When He Feels Judged and She Feels Unheard: A Way Forward for Men
There are so many different kinds of people in the world that it’s almost impossible to generalize about men and women without being misunderstood. But patterns do emerge—and as a therapist, the more people you see, the more you find them cropping up here and there over the long term. None of these is universal, and even the examples that fit a given pattern will have novel elements. But describing patterns can be helpful, and much is lost when we give up on that effort out of zeal for political purity or fear of being misconstrued.
What I’m saying in this post does not apply to every couple. It might not even apply to every couple I have in mind as I write it. It certainly doesn’t apply to couples in which one person is narcissistically entitled and doesn’t give a hoot about the other person’s feelings; those need a very different kind of help. But I’m pretty convinced that the particular dynamic I’ve been seeing lately is common enough that a blogpost on it could be helpful, so here goes. It takes up some of the themes in my 11/27/2023 post about Couple's Therapy: Why Fights Escalate & How To Stop Them.
Meryl Streep recently said a poignant thing onstage at an event held by the Washington Post. It made a big impact, in that many women and some men have reposted it with passion. The gist was, “Women speak the language of men, but men don’t speak the language of women.” It reminded me of Deborah Tannen’s 1990 book, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which remains justly popular.
There’s a vast scholarly literature on gender differences in social space, discourse, and conflict. The differences in how we tend to communicate are consistent enough that it makes sense to call them two different languages—provided we bear in mind that this is a metaphor, an overstatement that helps an important point get articulated. If men and women really spoke two different languages, most of us would be completely unintelligible to each other, just as 80% of Americans are monolingual.
When couples argue, and the couple is half female and half male, it often happens that they talk past each other because they have different understandings of the point of the conversation. As is often observed, most men tend to be more information-oriented and solution-focused, while most women tend to be more expressive of their experience and focused on making themselves understood. Neither person is necessarily competent at those tasks, or at selecting somebody who is, or at finding ways to encompass all four of the values which those tasks represent (accuracy, pragmatism, authenticity, and acknowledgement). Often those values don’t even fit together so well anyway. So the pitfalls become pretty evident after you’ve seen a few hundred or a few thousand of these arguments unfold, in a large number of different couples with varying levels of rhetorical skill, self-awareness, psychological mindedness, and depth of commitment.
An interesting thing keeps happening. Guys who have been socialized to care about women’s experience tend to be quite preoccupied with their own goodness or badness. If you’re a man who has robustly feminist sisters; if you have a mother who was either crushed by an oppressive male, or resolutely empowered (or both, where a gendered trauma drove an eventual political awakening); if you have women in your life whose grievances ever alarmed you about your own role in something called “patriarchy,” you are likely to be vigilant about what women think of you. You might really hate being seen as a bad human being until proven otherwise. And if this has been a big issue in your environment, you might even be hyper-vigilant about it, always churning out new evidence that you’re a decent man—fully a man and fully decent, thank you very much.
That can be exhausting, and even after you get over it and decide to let your ordinary humane demeanor speak for itself, that old urgent need to defend your own goodness rises to the fore whenever a woman confronts you with anything that feels like grievance—regardless of the facts. Uh-oh, one says to oneself, it’s time to prove once again that I am not whatever monster this person may have in mind. And then it’s off to the races…
That frame of mind gets in the way when you’re trying to connect to somebody who’s annoyed or even furious with you. It locks you in to defending yourself, usually by disputing whatever details of her presentation strike you as inaccurate embellishments that weaken your case and strengthen hers (a zero-sum game). So you seize upon those details, trying to play defense and score points at the same time. But even if you’re entirely correct about such details (e.g., exactly when some event took place, or how many times you took out the trash, or whether one thing happened before or after something else, etc.), and even if they actually matter to the issue at hand—often they don’t—you are still getting nowhere. Being right matters far less than it seems like it should.
That is because (for the moment) the woman you’re talking to may not be so interested in the individual facts, or not in the same ones you’re disputing. Her main interest may be in what she sees as the general arc of what took place, and how it is making her feel. Until you fit that piece into place, by understanding her position and showing you understand it, nothing you say will matter much—especially not an apology. Notice: showing you understand is the main thing. It’s even more important than actually agreeing with what you’ve understood. Why? Because the biggest relational threat to anybody is the prospect that their personal experience just does not matter. That’s why you’re so invested in defending yourself, and why she’s so invested in establishing her perspective.
Do not apologize—at least not at the beginning. Listen, empathize, and evoke her suggestions about what would restore the connection between the two of you. Do all the good stuff that an apology is supposed to accomplish, but without saying the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize”—unless two things are the case: (1) you really do regret whatever words or actions you’re apologizing for, and (2) she asks for an apology. If she doesn’t, the only reason to give one is if your feelings of regret are still there after you’ve done the other things apologies are supposed to do, such as: take some appropriate degree of responsibility, reach for reconnection, and offer a suitable policy improvement or some sort of balancing gesture (and then, of course, check in and see if those moves helped).
Otherwise, saying “I’m sorry” can cost more than it’s worth, because it makes you feel defeated in a power struggle, and the fight is lost by everyone so long as it remains a power struggle, no matter which of you “wins.” If only one of you “wins,” you both lose.
Another problem with the words “I’m sorry” is that they can take the place of whatever reparation, or new pact, or emotional work, is really needed. Get that done instead, and the explicit apology might be quite unnecessary. That’s what “sorry doesn’t pay my bills” means, in a less obnoxious form.
You will both be better served by focusing on improvements to the reality between you, than by placing blame and eating blame. Blame is about resentment (and resentment is, by the way, the biggest impediment to a good sex life for a couple). You resent me for something, so you blame me; I eat the blame, and now I resent you in turn. Blame is responsibility plus resentment, and nobody needs resentment in their diet. Why would I “eat the blame”? Well, to restore peace. But also to show I’m good, since a bad man would not accept any responsibility. If a good man does refuse to take responsibility, it’s because the accusation is either false, or partly true but so awful in his own eyes that accepting it would make him, well, bad. In other words, taking responsibility and refusing to do so can both be ways of broadcasting my terribly urgent claim that I-am-good-not-bad.
Here are two generalizations about conflict in couples:
When a man relentlessly defends himself in an argument with a woman, he is usually doing it to protect the goodness of his character: I am a good person! Can’t you see that?
When a woman exerts indignation in a relationship with a man, she is usually asserting her rights, her boundaries, her prerogatives: I matter! Can’t you see that?
Until the man stops trying to prove to her, and to himself, that he is GOOD and NOT BAD, he cannot go about the urgent business of showing the woman that she—her needs, her dignity, her work, her feelings—really does matter to him.
So the fight continues. Neither person can afford to let up (that’s their mistaken belief) because that would risk validating the other’s right to take them for granted as a doormat. The tragedy is this: even though neither of them has any real interest in subjugating the other (except in really awful relationships, which are not what I’m discussing right now), they have to keep fighting as if that threat were real. Each is reacting to private personal fears of being crushed, by a person who has no actual interest in crushing them.
What they do need are well-placed adjustments to the agreements they make, the ways they habitually do things, the rules of the little relational micro-culture that defines that particular relationship. Clarifying those is the upside of the conflicts—but they’re only worth enduring if the downside is smaller than the upside, the benefit greater than the cost. Learn to “fight” without hurting each other, and you’re pretty much golden.
When I see this pattern, one of the major moves I try to make is to get the man to see this. Let go of the effort to prove that you’re good. Accept that you are good. Accept that others can make you question the quality of your choices, words, and deeds, but don’t accept any assertions that you’re morally inferior to someone else; it’s a non-starter. If they’re merely implying that you might be no good, well, remember that they might not really be trying to imply any such thing—just reporting their personal distress about something you said or did.
After all, whatever you’re worried about is what you’re likely to project, hearing others as if they are saying the very thing you fear. Maybe they are; maybe not. Either way, trust that you are good. Relax. Then you can think clearly enough to help this other person you care about, who is feeling hurt and angry. Once her anger is over, then you can afford to revisit the question of your role in what transpired.
The angrier someone is, the less they care about what your intentions were when they first got angry. Focusing on the merits of your intentions is worse than useless if you do it too early. Nobody can make much use of such information until they are thinking with their prefrontal cerebral cortex instead of their amygdala, the fight/flight/freeze module that can hardly think at all. Two simultaneously enraged people are in a tricky situation, because between them and the exit doors, there is a thick fog of adrenaline and cortisol. One of the doors is an exit from the fight, while another is an exit from the whole relationship. The fog makes it hard to know which is which.
If a guy has a vise-like grip on the effort to defend his character, and it’s driving the two of them bananas, I need to help him let go of it. That works better if I can offer him something else to hold onto instead—which is also true of encouraging somebody to quit an addiction, like alcohol or gambling: you can’t just take something away, you have to replace it.
The necessary, new, better thing is often hidden behind the more familiar thing he thinks he needs to keep on using despite poor results. As an analogy, consider the recreational abuse of “whippets,” those little metal canisters of compressed nitrous oxide gas. It can indeed be poisonous (especially over time), but the main way nitrous oxide hurts and even kills people is by displacing the oxygen we need to survive. Defending yourself instead of reaching out to your upset lady is a naively misguided tactic that blocks the interpersonal docking-site where you would otherwise connect. It also blocks the space in you where a new interpersonal repertoire could otherwise take root.
What’s the better thing that should replace it? A stance of really believing in your own goodness, followed by the unfolding lived experience of soberly managing your partner’s distress in ways that afford dignity to you both. Without requiring either of you to lose face, you try to marshal all your available warmth, patience, and agility for somebody who deserves that kind of effort. Of course, this is harder to do if you don’t really feel she does deserve it. And if that’s what your gut and/or your mind tells you, well, that’s a whole other blog post. Those aren’t the relationships I’m thinking of right now.
This post is for people in resilient, deep romantic relationships that are still troubled by frequent conflicts that don’t make enough sense, don’t end soon enough, and don’t feel resolved. Replace bids for power and control with bids for connection. Replace verbal self-defense with curiosity about the cause and nature of the trouble, attunement to the other person’s feelings, and an eventual convergence where the problem can be seen as the natural result of a misunderstanding between two good people.
Most of the time, the root of a couple’s conflict is not anyone’s bad intentions or perverse character traits. Maybe somebody dropped the ball, and the other one didn’t; maybe somebody really wronged the other in a strongly asymmetric, lamentable way. Those happen. But the majority of “fights” are about big broad themes, conveniently jammed into currently local situations that are in themselves quite trivial. If a couple says, “We fight about stupid sh*t all the time,” the underlying themes are probably Am I good, or bad? and Am I somebody, or nothing?
Ideally, you could each spontaneously blurt out at the very same instant, “You’re virtuous!” and “You’re important!” and the whole tangled ball of bickering darkness would vanish in the sunshine of your mutual loving care. Since that’s pretty unlikely, somebody has to start the process on his own initiative, and draw the other into collaboration on a positive feedback loop that brings you both out of the mud and up into peace and fun and togetherness.
Which of you two should take up that leadership task, this time? Whoever is up for it? Whoever is less upset? Whoever is currently blocking it by prioritizing moralistic self-defense instead? My answer here is a partial one, but it does fit in: Sir, there is a gratifying experience of masculine, mature, competent role-appropriate behavior waiting for you right under your nose.
Snap out of the trance you’re in (the one about proving you’re a good person), and you’ll see it right there for the taking. If you can escape your own worry about being insulted, you may be able to guide your partner out of the miserable state of anger and protest that you both want to quench. And if you know what not to put up with, and how to make those boundaries clear without being scary or overwhelmed, you can calmly assess the quality of what she does with your contribution. Is the peacemaking effort reciprocated? Is the reparative kindness mutual? Does everyone present—all two of you—seem to prefer peace as soon as it’s genuinely available, or is somebody prolonging the conflict for bad or murky reasons?
This approach is not always a good fit for every relationship, nor does it work miracles. But if the couple has the right stuff without the right repertoire, this approach can get them on track toward learning how to use what they’ve got. Sometimes that starts with a man giving up an illusory project of vindicating his character, and replacing it with a real project of connecting with the person he cares about. You don’t need to prove you’re a good man by arguing that you are, if you can do it with loving behavior instead.
Of course, that requires a partner who won’t squander the opportunity you’re offering, or take opportunistic advantage of it by repeatedly asking too much of you in exchange for peace, or persistently gaslighting you with blame you don’t deserve. You’ll have to watch for that; if it’s there, you must notice it and take steps, but if it’s not, you’d better stop worrying about it.
Easily said, I know; harder to do. But very, very possible.