Marriage is a peculiar arrangement. Two people become so captivated by one another that they promise to spend the rest of their lives together, only to discover that neither knows how to load the dishwasher correctly. What began with candlelight, whispered affection, and the remarkable pleasure of discovering another person's body becomes a disagreement about whether a coffee mug belongs on the top or bottom rack. The surprising thing is not that these arguments occur. It is how personally we take them. Your spouse has apparently loaded the dishwasher incorrectly for the four thousandth time, and somehow the matter has become a referendum on whether you have ever been loved. The argument is no longer about the mug. It probably never was. Somewhere between falling in love and learning to live together, the person whose every movement once fascinated us has become the person whose breathing we occasionally find irritating.
We tend to imagine aggression as the enemy of love. A healthy couple communicates respectfully, validates one another's feelings, resolves disagreements, and learns to compromise. These are admirable accomplishments, although they make marriage sound suspiciously like a well-managed committee meeting. Nobody falls passionately in love because someone demonstrates exceptional conflict-resolution skills. We fall in love because another person awakens something in us that we cannot quite explain. We want to be near them, touch them, impress them, and discover what they might want from us. We are fascinated by their difference, even as we begin imagining a future in which that difference will somehow become entirely compatible with our own desires. Romance makes an extraordinary promise: that another person might finally make us feel complete. Marriage introduces the rather inconvenient discovery that this person has desires of their own.
The psychoanalytic understanding of aggression extends beyond hostility or violence. Aggression also participates in assertion, rivalry, frustration, and the experience of encountering another person who does not submit to our wishes. A child reaches for something that cannot be possessed. A lover reaches for a partner who would rather be left alone. A husband imagines an evening of passionate intimacy while his wife imagines eight uninterrupted hours of sleep. Neither desire is unreasonable, but each may experience the other's preference as a disappointment. What begins as the recognition of difference can quickly become an injury to the image we have of ourselves. The husband who is refused may feel undesirable. The wife who is pursued may feel that her own desires have become irrelevant. Both begin to resent the person whose affection they most want to preserve. It is one of the more curious achievements of romantic love that two people can become furious with one another for failing to want precisely the same thing at precisely the same moment. Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt's Imago Relationship Therapy offers an important way of understanding why these frustrations become so emotionally charged. Romantic attraction, in their account, is influenced by internalized images of our earliest relationships. The person who initially seems to promise everything we have been missing may eventually awaken the very disappointments we hoped love would overcome. The wonderfully independent partner becomes emotionally unavailable. The affectionate partner becomes needy. The confident partner becomes controlling. We may conclude that the person we married has changed, although the qualities we now resent may be remarkably similar to those that first attracted us. The independent woman was never particularly interested in being possessed. The affectionate man was never especially comfortable being ignored. The conflict emerges not simply because these qualities have changed, but because the relationship has begun to demand something different from them.
Yet there is another possibility that complicates the familiar account of romantic disappointment. What if the frustration itself has become part of what makes the relationship desirable? A husband may complain endlessly that his wife never initiates affection, while finding himself strangely uncomfortable when she does. Her desire arrives unexpectedly, without the familiar opportunity for him to pursue, persuade, or feel rejected. A wife may resent her husband's emotional withdrawal while becoming suspicious when he begins asking thoughtful questions about her feelings. The old arrangement may have been painful, but at least everyone knew their part. The husband was the disappointed lover. The wife was the pursued partner. Their conflict gave each a recognizable position from which to experience the other. When the arrangement changes, something about their familiar way of loving is suddenly lost.
Freud's account of repetition compulsion makes this difficulty especially interesting. We do not always repeat painful experiences because we are searching for a happier ending. At times, the repetition itself seems to carry an unconscious satisfaction. A person may become attached to the position of being disappointed, rejected, indispensable, or misunderstood. The suffering is genuine, but so is the investment in the relationship that produces it. This does not mean that people secretly wish to be mistreated. It means that unconscious desire is not always organized around what consciously feels pleasurable. A familiar frustration can preserve an image of ourselves that we have come to depend upon. The husband who is always rejected may never have to encounter the vulnerability of being genuinely wanted. The wife who is always pursued may never have to discover what she desires when no one is demanding anything from her. Their aggression sustains a familiar arrangement, even as each insists that the arrangement is destroying their intimacy.
Melanie Klein offers another way of approaching this contradiction through her understanding of ambivalence. Love and hate are not necessarily separate feelings directed toward different people. They can coexist in our relationship with the same person, sometimes within the same afternoon. The spouse who comforts us is also the spouse who disappoints us. The person whose presence feels indispensable may be the person we most desperately want to leave the room. Klein's account of the depressive position concerns the developing capacity to recognize that the loved and hated aspects of another person belong to the same whole person. We do not have to preserve the beloved as entirely good by locating everything disappointing elsewhere. Nor must a moment of anger transform the person we love into someone entirely bad. This sounds like a rather modest achievement until the next marital argument, when a forgotten anniversary, an unreturned phone call, or an ill-timed remark suddenly becomes evidence of someone's entire moral character.
There is also a peculiar satisfaction in being right. A spouse begins with a legitimate complaint, remembers a supporting example from last Thursday, recalls an incident from the previous Christmas, and suddenly possesses enough evidence to establish a pattern extending back to the wedding. The argument becomes a historical investigation in which the verdict was decided before the evidence was collected. Winning promises satisfaction, although it is rarely the satisfaction either person originally wanted. The triumphant spouse has established their innocence at the expense of the person whose affection they still desire. The defeated spouse is now expected to offer that affection with renewed enthusiasm. This is one of the less efficient methods of sustaining romantic passion. Yet the couple may return to it again and again, not simply because they cannot communicate, but because the argument offers each person something familiar. One gets to be right. The other gets to be wronged. Both are spared the more difficult question of what they actually want from one another.
Donald Winnicott approached aggression through the problem of discovering that another person is real. In his account of the use of an object, he describes the importance of an object surviving destruction in unconscious fantasy. The distinction between fantasy and actual behavior is essential. Winnicott was not suggesting that lovers should injure one another to test the strength of their relationship. Rather, he was interested in how another person becomes recognizable as existing beyond our imagined control. The beloved does not disappear because we are angry. They continue to exist, to think, to want, and occasionally to disagree. There is something wonderfully irritating about this. The person we love turns out to be a person, not merely an exceptionally responsive extension of ourselves. The aggression that once seemed to threaten the relationship may become part of discovering that the relationship exists between two separate subjects.
Jessica Benjamin develops a related problem through the dialectic of recognition and destruction. We want to be recognized by another person, but recognition means very little if that person has surrendered every independent desire. Being admired by someone who must agree with us eventually becomes a rather lonely accomplishment. The beloved must remain someone whose wishes cannot be commanded if their desire is to mean anything at all. Yet this introduces a contradiction that marriage cannot permanently resolve. We want the security of being chosen and the excitement of being desired. We want someone who knows us completely and someone who continues to surprise us. We want the beloved to be reliably present without becoming predictable, independently desirable without becoming unavailable, and passionately devoted without becoming demanding. It is an ambitious set of expectations for someone who is also supposed to remember to take out the trash.
The difficulty becomes particularly apparent in sexual intimacy. Desire is not simply an intensified version of getting along. It involves play, difference, imagination, vulnerability, and the encounter with someone whose body and wishes are not our own. A couple can become extraordinarily skilled at maintaining a household while becoming remarkably uninteresting to one another. They coordinate schedules, divide responsibilities, manage finances, and discuss the children with admirable efficiency. Their marriage functions beautifully. Unfortunately, they have begun to resemble two competent administrators who happen to share a bed. The problem is not necessarily that they have become too familiar. It may be that they have become too careful. Each knows what the other expects, and neither wants to risk the inconvenience of wanting something different.
There is a particular kind of aggression concealed within excessive accommodation. A husband agrees to everything his wife suggests, then quietly resents her for making all the decisions. A wife anticipates her husband's needs so thoroughly that he rarely has to ask for anything, then feels furious that he never notices what she wants. Both appear generous. Both may even pride themselves on being unusually considerate. Yet their generosity has become a way of avoiding the aggression involved in asserting a desire of their own. The resentment accumulates in small gestures, delayed responses, forgotten promises, and the familiar declaration that everything is fine. By the time the couple begins discussing their sexual relationship, neither feels particularly interested in becoming vulnerable with someone they have spent years silently resenting.
The integration of aggression does not mean becoming more hostile, argumentative, or sexually forceful. Nor does it mean treating cruelty as an expression of passion. Threats, intimidation, coercion, humiliation, and violence destroy the conditions under which mutual recognition becomes possible. The freedom to desire includes the freedom not to desire, and erotic play depends upon that freedom being respected. The aggression worth considering is the assertiveness involved in having a wish of one's own, the frustration of encountering another person's limits, and the capacity to remain in relationship without demanding that those limits disappear. There is a considerable difference between saying, "I want you," and insisting, "You owe me." The first opens the possibility of an encounter. The second attempts to eliminate the other person's freedom.
Couples therapy can sometimes become another place where aggression is politely concealed. Partners learn to speak gently, validate one another, and use carefully constructed sentences beginning with "I feel." These practices can be useful, especially when conflict has become so reactive that neither person can listen. Yet a husband can say, "I feel hurt when you don't initiate affection," while secretly meaning, "You should want me more." His wife can respond, "I understand that you feel rejected," while privately thinking, "And I understand why." The language has become considerably more civilized. The aggression has not necessarily gone anywhere. The analytic interest is not simply in helping the couple communicate their feelings more effectively, but in discovering what those feelings have come to accomplish within the relationship. Why does disappointment feel humiliating? What makes another person's independence so threatening? Why must one partner always be reasonable while the other becomes difficult? What happens when the accommodating spouse stops accommodating, or when the disappointed lover is finally desired?
These questions can reveal something about the unconscious images through which each person has learned to recognize themselves. One must always be generous. Another must never need too much. One must remain desirable, while the other must remain indispensable. Aggression threatens these images because it exposes desires that do not fit comfortably within them. Yet the attempt to eliminate aggression may preserve the very arrangements that have made the relationship less intimate. The spouse who cannot tolerate disagreement may require the other to become increasingly agreeable. The partner who cannot bear rejection may gradually make desire feel like an obligation. What appears to be the protection of love becomes a way of restricting the beloved's freedom, and the relationship loses something of the difference that first made attraction possible.
There is something liberating about discovering that we can be furious with someone and still love them. A spouse can disappoint us without becoming our enemy. We can refuse a request without abandoning the relationship. An argument can end without either person being declared the winner. The beloved can remain lovable even while behaving in a thoroughly irritating manner. These are not merely lessons in emotional regulation. They are discoveries about the kind of intimacy that becomes possible when neither person has to remain endlessly agreeable to preserve the other's affection. The integration of aggression does not abolish conflict. It allows conflict to become something other than the familiar demand that one person surrender their desire so the other can feel secure.
The title F*cking Forever carries something of this contradiction. The same word can express fury, pleasure, contempt, surprise, or passionate enthusiasm. Its meaning depends upon the relationship in which it is spoken. There is a world of difference between wanting to make love to someone and wanting them to leave you alone, although a long marriage provides ample opportunities to experience both desires toward the same person. The difficulty is not that these feelings coexist. It is that we so often imagine one must be eliminated before the other can be genuine. We want passion without frustration, devotion without dependency, and intimacy without the possibility of being hurt. Yet these wishes may gradually remove the very conditions that make loving another person interesting.
To love someone forever is not to remain forever pleased with them. It is to discover, again and again, that the person beside us has a life beyond our wishes. They will frustrate us, surprise us, misunderstand us, and occasionally insist that the dishwasher was loaded correctly. Their separateness is not simply an obstacle to intimacy. It is part of what allows desire to remain alive. The passionate couple is not necessarily the couple that fights most intensely or reconciles most dramatically. It is the couple in which neither person must disappear to preserve the relationship. Love becomes more interesting when the beloved is allowed to want something different, to disappoint us without being destroyed in our imagination, and to remain someone whose desire cannot finally be possessed. Forever is a long time to spend being agreeable. And an even longer time to spend being right.
References
Benjamin, J. (1995). Recognition and destruction: An outline of intersubjectivity. In Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. Yale University Press. Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition, 18, 7–64.
Hendrix, H. (1988). Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. Henry Holt.
Klein, M. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174.
Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21, 125–153.
Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object and relating through identifications. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 711–716.