Counseling 3

Wife and I had one of our boilerplate fights this morning. By "boilerplate" I mean that we have had what is structurally or formally the same fight once a week (sometimes it seems like once a day) for the last 25 years. It goes something like this (and I always start it):

Hosea: Is it raining outside or sunny?

Wife: You don't have to pick on me all the time just because I can't stop it from raining! Why are you always attacking me over the weather?

Hosea: [shouting] What?? I am not attacking you over the weather! I just asked if it was raining or sunny! How can you accuse me of being so irrationally critical?

Wife: [shouting back] Well you're always yelling at me, like you did just now!

Hosea: [even louder] But I wouldn't yell at you in the first place if you didn't accuse me of being some crazy man who holds you accountable for the god-damned weather ...!

And so on.

It's a really stupid argument, the way other people's arguments always are. But somehow it left Wife with the idea that I was going to throw her bodily into the street when I got home from work. I don't know how she could have thought that, but there is a lot about our interaction that still baffles me.

Anyway, we saw Counselor over lunch, and we spent the session deconstructing this argument. What took 90 seconds in real time took over an hour to tease apart in Counselor's office. Honestly, I doubt that Roland Barthes or Leo Strauss could have done as thorough a job on that particular "text".

And the upshot is that Counselor said we were both reacting to wounds we had undoubtedly experienced in childhood long before we ever met, and that it would really help us to go very slowly over the terrain the next time we hit one of these arguments, so that we can each tell the other as clearly as possible what we are really feeling in that particular moment. Boy, I bet that analysis really shocked the pants off of you, didn't it?

And you know, it was just physically tiring to hear this because it never changes. We have discussed the same fight with marriage counselors -- including this one -- for years; and in all those years we have always gotten the same diagnosis and the same advice. Now either we just aren't following the advice (very likely) -- in which case we probably aren't going to start now and our counselors should start recommending something else, like rapiers at dawn -- or else the advice itself is useless. I don't know which, but the fact remains that nothing has changed in all this time.

I hardly need to add, I suppose, that Wife spent the whole morning trying to make plans with Boyfriend 5 for how she was going to keep me from throwing her out into the street; then she spent all afternoon deconstructing Counselor's deconstruction, going over it piecemeal and trying to figure out What It All Meant. Is Hosea just biding his time, so that he can throw her out next week instead? Is Hosea too cowardly to throw her out at all, even though he desperately wants to? Is Hosea basically just a basket case who needs heavy medication? Inquiring minds want to know!

What a waste ....