House of Eratosthenes

This is one phony white-coat-propeller-beanie-wearing pocket-protector clipboard-carrying got-beat-up-in-high-school egghead study I can certainly believe…

Preliminary results of a 17-year study of 192 married couples indicate that couples who argue live longer than those suffering in silence.

Early mortality results from “mutual anger suppression, poor communication (of feelings and issues) and poor problem-solving with medical consequences,” the researchers write in the January issue of the Journal of Family Communication. The couples ranged in age from 35 to 69.

“When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict,” said researcher Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus with the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Psychology Department. “Usually nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that’s fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict.”

In this post-cold-war world, the culture of the western world has lost an important ability, and this ability has been a keystone to our most unimpressive but fundamental personal achievements — existing in a healthy way in a marriage, eating in a healthy way, sleeping in a healthy way.

That ability has to do with graciously peeking at your neighbor’s test paper. Borrowing techniques from others without fanfare.

We guard our privacy with zeal and jealousy. But privacy about what? How we argue with our spouses…the contents of our grocery carts. Whack your bratty kid on the seat of his pants, and it’s everybody’s business.

We need professionals to inject their wisdom into marital spats, and household diets. Professionals…who might have the same problems…or worse. Somehow, it’s become culturally unacceptable to say — “hey, so-and-so seems to have a happy marriage, what is it they’re doing that we don’t do?” Or, “hey, those friends of ours don’t huff and puff when they get up from a chair, and they can see their shoes when they stand up straight and look down. What are they eating?”

You see people succeeding where you fail, and resolve to find a difference, that might involve keeping your own individual values. When you “seek professional help” to guide you in these problems, society can filter out these professionals for you. And exert pressure on the professionals that aren’t so filtered.

As the war on the individual continues, we like to define “privacy” as a difficulty involved in communicating with one another…without the intervention of a professional. And so it has become commonplace for people, even people lacking any experience in such a situation, to sing the praises of the professionals and the wonderful things the professionals can do — but entirely rare for anybody to specifically cite the wonderful things the professionals do.

So without them, we are discouraged from taking in any new information about how to live. For a younger couple that is inexperienced in the ways of human conflict, this leaves two options — the ever popular “seek counseling,” or do more and more fighting until you get a divorce.

And most counseling is about paying a professional to find more complaints about the man, on the way to the divorce.

In my own brief marriage, I could see I’d been hoodwinked in childhood — brought up to believe, without anyone outwardly stating it, that everybody’s compatible with everybody else, or at least if they work at it they ought to eventually become that way. It just isn’t so. But I’ve strongly suspected, in the long years since then, that I’m not the only one fooled this way. We desperately want to believe that we all possess uber-compatibility with each other, or at least the makings of it.

It’s our heritage. The class-ism from Middle English society. We have this instinctive egalitarian desire to evolve beyond it.

The tricky thing about egalitarianism, though, is that it can only work on a foundation of other things. What we’re doing is trashing individualism, and expecting zero consequences for doing so when in fact there are consequences. An individual may believe that the point of having money, is to spend it. Another individual might believe the point is all in the saving of it. As individuals they can cope with life just fine, in their own way — but two such individuals cannot built a home together, even though they might have been raised to believe this should be do-able. Not without one of them undergoing a profound structural change in the way they look at money.

I expect this is an important study…because I expect this is the way thing are typically done. Couples marry, and then hope whatever inventory there is of foundational differences in the way they look at life, will work itself out. In our desire for more egalitarianism, we parents tend to neglect to teach our kids that people are different. And then the household does things according to the will of one of the spouses, or the other. Usually the woman. Let’s face it…women are smarter at interacting. People want to interact with them. Television commercials are aimed at them, salesmen talk to them, counselors tailor their marriage advice in such a way that the woman will find it pleasing.

And so the man is left to stew in his juices. And go fishing.

They fight. Or not. They get divorced. Or not. But they’re aggravated by the knowledge that their parents and grandparents didn’t go through any of this…why is that?

There used to be some shame involved in divorce. In fact, there used to be shame involved in just fighting. People did both…but culturally, less was thought of them when they were caught doing it. So the previous generations did some stewing in their own juices as well.

But shame can have a useful side as well, and this is the part I think most people miss. For example — consider this definition from the House of Eratosthenes Glossary…

Arguing in a Vacuum (v.):
An attempt to persuade another mindset which 1) has not agreed on the facts to be considered or 2) already agrees on the thing to be done (see Thing To Do).

…and think on the second of those two clauses. Persuading another consciousness — your spouse — when s/he already agrees on the thing to be done.

I can think of a great example just off the top of my head. My son was born at twelve pounds…his mother had resolved to breastfeed him — but as he approached his second week of life, she had to abandon this because he was being a little piglet.

Now, I’m a dude. Maybe that makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t. I dunno.

I did notice in my years with his mother, that everything that could possibly cost money, did. But the point is, if she can’t make enough milk for the little monster…she can’t do it. I’ve long had the same reputation about arguments that she had about spending money…if an argument can be made, I’ll make one. Well, it isn’t true. I went off to the store and got formula. Looking back on it, maybe a little arguing would have been helpful. Formula isn’t cheap.

But that story has a point to it. When you disagree on what’s good and what’s not good — and believe me, off in mommy-land, there is a white-hot cultural war going on vis a vis the merits of breastfeeding versus formula — arguing might have a chance at being practical if you disagree about the thing or things to do. Otherwise, it is arguing in a vacuum.

And so shame does have a place. In times of old, husbands and wives had a tendency to “not do this” if there was agreement about the thing to do, or not to be done. Why haggle over the reasons why?

Nowadays, every principle that is meritorious, must be articulated…one more time. Every one that has emerged from The Dark Side, must be denounced…one more time. Silence may not be kept. We do tend to do less stewing than generations past, and we do tend to do more yelling…the statistics do say we live longer.

But I can’t escape the feeling that there seem to be conflicts that did not exist previously. And as an adjunct to that, I also can’t escape the feeling that much of this is arguing in a vacuum. Arguing over the merits of doing the things we’re going to do, or not do, when we’ve already agreed on the important stuff, the things to be done, or not done.

But, you see, it’s not “fair” if what I do isn’t as successful as what someone else does. I can’t use their success as my judge because I have put just as much effort into it as they have. And certainly they are not inherently superior to me. The only possible reason for their superior achievement is luck. I can’t copy luck. The only right thing to do is for them to share the fruits of their luck with those who are not so lucky. And if they don’t do so willingly, then that proves they are selfish, evil bastards who don’t deserve all that stuff anyways.

And they’re so arrogant anyways, flaunting their “success” like they did anything to earn it. How I hate them. Their unearned wealth is evidence enough of their guilt.
- JohnJ | 01/26/2008 @ 17:09
Well qurap.

This is bad news for us. Guess we’re going to die young.
- philmon | 01/27/2008 @ 13:35
Nope, we are 180 on this. Couples that argue are the norm rather than the exception. The distinction lies in the fact that some think “we’re in love and shouldn’t argue.”

It’s not the fact that argument is related to longevity, it’s the fact that suppressing argument is unhealthy.

I don’t remember taking a vow on agreement in every situatiuon. I do remember something about compromise. Compromise is such a dirty word these days, on both sides of any issue.

If you want patrisanship, it usually means combat. Big surprise, and there are often casualties involved
- Allen L | 01/28/2008 @ 02:01
No, I don’t think we necessarily disagree about this. There’s an important difference I neglected to highlight in my ramblings, dividing some of the “not-argue” couples from others.

You can do your not-arguing by recognizing that the current disagreement is trivial, or, to be more precise about it, subordinate to other things. It’s a Done Deal, in other words. My current one likes to watch Everybody Loves Raymond, which I think is an abominable show, responsible for much cultural decay. But we don’t argue about it, if it’s what makes her happy, then that makes me happy. Oh, and Battlestar Galactica from 1978…which bored me after a couple episodes when I was a kid, and is painfully boring now. Again, I’m happy to have it in the house if that’s what she likes. And, I have no idea whether she’d prefer me to drink less beer than I do. But I got a wall-mounted bottle opener for my birthday, and it’s one of my prize possessions. She’s happen when I have things that make me happy.

Another relationship from my past comes to mind, in which the person failed to find this kind of harmony with the things I liked, that she didn’t. Of course, I didn’t change, and we drifted into an entirely different flavor of “not arguing.” Which meant, she resolved to use all kinds of creative energies to find some new, untried method of forcing me to change what I liked. It never worked…but she never stopped. That is genuine suppression. (Once or twice, I actually heard a grunt.)

Can that shorten one’s time on this plane of existence? Heh. I have no doubts that it actually did, on both ends.

I remember thinking when I wrote the above that this was a distinction I needed to include, but sometimes the rambling grinds onward and I feel a much sharper need to truncate things. That’s usually for the best, and almost always overdue. Sometimes though, it causes critical ingredients of the message to be left out.
- mkfreeberg | 01/28/2008 @ 09:43
If you aren’t arguing with your spouse it means you probably don’t care much which isn’t a good sign. If you aren’t even disagreeing with your spouse you’re either a doormat or totally divested from your relationship either of which is reason to call it quits.
- Duffy | 01/28/2008 @ 10:58
Ah, well if you’re talking about arguing, then that’s quite a different matter. To me, an argument isn’t necessarily a fight. A fight involves anger and typically agression (if only verbal) on the part of at least one party.

We do argue.

If you pick somebody that has roughly the same worldview you have, and you agree that neither ever wants to hurt the other intentionally, (and if you do want to hurt them then I’d argue that that is not love at all), then your arguments need not be fights. We work things out by presenting arguments and taking the other person seriously.

Of course if this road doesn’t go both ways I can see it turning in to a fight.

But so far (16 years) we haven’t had that problem on any kind of large scale. I can’t say we haven’t had the occasional heated moment. We both have our hot buttons, but we’re pretty quick to figure out what’s going on and get down to a discussion involving reason. More often than not we “recognize that the current disagreement is trivial” and the one to whom it’s more important will get his/her way on that one. Otherwise it’s rational “argument” in the form of a discussion. It works pretty well for us.
- philmon | 01/28/2008 @ 14:37
Yeah, I guess that’s exactly what I’m trying to say about the difference between 1) relegating the subject of a possible argument to the ash heap of crap that doesn’t really matter, and 2) biting your tongue, suppressing a complaint that you really think ought to matter like hell.

I think humans are wired for monogamy, and that they’re also wired to pick out some kind of personal destiny at a young age. Tragically, it takes time to get to know someone to the point where you can figure out all these pieces of your life are compatible with each other. Time and maturity. I furthermore believe that if your destiny is incompatible with your mate, either a divorce, or a shortened life span (of the variety discussed in the article) is inevitable. Unless someone is killed in a car accident or a hostage crisis, one of those is unavoidable.

A wonderful example is money. Some people think it’s wasted if not spent, some think it’s wasted if not saved. We like to think everyone can live with everyone else, with sufficient patience — it just isn’t so, because that dividing line (as well as others) bisects potential match-ups that, if made, ensure insurmountable incompatibilities. There simply isn’t any way to reconcile it. The household saves or else it spends, and whichever way it goes, someone ends up contradicting what they see as their ultimate destiny in life, with each passing day. They’ll want out. And the other spouse isn’t going to be tickled pink with things on a day-to-day basis either.
- mkfreeberg | 01/28/2008 @ 15:21
In my experience argument could be a form of communication, based upon differing mindsets. For example, many men can conclude a telephone conversation in about 30 seconds. For my wife it was different.

It is the difference between taking action on a problem and talking about a problem. Some people approach problem solving as talking about it, and see the conversation as solving said problem.

Taking action on a said problem is highmost with some people.

This is often the root of arguments. Having said that, the conversation about the problem, and the action to solve the problem are equally important to commity.
- Allen L | 01/29/2008 @ 01:29

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Saturday, January 26th, 2008