A CONFLICT BETWEEN HUSBAND AND WIFE

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to do therapeutic work with a professional couple involved in bitter conflicts over issues they considered nonnegotiable. The destructiveness of their way of dealing with their conflicts was reflected in their tendency to escalate a dispute about almost any specific issue (for exam­ple, a household chore, the child’s bedtime) into a power struggle in which each spouse felt that his or her self-esteem or core identity was at stake.

Many couples involved in such conflicts do not seek help; they continue to abuse one another, sometimes violently, or they break up. The couple that I worked with sought help for several reasons. On the one hand, their conflicts were becoming physically violent. This frightened them, and it also ran counter to their strongly held intellectual values regarding violence. On the other hand, there were strong constraints making it difficult for them to separate. Their child would suffer; they felt they would be considerably worse off economically; and they had mutually congenial intellectual, aesthetic, sexual, and recreational interests that would be difficult to continue engaging in together if they sepa­rated. As is often the case in such matters, it was the woman—being less ashamed to admit the need for help—who took the initiative to seek the assis­tance of a skilled third party.

The wife, who worked (and preferred to do so), wanted the husband to share equally in the household and child care responsibilities; she considered equality of the genders to be a core personal value. The husband wanted a “traditional marriage” with a conventional division of responsibilities in which he would be the primary income-producing worker outside the home, while his wife would principally do the work related to the household and child care. The husband con­sidered household work and child care inconsistent with his deeply rooted image of adult masculinity. The conflict seemed nonnegotiable to the couple. For the wife, it would mean betrayal of her feminist values to accept her husband’s terms; for him, it would violate his sense of male adult identity to become deeply involved in housework and child care.

Yet this nonnegotiable conflict became negotiable when, with the help of the therapist, the husband and wife were able to listen to and really understand the other’s feelings and how their respective life experiences had led them to the views they each held. Understanding the other’s position fully, and the feelings and expe­riences behind them, made each person feel less hurt and humiliated by the other’s position and readier to seek solutions that would accommodate the interests of both. They realized that with their joint incomes they could afford to pay for household and child care help that would enable the wife to be considerably less burdened by such responsibilities without increasing the husband’s chores in these areas (though doing so, of course, lessened the amount of money they had avail­able for other purposes).

This solution was not perfect for either partner. Each would have preferred that the other share his or her own view of what a marriage should be like. But their deeper understanding of the other’s position made them feel less humili­ated and threatened by it and less defensive toward the other. It also enabled them to negotiate a mutually acceptable agreement that lessened tensions, despite the continuing differences in basic perspective. (See Deutsch, 1988, for further discussion of negotiating the nonnegotiable.)