We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology . . . But when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day summit to the management of a bathroom, and positively absurd to hire a professional mediator to help us identify the right time to leave the house to go out for dinner.
I’ve married a lunatic, he thinks, at once scared and self-pitying, as their taxi makes its way at speed through the deserted suburban streets. His partner, no less incensed, sits as far away from him as it is possible to do in the backseat of a taxi. There is no space in Rabih’s imagination for the sort of marital discord in which he is presently involved. He is in theory amply prepared for disagreement, dialogue, and compromise, but not over such utter stupidity. He’s never read or heard of squabbling this bad over such a minor detail. Knowing that Kirsten will be haughty and distant with him possibly until the second course only adds to his agitation. He looks over at the imperturbable driver—an Afghan, to judge from the small plastic flag glued to the dashboard. What must he think of such bickering between two people without poverty or tribal genocide to contend with? Rabih is, in his own eyes, a very kind man who has unfortunately not been allotted the right sort of issues upon which to exercise his kindness. He would find it so much easier to give blood to an injured child in Badakhshan or to carry water to a family in Kandahar than to lean across and say sorry to his wife.
Not all domestic concerns carry equivalent prestige. One can quickly be made to look a fool for caring a lot about how much noise the other person makes while eating cereal or how long they want to keep magazines beyond their publication dates. It’s not difficult to humiliate someone who cleaves to a strict policy on how to stack a dishwasher or how quickly the butter ought to be returned to the fridge after use. When the tensions which bedevil us lack glamour, we are at the mercy of those who might wish to label our concerns petty and odd. We can end up frustrated and at the same time too doubtful of the dignity of our frustrations to have the confidence to outline them calmly for our dubious or impatient audiences.
In reality, there are rarely squabbles over “nothing” in Rabih and Kirsten’s marriage. The small issues are really just large ones that haven’t been accorded the requisite attention. Their everyday disputes are the loose threads that catch on fundamental contrasts in their personalities.
Were he a keener student of his commitments and disappointments, Rabih might, in relation to the air temperature, have explained from under the duvet: “When you say you want a window open in the middle of winter, it scares and upsets me—emotionally rather than physically. It seems to me to speak of a future in which precious things will be trampled upon. It reminds me of a certain sadistic stoicism and cheerful bravery in you which I am generally in flight from. On some subconscious level, I feel afraid that it’s not really fresh air you want but that, instead, you’d ideally like to push me out of the window in your charming but brusque, sensible, daunting way.”
And were Kirsten similarly keen to examine her position on punctuality, she might have delivered her own touching oration to Rabih (and the Afghan driver) on the way to the restaurant: “My insistence on leaving so early is in the end a symptom of fear. In a world of randomness and surprises, it’s a technique I’ve developed to ward off anxiety and an unholy, unnameable sense of dread. I want to be on time the same way others lust for power and from a similar drive for security; it makes a little sense, though only a little, in light of the fact that I spent my childhood waiting for a father who never showed up. It’s my own crazy way of trying to stay sane.”
With their respective needs contextualized like this, with each side appreciating the sources of the other’s beliefs, a new flexibility might have ensued. Rabih could have suggested setting out for Origano not much past six thirty, and Kirsten might have arranged an airlock for their bedroom.
Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can’t be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counterarguments or, alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character.
The two parties just hope the problems—so boring to them both—will simply go away.
As it happens, it’s in the middle of yet another stand-off about the window and the air temperature that Kirsten’s friend Hannah calls from Poland where she lives with her partner and asks how “it”—by which she means the marriage (a year old now)—is going.
Kirsten’s husband has donned an overcoat and woollen hat to maximize the force of his objection to his wife’s demands for fresh air and is sitting huddled in childish self-pity in a corner of the room with the duvet over him. She has just referred to him, and not for the first time, as a big Jessie.
“Just great,” answers Kirsten.
However fashionable an openness around relationships might be, it remains not a little shameful to have to admit that one just may, despite so many opportunities for reflection and experiment, have gone ahead and married the wrong person.
“I’m here with Rabih, having a quiet night in, catching up on some reading.”
There is in reality no ultimate truth in either Rabih’s or Kirsten’s mind as to how things actually are between them. Their lives involve a constant rotation of moods. Over a single weekend they might spin from claustrophobia to admiration, desire to boredom, indifference to ecstasy, irritation to tenderness. To arrest the wheel at any one point in order to share a candid verdict with a third party would be to risk being held forever to a confession which might, with hindsight, turn out to reflect only a momentary state of mind—gloomy pronouncements always commanding an authority that happier ones can’t trump.
So long as they keep making sure there are no witnesses to their struggles, Kirsten and Rabih are free not to have to decide quite how well or how badly things are going between them.
The ordinary challenging relationship remains a strangely and unhelpfully neglected topic. It’s the extremes that repeatedly grab the spotlight—the entirely blissful partnerships or the murderous catastrophes—and so it is hard to know what we should make of, and how lonely we should feel about, such things as immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors, and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty.
Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don’t. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives.
But too often a realistic sense of what an endurable relationship is ends up weakened by silence, societal or artistic. We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we are unhappy, we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.