ALLWAYS and NEVER

The issue I wanted to put on the table for your consideration are the words “never” and “always.” This came up at one of my weekly meetings with men and I want to give a hat tip to John C. who is always perceptive.

 Always and never are interesting words because they don’t describe the real world. As Asimov so famously observed “the only constant is change” and nothing in the physical world is “always” or “never.” Reality is like a statistical distribution curve, there are always the fee tails, the outliers, the exceptions that prove the rule. So when someone says “Blank is always soandso” you know they are speaking from an emotional rather than rational point of view because it is an impossible statement. It is like dividing by zero, or saying “a cubed equals b cubed plus c cubed” it is a seemingly rational mathematical formulae, but it is an impossibility. Likewise, so is “Blank is always soandso.”

So let’s bring this down out of the theoretical and into the nitty gritty of relationships.

When your beloved comes home and says, in an angry voice “You always leave the door open.” Your first response, if you are novitiate in the ways of being a better man, is to see that blatant falsehood as an attack, as blaming you for something you don’t do, wouldn’t do, or at least if you did do there was a damn good reason for it.

 Admittedly, the door might have been open when your beloved came home, but clearly it is not “always” open and more to the point since your last argument about heating the neighborhood you have been conscientious about closing the door for which you’ve gotten absolutely no credit and a quick survey of the house would show to a certitude that all the doors and windows are closed, were closed, and have only been opened as necessary for egress and ingress, so you might say “don’t start with that” or “That’s the first time the door’s been open in six weeks, stop bitching.”  And we know how these theoretical conversations are going to end: badly

 Note this, even if you are absolutely correct. Even if you had been closing and locking the door with the assiduity of the vault keeper at Gringotts, even if you had locked the door not just three minutes ago but a burglar  had slipped the bolts in anticipation of stealing you baseball collection only to be scared away by the headlights of your beloved’s car, understand this: it doesn’t matter.

Your honey telegraphed where she was coming from when she said “always.” When we say “always” or “never” we (yes, WE. This bit of irrationality isn’t limited to women) are announcing that we are in an irrational state and if there is one other fundamental truth to this universe it is that you cannot reason with an irrational person.

Stack up all the facts, call in the witnesses, catch the burglar down the street and have him confess and she’s still going to be angry. No one who is out of control has ever calmed down when someone said “calm down” and if you try to reason with them you by citing facts and appealing to logic you are just going to make it worse and end up in a fight where your feelings get hurt and you start attacking back with some perceived fault of your partner (you spend too much money, you always expect me to to … whatever.)

“But it’s not fair!” you say and perhaps you’re right but life isn’t fair. I promise you everyone sailing through the air after being hit by a beer truck is thinking “this isn’t fair” but it doesn’t change a damn thing. Life isn’t fair.

“So what do I do? Suck it up, roll over and play dead, be pussy whipped?”  Nope. Wouldn’t suggest that for a minute. We all hate it when we roll over and play dead, we all hate the way it makes us feel impotent and useless when we seemingly cave to our partner’s  (and I hate to use the word) unfair behavior. We resent rolling over and after a while that resentment builds up into a general dislike and distrust for our spouses and bingo, the marriage has taken the exit ramp to the Twilight Zone.

“BUT she’s being irrational… you said so yourself… why should I have to put up with someone who’s being irrational?” Jeezopete, come on down off the cross. We all act irrational from time to time, and your typical response, to feel attacked and to become defensive is not only irrational, but it is ineffective. It is time to try something new, something that works.

You stand up for yourself by embracing the anger. If you haven’t the foggiest what I mean by that you haven’t read enough of the blog or the book, but it comes down to this: you don’t walk away, but you do realize that this isn’t about the door being left open.

Always and Never are invitations to dialogue. Always and Never are by themselves statements of a fear that life is not going to change. This is what I am going to live with the rest of my life. He is never going to change. I am always going to be miserable.

The key is to engage your beloved through dialogue and mirroring to understand what is going on in her life.

So your response might better be: “You’re right. I did leave the door open. Did I get that right?” and then let her explain if there is more. If there is, go there, but if there’s not you simply say “I can understand how finding the door would make you ….

And before you know it your relationship will grow deeper and more meaningful and there is a damn fine chance that you wife will stop saying “you always….”

Now if this makes no sense to you what so ever it’s because this is your first time here and you have neither read the book nor are you up to speed, but trust me on this and read on.

In the interim, it wouldn’t do yourself or your relationships with your spouse and kids if you took “never” and “always” out of your lexicon as well.

The Curious Case of the Barking Dog

My dogs bark at the letter carrier. They also bark at the UPS box carrier. They bark at these intruders into their territory, because the letter carrier is an unknown, a threat, and his footsteps set off an alarm in their heads. They get their hackles up, their hearts pounding, their minds focused, and they present themselves as flesh-rending crazed canines, intent on death and destruction and guess what? The interlopers leave.

So from my dog’s perspective, the cause and effect is pretty obvious. They bark and these modern day Visigoths retreat. They go away. They turn tail and run. Thus, it seems to my dogs that they have an effective tool to keep the barbarians away from the gate and to keep their world safe: they bark,.

And when an intruder happens to simply walk down the sidewalk: they bark. The trespasser, according to the story my dogs tell themselves, is aware of the immense threat they pose and probably mindful of the dog’s successes with the postal service, and so moves on up the street. This is another example from my dog’s point of view of the extraordinary effectiveness of barking.

Mind you, the from the letter carrier’s point of view, (or as we say in HTSYMBBABM speak, the letter carrier’s “reality”) there is no hasty retreat, there is no turning tail and running, there is only the next mail box to fill, the route to complete, and the kids to pick up from school. In the letter carrier’s reality, as with the sidewalk trespasser and the Man from Brown, the dogs’ barking is mostly irrelevant.

A friend of mine, Stan, comes by the house on a regular basis. At first the dogs barked and being a prudent man he waited outside the gate until I responded to the dog-bell and let him in. The dogs barked some more, but eventually they shut up. Time and time again, Stan would drop by and the dogs would bark and Stan would wait patiently for me to come to the door.

Eventually they stopped barking. Now when Stan stops by they don’t even bother to raise their heads from their sun-besotted dozing. He gives them a pat and walks on in, often commenting that I need to get my dog-bell fixed.

The cleverer of my two or three constant readers will now nod their heads and say, “I know where this is going” but for the slower, the stubborn and the neophyte I will explain how the story of the barking dog fits into the paradigm of the better man and saving your marriage.

My dogs have one tool that allows them to keep a modicum of control over their environment when they feel threatened: they bark. In their reality it is an effective tool. It seemingly generates the response they want. When Stan did not respond the way they expected, the barked and barked and barked until at some time they realized that the whole bark thing wasn’t working on Stan and they quit barking. The tool didn’t work, there was no point in using it.

Your spouse might have one tool that allows her to maintain a modicum of control over her environment when she feels threatened: she becomes angry, and when she becomes angry she seemingly generates the response she wants: you leave, you retaliate, you shut down, you give in… whatever response to which you habitually resort is the response she associates with her anger, and thus by seemingly causing that response she gains something, maybe it’s a sense of moral outrage, ascendancy, or maybe it’s simply control and thus a sense of safety.

You’ve seen this happen time and time again. It shows up as when you start talking about one thing, it leads to another, and soon you are fighting about something that has nothing to do with where you were.

Imagine it happens like this: you and your beloved are chatting and you say something that you think is totally innocent but she hears it differently and for whatever reason it scares her. Maybe it scares her because it brings up a guilt issue, maybe she feels controlled, or blamed, or inadequate. It doesn’t matter what particular alarm you set off in her brain: the sensor has been tripped and the bell is ringing. She is scared, so she goes to the one tool she has, anger, and with the expression of that anger she gets the response that you all ways give her and suddenly she is on safe ground again. Admittedly, it is unpleasant ground, her hackles are up, adrenaline is coursing through her veins, and you’re not on your best behavior, but it’s safe ground. By reacting as she expects you return to a pattern that she’s experienced before and she can anticipate the course of the next few minutes, hours or days. Not pleasant, but predictable and thus safe.

Now mind you, she’s not trying to start a fight. I know it seems like that, but remember my dogs are not trying to kill the letter carrier. They’ve just learned to bark when they hear his footsteps and because they are scared and they’ve learned that when they bark the letter carrier leaves and safety is restored.

When Stan simply stood there the dogs eventually learned the tool didn’t work with him and they stopped using it. Likewise, and this is not to compare your wife to a dog, if you can become non-reactive, if you can learn not to give tit for tat, if you can learn not to take offense and make that point clear by way of engaging in an argument, guess what will happen. Guess what will happen if you simply stand there, as Stan did, and not react to the barking?

She will quit. She will quit because the tool isn’t working for her. As I said, she’d not trying to tell you she hates you, she’s not trying to drive you away, she’s not trying to hurt you, she’s simply trying to protect herself from some fear, perhaps a fear she doesn’t want to confront, perhaps a fear of which she is unaware. And if you stop reacting, if you stop responding in king, she will either start looking for another tool or she will open herself up to introspection and try to understand the fear that is driving her anger, but she will stop barking.

I shit you not.