#5: Barreling Over the Falls (Part 3 - Desire and Deliberate Destruction)

Now that we have a better understanding of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, there are no doubt those among us whose mental panic alarms are going crazy as times when the horsemen have trotted into recent conversations resurface in our memories. Don't worry—yet. As we discussed in class, even couples that have stable, happy relationships will find that three of the four horsemen still rear their ugly heads from time to time. Although the frequency of the horsemen's appearance differs between stable and unstable relationships (for a clip of Dr. Gottman explaining this idea, click here), there is only one of these four potentially devastating types of interaction that basically doesn't happen at all among happy couples. When we discussed as a class our initial ideas of which horseman wouldn't be used by happy couples and why, class members gave various answers and provided logical explanations for their reasoning. However, none of us has done over 30 years of research on this stuff, so let's stick with what the expert has to say. As we read together in class, Gottman has written, "The amount of contempt in stable, happy marriages is essentially zero" (The Marriage Clinic, p. 47).

So that answers the question "Which?", but we are still left with the question "Why?" Why is it that contempt is absent from happy relationships? The answer is simple, and it can be summed up in a single word—desire. Happy couples want to be happy, so they are happy. I firmly believe that we get what we really want in life. Now I know some of you are thinking that I'm crazy, but I am convinced that this is true. You might say, "Well, I want to have a good relationship, but I don't have one. Therefore that can't be true." My question to you is, "Are you sure?" Take a good hard look at your behavior. Is it consistent with having a good relationship, whatever the relationship might be? What kinds of things do you do on a regular basis to make yourself and/or your partner miserable? Ultimately, each individual must ask, "Am I sabotaging my relationship?"

That is where this discussion begins and ends. If a person uses contempt (or in other words, if a person tries to hurt his/her partner), can that person honestly say that he or she wants to have a good relationship with the person that he or she is trying to hurt? At the very least, the answer at that specific moment in time has to be a resounding "No." I repeat: we get what we really want. If we want to hurt people, we can probably do it fairly easily. As the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, "People sometimes talk of bestial [or animal] cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.” Some among us are well trained in the art of contempt, brandishing a belittling brush to paint our partners as miserable wretches deserving of our denouncement. If we are guilty of doing this, however, we will be left with a relationship that is as dark and desolate as we have made it out to be. Simply put, happy couples don't try to hurt each other. Do they hurt each other? Certainly. We all do some pretty stupid things at times. But do they hurt each other on purpose? No—and that's what sets them apart.