How to Wreck Your Marriage

If Alyssa Shelasky is right to say that Esther Perel is “the best of the best” among couples therapists, then, as the old saying goes: “Houston, we have a problem.”

For those who do not make a habit of reading New York Magazine, Shelasky runs a column called “Sex Diaries.” It is upscale voyeurism for people who have not quite graduated to The New Yorker.

In the average column Shelasky presents a 27 year-old production assistant who travels for work. On one trip said assistant made full use of Tinder and found three hook-ups. She explained to us that she had fourteen orgasms in a five day period and “slept like a baby.” Now she is trying to figure out whether she should tell her husband. After all, she tells Shelasky, they never kept secrets.

Imagine for a moment dinner table conversation chez Shelasky.

As for Perel, she gives the game away in her first jaculation. When Shelasky seems to suggest that she wants to learn how couples can get along, Perel exclaims:

In no way do I want you to stop fighting!

If you want to know why marriages today are so contentious and unsatisfying, ponder that for an instant. Perel wants to stoke conflict, to encourage fighting, the better to turn marriages into permanent psychodramas.

After all, she is more like a drama coach than a counselor, and couples that fight more are better for her business.

Perel is certainly not a serious thinker. She imagines that if the word “fight” is used in multiple contexts, it means the same thing in each context. Fighting for justice is not the same thing as fighting because you have not been heard. And none is the same as fighting a war.

Does she really want marriages to turn into something akin to military battles? Might she have recognized the simple fact that fighting often involves aggression, and that the purpose of aggression is often to inflict pain. Do you think that this will promote conjugal bliss or domestic harmony?

In Perel’s words:

Sometimes we fight for justice. Sometimes you fight for fairness. Sometimes you fight to correct a wrong. Sometimes you fight because you’re not being heard. Sometimes you fight because it creates heat. Or it energizes you or emboldens you. Fighting is an energy as well as an interaction. I think some people have witnessed fighting a lot more than others. They’ve witnessed fighting that was insidious and hurtful. And others have witnessed fighting that was temporary and quickly covered over. Some people get scared when they go through fighting, they anticipate terrible escalation, and others just think it’s a loud moment with people who scream and use words and then life continues.

Obviously, this is a jumble. If you are promoting fighting you have to accept that some people are going to get hurt. Fighting is aggressive. Do we want husbands and wives to aggress each other?

Consider this. Being in a marriage is like being part of a team. As you know, a team cannot function effectively if teammates are fighting among themselves. Each player has a role to play. When differences arise, teammates compromise, conciliate and negotiate.

I should not have to explain this, but a negotiation is about finding a mean between two extremes. If you want to fight it out, you are encouraging a war between two extremes. One side might get the better of the other, but you still end up with a winner and a loser. And the loser will want to to settle the score.

Perel imagines that we have become conflict-avoidant. And yet, she is certainly an influential voice in the world of couples counseling and she is prescribing conflict. She suggests, wrongly, that avoiding conflict involves polarization. In truth, when people are at odds with each other, when they polarize a conversation, they are more likely to stoke conflict than to get along.

She says this, yet another jumble:

At this moment, we have all become conflict avoidant. We polarize. We lack the skills to manage conflict in a tech-assisted era that is contributing to the atrophy of our social losses. More and more we don’t know how to continue to stay connected to people we like but disagree with. We don’t know how to experience disagreement or divergence without leading to disconnection. Forever, people were married where one believed in God and one did not. Or one was a religious person and one was not. Or one voted for this party, and another voted for another. And they laughed about it. They disagreed, but they didn’t experience it as a personal attack. These days, people cut off siblings, family members because they can’t be in a room with people who have fundamentally different ideas. Even though these are the same people who will jump up to help when something happens to you.

Everyday has become politicized. Feminists recommended turning home life into a battlefield, the better to play out the revolution in the kitchen. In that they certainly succeeded.

Since we prefer domestic harmony to domestic conflict, we reject her advice.

By now certain concepts have become cliched, so Perel repeats them. Like everyone else, she believes that fights are about power and control. Again, this has come down to us from feminism, and especially from the feminist wish to be part of the vanguard of the revolution.

Underneath, most couples are fighting for power and control — whose priority matters more, who gets to make the decisions. Or they fight for trust and closeness: “Do you have my back? Can I trust you? Will you be there for me?” Or they fight for respect and recognition: “Do you value me? Do I matter?” Those are the main three things.

And, of course, thanks again to feminism, couples fight about who is going to do the dishes. Now, Perel suggests that it is not really about the dishes. It’s about feeling alone-- a silly enough interpretation.

Okay. If I don’t do the dishes, you might interpret this as “You don’t care!” or “I will always be alone.” You tell yourself, “I chose somebody so I would finally not be alone, and someone who will be there for me, and take care of me, or at least help me and participate with me, and now every time I ask you to do the dishes, I’m not talking about the dishes! I’m actually talking about how I don’t want to feel alone like I felt my entire childhood, when I was taking care of my siblings because my father left us and my mother had three jobs.” That’s the story. It’s so clear to me. What are you fighting for? To not feel alone. Therefore, you attack. Because what you’re fighting for is way more important than what you’re fighting about.

Like a good drama coach, Perel feeds people the correct lines, which incidentally amounts to girl talk.

If the person who did not do the dishes can say, “Listen, I love you. I do so much with you in mind. I carry you with me all the time. It’s too bad that when I forget something, you take this as a complete rejection and then I become the holder of every deprivation you experienced in your childhood. It’s too bad because I absolutely don’t mean to hurt you like this.”

That is very different from: “GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK ABOUT THE DISHES.”

So, Perel wants people to communicate. It sounds harmless enough, except that she is telling people to fight it out. And she does not realize that when people fight it out, they are unlikely to conciliate or to compromise or to negotiate. So, she feeds people their lines.

The only time people really know what you want and what you need without you really having to say anything is basically in utero. But from the minute you can communicate, it’s about us letting the other person know. “I’m going to see the doctor today. It really is very important for me that when I come back, you ask me about it. It makes me feel taken care of.” You can even add, “You’re not doing anything wrong by not asking me, but I just like it when you do.”

Obviously, the Perel approach is the problem, not the solution. But, what is the solution? For that we go back nearly a century and a half ago and consult famed French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. In his first book, on The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim remarked, that marriages required a division of labor.

Like teammates, couples should divide tasks and allot responsibilities. They should then routinize it all. At that point, there will be no more fights about who is going to fry the eggs or to do the dishes. 

Fighting takes time. It wastes time. It wastes brainpower. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time than to fight. 

Like a team that is divided against itself, a couple that is fighting all the time cannot be effective when the time comes to go out and compete in the world.

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