We can repair the nation’s listing political marriage
Listening to people argue about politics these days is like overhearing people in a restaurant who are in a bad marriage. They’re always trying to use disagreements to establish superiority. It’s not merely, “We’re different.” It’s, “I’m better.”
I thought it might be good to consult marriage books for lessons on how to repair national politics.
The books emphasize that when a marriage hits a rough patch, both people are likely to feel unknown or misunderstood. So the first task in repairing it is to seek empathetic understanding of the other person — understanding the other person’s likes and dislikes, how half-forgotten wounds in the past can trigger ridiculous overreactions in the present.
The second task is to understand the marriage itself. Each person brings into the marriage a pattern of interaction absorbed from his or her original family. Then over time the couple creates their own pattern of interaction, which may propel them to act in ways that neither person particularly likes.
A common dysfunctional script is the demand/withdrawal cycle. One partner makes a request of the other but there’s a hint of blame. The other partner hears it as complaining, and just withdraws.
This prompts the person making the request to make the blaming more explicit, in turn causing the withdrawing partner to withdraw more. The more the latter disappears, the more the former creates a scene to get any response.
The third task is to recognize that repairing strife will require both spouses to become better people.
When you read these books in the context of today’s tribalism, you’re reminded that we’ve had relational tears since the beginning. Overcoming tribalism means taking care of problems that weren’t addressed at the founding and not during Reconstruction.
The crucial step, which several books come back to, is the raw and willful decision each partner must make just to recommit. The relationship is strife-ridden. Every fiber of your body says to retreat to the safety of your foxhole. But you have to lunge toward intimacy.
Mike Mason says in “The Mystery of Marriage”: “A marriage lives, paradoxically, upon those almost impossible times when it is perfectly clear to the two partners that nothing else but pure sacrificial love can hold them together.” This involves, he writes, “a deliberate choosing ... of relationship over isolation.”
That involves a relentless turning toward each other. John Gottman, who I suppose is the dean of marriage experts, describes relationship as a pattern of bids and volleys. One partner makes a conversational bid: “Look how beautiful the sunset looks!” The other partner can either respond with a toward bid: “Wow. Incredible. Thanks for pointing it out!”; or an against bid: “I was reading the paper, do you mind?”; or a turning-away bid, which would be not responding at all.
Successful marriages, Gottman finds, have five toward bids for every one of the other kinds.
The relationship masters actively scan the social horizon for things they appreciate about the other person to say thank you.
The books are humbling for anybody who has messed up relationships. But they’re inspiring for anybody thinking about politics. Repairing a relationship can be a process of transformation. Red or blue, we are stuck together permanently in this country. And as the saying goes, the only way to get out of this mess is to get into it.