In one of the most frequently quoted aperçus about marriage, Rainer Maria Rilke exhibited a rare wisdom for someone not yet thirty. He wrote: “A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of is fullest freedom and development.” One might add that togetherness is also a fragile agreement, vulnerable to backtracking and rupture: as social animals, we do not seem especially well-suited to having our freedom and development confined, much less stolen – even if its relinquishment is voluntary.
They say it takes two to tango. But it takes two to fight as well: two teams, two countries, two people. And the conflict is exacerbated when there is nowhere to go. Two people locked inside a marriage are like boxers flying about the ring.
Marital conflict intrigues me since, these days, it is so easy to get divorced: if you don’t want the fight, you can walk away. So, clearly, people do want to fight. Or perhaps they just want to feel vindicated: to know their commitments are worth standing their ground for. Then again, perhaps conflict makes them feel alive. All said, it is far harder to ‘work’ at a marriage; to search for that sweet spot of compromise between two conflicting poles – their ying to your yang; their black and white to your white and black.
A recent study published in the Journal of Family Issues in 2021 found that poor communication topped the list of things that spark conflict within marriage. Other high-scoring areas, guaranteed to generate dispute, are housework, finances, parenting, and sex. None of this is surprising. They’re all areas in which ordinary disagreement can readily flare into an all-out clash – the kind of head-butting, voice-raising, foot-stamping non-negotiability that dares the other person to walk away from the fire.
Leave, however, and you lose.
I don’t want to suggest that conflict is bad, or even wrong. In fact, it may not be the problem in a marriage, but the solution – especially if it stems from a shared desire to make things better. As Robert Frost wrote in his Notebooks: “the most beautiful thing in the world… is conflicting interests when both are good”.
But rewind the clock for a moment, to the start of togetherness. When people pledge to live as a couple, their greatest desire is to please the other person; to accommodate and defuse tension; to play down their niggling needs and peccadillos and push forward their malleability and generosity. To make the most of their virtues! The trouble is that coupled people grow tired of always having to please someone else. They want to please themselves, too – and it is important that they do so, lest they risk losing themselves. It is here that conflicting interests arise, even when the couple’s ultimate vision or goal is shared, whether this is to raise their children to be well-adapted, resourceful, independent, and caring; to remain solvent; to honour and respect each other; or to keep a clean house.
Marriages start out as democracies in miniature and each person’s sphere of integrity is boundaried. In marriage, two autonomous individuals have elected to live together, after all. It’s just that they’ve decided to privilege the ‘we’ over the ‘I’. In order to shore up that ‘we’, everything must be negotiated: you have to move towards each other; streamline yourself. You aim for mutual appreciation – consensus not capitulation. Yet even within a good marriage, this shared aspiration to bring out the best in each other often gets warped. Does this mean that the democratic ideal of marriage is unsustainable? Or does conflict arise when the shared vision wobbles, when one person begins to want something else, something different, or something more?
Noah Baumbach’s hard-hitting 2019 movie Marriage Story offers a poignant portrait of a husband and wife who have reached the end of the road as far as compromise goes. After fractures in their marriage appear, they seem to be no longer capable of civilised behaviour towards each other and their animus bubbles up, hot as lava, through the cracks. There’s an unforgettable line where one of the warring divorce lawyers says: “Criminal lawyers see bad people at their best; divorce lawyers see good people at their worst.” The bitter edge of the quip lies in suggesting that marriage is merely a flimsy veneer we paint on to cover up ‘irreconcilable difference’.
Follow that logic though and reconciliation – the resolving of conflict – is only ever a temporary fix. Take the lid off the marriage and conflict casts its fury all over the shop; over who gets to have the children and when; over who bought this book, that lamp, this chair; who made what sacrifices; who’s family was more villainous or demanding; who was more selfish. It’s so ugly. As for money: where do we even begin?
Marriage Story is especially good in portraying how conflict escalates. In one extraordinary scene the two leads let rip, hurling abuse at each other with ever increasing force, until mad-eyed with hatred, the man yells that he hopes his wife would just die. His venom spent, he crumples to the floor in tears. In divorce, the personality quirks people tamp down to keep the peace becomes ammunition – exploded bombs hurled across the legal battlefield.
Baumbach’s film begins when therapy (the first resort of warring parties) breaks down. It calls us out, in other words, on our lazy tendency to think that talking can resolve any disagreement. Whole industries support this idea, from counselling services to conflict mediation to truth and reconciliation committees, but Baumbach sees through the hopeful lie. When people are set against each other, when conflict defines them, discord is pre-verbal. In Joanna Hogg’s film Exhibition, everything her alienated couple does (they are both artists) grates on the other: closing a cupboard, turning on a tap, walking up the stairs. Every sound is a jarring message of bile intended only for them.
But what if the discord is internal? What if conflict is not a fight to win, but is rather expressive of the struggle for recognition (You don’t see me!) or for justice (You said you’d do half the housework, but it always falls to me!)? The American psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler in Divorce Won’t Help (1948), notes that a person suing for divorce “unconsciously wants to get rid of her own inner conflict”. But because she’s “unaware of the very existence of this conflict, she fights with great energy against her partner, upon whom the conflict has been projected”. Divorce, Bergler observes, will never resolve an inner conflict. And if this is the root cause of disharmony, then the person divorcing will almost certainly seek another spouse in order to continue their quarrel.
