makes it clear that he was aware of the metamessage, and was deliberately refusing to hear it unless she chose to express it clearly. Why was this?

Part of the reason has already been suggested: the myth of love tells us that communication should never pose problems, and if it does then love is faulty.

Another part of the reason is that men expect to be able to dominate a woman, and one way to wield power is to manipulate her feelings. Women foster this belief by being willing to conciliate, until confronted with a conflict that seems to put the relationship in question.

Doing Dominance

The desire to dominate is usually most clear in impermanent love affairs, or in unhappy marriages, and the issues that bring the conflict to a head can range from the crucial to the trivial.

Debbie, for example, found that starting to share a house with her boyfriend of six years led to arguments about little things, like doing the crossword together.

"I feel patronised," she explained. "He is quicker than I am, then doesn't say the words but tries to give clues on the answers. I would rather the answers were put straight in, but of course, he said that that doesn't give me a chance. I would much rather not be given extra clues as well."

She adds that "We could both understand each other's feelings." But there is not much evidence that he takes any account of hers. It looks like a perfect example of a man parading his superiority while masquerading as 'helpful'. His desire to dominate in a field where he is clearly better is emphasized by his claim that if he did do as she asked, this would not "give her a chance".

He thought he was a New Man. But their long-term relationship could not withstand the assaults of these and similar attempts by him to establish his dominance by stealth.

Rational Man and Emotional Woman?

Sandra and Wilf are a modern couple, both of whom are engaged in research work that is important to them. Wilf, though, wants Sandra to do it "his" way.

Sandra says, "He just won't listen. That's the way our arguments usually end. Either I say, let's leave it, it really upsets me. Or he'll see I'm upset and say, Let's drop it, we're not getting anywhere."

Dropping an argument because it is upsetting and agreeing to differ are not quite the same thing. Sandra gets upset because she feels that Wilf has not "heard" what she said: he is not accepting her equal right to an opinion when it is not the same as his own.

Wilf dismisses any suggestion that his attitude to his lover's work is a consequence of old-fashioned sexist attitudes. But conversation with him reveals an unconscious assumption that he knows better, and he confided in a low voice:

"Sandra does get emotionally involved with her work, which makes it a bit tricky to talk about it sometimes."

Wilf is doing what so many men do, even in relationships with a woman who is important - he is explaining her reluctance to accept his view as "emotional", not as an intellectual equal's rational choice.

But Men are from Mars

Some men maintain their dominance by turning the belief that a man cannot express feelings to their advantage.

Stella's husband sits silently while she tries to talk to him about her needs in their marriage, struggling in vain to get through to him: and when she is utterly exhausted with talking and then shouting and then bursting into tears, he points out that she is being impossibly demanding, and how is he to cope with such outbursts? She told me:

"Men don't seem to want to talk about feelings. It really upsets him if I start to cry, and I try not to."

And she makes amends for her "unreasonable" outbursts by being extra loving.

Jim, a writer, is even more devious. He discovered that he could provoke his young wife Betty, by criticising her appearance or her care of the children, and she would fight back. Unoriginally, but with obvious pleasure, he said:

"She's like a tigress. Never met such a woman for giving as good as she gets."

He would goad her until she spectacularly lost her temper, whereupon he would march off to his study shouting at her that she was a bitch, a slut and a fucking whore who didn't give a shit for her kids. (Excuse the language - it's his!) He would then bash away at his wordprocessor, inspired as he said "by a good fight".

Meanwhile she recovered from her temper, accepted his criticisms - she had"exploded", maybe even broken a dish or slammed a door - took the children out for the day to give him peace, cooked a special meal for him in the evening to make amends.

He won every way. Until Betty started listening to what was happening, stopped reacting to his criticisms, and his dominance faded. He finds he has come to depend on the stimulus of a fight, for when Betty stopped being manipulated, his muse dried up. It is now, of course, her fault that he cannot write.

Those hidden stereotypes about women and men can lead some people to believe that all relationship problems in marriage are likely to be the woman's fault: he brings home the bacon and she sorts out all the rest.