How Arguments About Stupid Little Things Turn into Major Blow-ups

The Grouchy Guy:  How Arguments About Stupid Little Things

Turn into Major Blow-ups

BLOGGER:  LAWRENCE JOSEPHS, PHD

I am always surprised by the fact that couples who fight like cats and dogs all the time usually fight about stupid little things that get blown up out of proportion. Someone forgets to clean up after themselves, someone doesn’t want to take directions when driving, someone thinks the kids are being treated too permissively, someone isn’t in the mood to do something like have sex or go out to dinner, someone doesn’t want to spend money on something, etc. These are just all the little conflicts and tensions of married life that require two people with two different personalities, two different points of view, and two different sets of preferences to peacefully negotiate their inevitable differences and come up with a workable compromise. Why is that so difficult to do and why do these little conflicts become triggers of major blow-ups?

The problem seems to be that on average men and women seem to have different ways of managing conflict and angry feelings in a close relationship. When men are annoyed about something and assert their grievance, they want respect and are hypersensitive to not getting it. When women are annoyed about something and assert their grievance, they want reassurance that the relationship is solid, isn’t threatened by the difference in opinion, and are hypersensitive to not getting that reassurance. Men want to feel that their wives respect them no matter what and women want to feel that their husbands still love them no matter what, though women also want respect and men also want love. Perceived lack of respect and perceived lack of reassurance is what escalates a minor conflict about a petty issue into a major blow-up. The argument takes on a larger symbolic significance once the couple becomes insecure about whether or not they really love and respect each other. That’s the underlying hot button issue that can lead to a major conflagration.

When a difference of opinion arises and our viewpoint is questioned, it is only natural to defend ourselves by further justifying our own position while more strongly attacking our rival’s position in order to win the argument. Once a competitive mindset has been activated, that winning the argument is all that matters, the stage is set for an escalating conflict that may get totally out of control. Many men are hypersensitive to being questioned by their wives as though being questioned puts their masculine competence in doubt. To assert their dominance men start to make their argument all the more forcefully as their temper is rising. Of course, women don’t want to feel bullied into a submissive position so they too defend themselves all the more forcefully, leading to an escalating conflict. As men get more and more frustrated that they can’t get respect by winning the argument, they start expressing more disgust with and contempt for their wives and as they begin to get fed-up start to threaten to withdraw in anger. At this point, many women get alarmed that the relational connection is threatened and start demanding reassurance that they are still loved by a devoted partner who seems to be threatening hostile rejection. Of course, a man is not going to give reassurance that he still loves his partner when he is fuming inside and beginning to withdraw in anger. This is the stand-off: the man demanding respect or else to be left alone in peace and the woman demanding reassurance through some intimate gesture that brings them closer together and neither getting satisfaction. Then it’s a screaming match.

The challenge for anger management is captured by the title of the famous Rolling Stones song “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Men aren’t going to get respect and women aren’t going to get reassurance once their partner is upset and angry because people have difficulty thinking straight when they are only seeing red because they are so angry. You have a difficult choice to make, give up trying to win the argument so you can diffuse an escalating conflict or keep trying to win the argument, knowing it’s just going to end up in a big blow-up. The best response is simply to say: “This isn’t worth getting in a big fight about, let’s discuss the issue later when we are in a better mood.” Since the hot button issue must be discussed sooner or later, you have to remember that you can never talk someone out of their true feelings. Everyone is entitled to their feelings or point of view so there is no sense trying to prove that someone’s feelings or point of view are wrong and your feelings and point of view are right. So you may just as well cut to the chase. The way to arrive at a negotiated solution is to accept the fact of eventual compromise and concession. So you say something like this: “I understand that from your point of view it looks this way and from my point of view it seems exactly the opposite. Let’s not waste time trying to change each others’ minds because we will just get into a big fight and just dig in our heels all the more. So let’s just figure out what kind of compromise or concessions we can each live with.” Ultimately, you can always just walk away from a fight if your partner isn’t ready to negotiate a workable compromise. A little time-out from the relationship gives everybody time to cool off and arrive at a more conciliatory attitude.

Being in a long-term relationship is about making compromises for the sake of the relationship. You can’t always have everything your way even if you genuinely believe your way is the best way, the right way, or the correct way to go. Being in a relationship means we have to patiently suffer our partner’s mistakes and errors of judgment and still find it within ourselves to respect and love them anyway. Nobody is perfect so part of being married is learning to tolerate our partner’s imperfections, which means letting your partner do things his or her way even when you know for a fact that his or her way is the absolutely wrong way to do things. We all have to learn from our own mistakes so we can’t micro-manage our partners to make them do everything our way which is of course the “right” way. So we have a choice:  We can try to win every argument and get our partner to do everything our way and end up fighting all the time. Or we can give up trying to win arguments and try instead to negotiate a workable compromise, perhaps having to suffer your partner’s errors of judgment. Yet at least you won’t be arguing all the time and your partner, following your lead, will learn to let you do things your way even when they think you are dead wrong.

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THE GROUCHY GUY: WHY GROUCHY GUYS DREAD MARRIAGE

Why Grouchy Guys Dread Marriage

BLOGGER:  LAWRENCE JOSEPHS, PHD

Here is a list of men’s worst fears and how marriage or any long-term committed relationship arouses those fears:

1) Wimp: Any man who is too frightened to stand up to his wife or to other men.

2) Pussy whipped: Any man who is shamefully submissive in relation to his wife because he is afraid of antagonizing her.

3) Mama’s Boy: A man who is shamefully dependent on his wife because he would be lost without her.

4) Limp Dick: An impotent man, psychologically as well as physically, who can’t get it up, who can’t satisfy his wife sexually or otherwise.

5) Cuckold: A man whose wife cheats on him or flirts in front of him with other men and he let’s her get away with it.

Committed relationships unconsciously expose men to men’s worst fears of being emasculated. Therefore falling in love is dangerous for men. Men think marriage can be an emasculating trap because a castrating wife can turn a husband into a wimpy, limp dick, and pussy whipped mama’s boy who is cuckolded. This is a straight man’s worst nightmare, almost as bad as getting fucked up the ass by a thug in prison who is going to use him as his personal bitch. Yet many men will face these dangers because they are also hopeless romantics and fools for love who will do anything to win the woman of their dreams. So men do enter the lion’s den of marriage but they do so self-protectively to play it safe. Men enter marriage in a self-protective way that hedges their bets. Men go into marriage with a certain type of protective armor on. They will maintain as much of their independence, self-sufficiency, personal space, and freedom as their wives will let them get away with. They keep their feelings and their thoughts to themselves, not really letting their wives into their inner sanctum. They become grouchy when wives threaten that protective armor because they don’t want their hidden vulnerabilities exposed.

Men are secretly ashamed of their monogamous tendencies because privately they think that only an emotionally needy mama’s boy would choose monogamy for the sake of emotional intimacy over a life spent playing the field and making sexual conquests. A real man like James Bond or Hugh Hefner spends his entire life enjoying the pleasures of being a playboy having sex with an endless variety of young beautiful women. Men secretly believe that only wimpy men (i.e. losers) submit to having sex with just one woman for the rest of their lives. Grouchy guys look around and see that the alpha males in our culture don’t seem to be particularly monogamous. They see Hollywood superstars who never get married and instead spend their entire lives having sex with new starlets, siring and supporting children out of wedlock. Or they see captains of industry who engage in serial monogamy. These rich men, like Donald Trump, can easily afford to trade in their middle-aged wives for younger models. And closer to home are all the guys at the office who seem to be getting away with having extra-marital affairs and even have the audacity to brag about it.

Monogamous guys begin to feel envious and sexually inadequate in relation to guys who remain free to enjoy playing the field. That’s why they are so grouchy. They take out their frustration with themselves on their girlfriends and wives. It doesn’t do anything for their male egos to remind themselves what loyal and devoted husbands they are when they are beginning to feel like first class shmucks who are missing out on all the fun.

There has been great controversy in the social sciences as to whether or not men are biologically predisposed to form monogamous relationships. Yet what is not widely appreciated is most contemporary evolutionary psychologists now assume that strong but not exclusive monogamous tendencies are now thought to be biologically based. Humans are one of the few monogamously inclined primates. Chimpanzees are promiscuous and gorillas have harems. Humans are thought to have evolved towards monogamy as females started needing help raising their helpless big-brained babies who take almost two decades to reach full maturity. Monogamy evolved as children with both a mother and a father survived and reproduced more successfully than children did with only a mother to take care of them. Humans, men included, possess an instinctive tendency to pursue a quality over quantity reproductive strategy. Wanting to have sex with just one woman for the rest of one’s life in order to sire children with just one woman is a completely natural and in fact powerful tendency within the hearts of men. All men have a sense of what it means to be a “good Dad.” It means putting all your resources into raising a handful of children who will be given every advantage in life. All men intuitively appreciate that what is best for children is for them to be raised by two loving parents who function well as a team together who will funnel all their joint resources towards enhancing their children’s long-term prospects.

Men feel guilty when they fail to live up to this “gold standard” and this guilt isn’t simply imposed by society. Men know that their children are getting less than they deserve when their family life is characterized by ugly bickering, infidelity, and/or contentious divorce. Pursuing a quantity over quality reproductive strategy by siring children with different women means that none of those children will reap either the emotional or the economic benefits of a full-time devoted father. In a study I conducted at Adelphi University where I teach I discovered that over 20% of undergraduates were aware of parental cheating and those undergraduates were significantly more likely to cheat or be cheated on themselves. Thus it may be natural for men to want to cheat but cheating is not only devastating for the betrayed spouse but has real long-term effects on the future love lives of their children, independent of the impact of parental separation or divorce. What kind of example is a philandering Dad setting for his son and what is he conveying to his daughter about how a devoted woman in a long-term relationship can expect to be treated by the man she loves?

Human males invest more in raising their children than do any other primates (i.e. apes and monkey’s, human’s closest animal relatives). Even though women tend to remain the primary caretakers of children in comparison to men, in comparison to males of most other species most human fathers seem like Mr. Mom. Thus not only have human males evolved towards monogamous arrangements with women but they have also evolved to have a strong paternal caretaking instinct. Thus what men are born with is a deep-seated inner conflict, a potentially overwhelming conflict between love and lust. On the one hand, men lust for endless sexual variety with young beautiful healthy women at the height of their fertility. On the other hand, men have a deep yearning to mate for life with a soulmate with whom they will become dedicated fathers who will provide for, protect, play with, and nurture a brood of children and grandchildren. What’s a man to do?

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Grouchy Guy: Monogamy

GROUCHY GUY: MONOGAMY

BLOGGER:  LAWRENCE JOSEPHS, PHD

Why are grouchy guys so grouchy? Why do they make mountains out of molehills and pick fights about stupid little things? What do they have to be so angry about when more often than not their girlfriends and wives bend over backwards to please them and make their lives comfortable? Is it simply that they don’t like their jobs and come home to take their work frustrations out on their wives or children? That’s part of it but there is often a deeper reason, one that grouchy guys don’t like admitting to their partners because it is offensive to women. Often times they don’t even like to admit it to themselves because they feel guilty about feeling this way.

To put it bluntly, grouchy guys resent relinquishing their sexual freedom for the sake of long-term monogamous relationships, even with women they truly love. In a nutshell, men in committed relationships become grouchy because it frustrates their pressing desires for casual sex without strings attached with an endless variety of young, beautiful, and sexually indulgent women. Though most men don’t get close to gratifying this sexual fantasy when they are single, once they are in a committed relationship they begin to privately blame their girlfriends and wives for preventing them from making their dreams of playboy paradise come true.

Men don’t like to admit this fact to women or even to themselves. First, men know it’s an unrealistic fantasy and that they weren’t really such studs when they were single. They are ashamed of this fact because at some primal level men believe that if a man is not a first rate stud he is a first rate loser. Getting married then seems like settling for second best, an admission of defeat that they couldn’t cut the mustard as a first class seducer of women.  Second, men feel guilty about their womanizing ambitions. Men appreciate that thinking about women as sex objects to be loved and left to boost the male ego hurts women’s feelings even when men don’t have any real intentions of being unfaithful.  Men fully understand that any self-respecting woman wants to think that she is well worth the price of monogamy and that it wounds  a woman’s self-esteem to realize that her grouchy guy resents having to be faithful to her as though marital fidelity is some huge, almost unbearable sacrifice.

Being in a long-term monogamous relationship means giving up casual sex with other women in exchange for enduring love and affection from a woman with whom you might hope to raise a family. In other words, being monogamous requires men to endure a certain type of sexual frustration that men find difficult to endure. Men in general are much more interested in casual sex than are women. In comparison to women, men want to have more sexual partners in a lifetime, want to have more sexual variety, have more sexual fantasies about having sex with someone other than their current partner, utilize more pornography, utilize more prostitution, want to have sex earlier in a relationship, have more willingness to have sex with strangers, are more predisposed to have extra-marital affairs, and are more predisposed to have extra-marital affairs in search of casual sex as opposed to a finding a serious lover.  Curiously, though girls usually reach puberty several years earlier than boys do, the average boy has his first orgasm at age 13 while the average girl has her first orgasm at age 15. And if boys don’t masturbate they start having wet dreams to relieve themselves. In contrast, some women can go years if not decades without ever having their first orgasm and without ever having one in their sleep. Many men just seem to be driven by their sexual desires in a way that many women aren’t and men’s sexual desires often have a more impersonal and insistent quality than do women’s.

This sexual difference can be an underlying source of perpetual conflict in long-term relationships and is often a touchy issue that is difficult to discuss without being defensive. Ultimately, men have to learn how to deal with the sexual frustrations of monogamy without dumping their frustrations on their girlfriends and wives. To some extent women help men do that not by learning new sexual techniques, not by giving them quickies every time they want to be sexually serviced, not by getting breast implants, and certainly not by looking the other way while they cheat. You can help him become less grouchy by not taking his grouchiness so personally, making fun of him when he is acting like a jerk, and setting firm limits on his surly behavior when it goes over the top. Your grouchy guy has to learn how to get over himself and you can help him do that by helping him not take his fragile male ego so seriously.

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?

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