On Marriage - Emotional Management

Understanding the factors that influence emotional change in a relationship

Relationships are hard

This is often passed as some kind of semi-cryptic sage wisdom regarding the reality of a long term relationship or marriage, but that isn’t actually advice, it’s honestly not even really useful. Differential equations are hard too, but me telling you that does not provide you with anything. Often the sentiment is true, but most people stop right there, often happy to proclaim this useless platitude, not because its helpful to anyone, but because it allows them to claim some kind of honor for remaining in a relationship. Its the marriage equivalent of “back in my day” an attempt to squeeze veneration out of normality.

But relationships are hard. So what’s hard about them?

I’ve been with my wife for over a decade now, married for most of it, with kids for almost half of it. What I’ve learned is the single hardest part about a relationship is emotional management. I learned this not from my wife but from my son, because small children don’t know how to manage emotions. Anyone who’s told a 4 year old they cant have candy for breakfast for the first time, and weathered the subsequent shitstorm of a reaction, is very aware of this.

In my mind I see emotional management kind of like a plumb bob, a weight on the end of long bit of string. Most of the time it points directly down, neutral, normal. One axis measures emotional state, happy to sad. The other axis measures emotional engagement, manic to calm. Now the question becomes, why a plumb bob and not a Cartesian graph? Well because emotions are not fixed points where you suddenly jump from one to the next, they are pendulous, moving from one event to the other, crossing into and through other states of emotional existence as you arrive.

A small child is like a very light weight on a very short string, it takes very little input to create a change in emotional state. You can actually watch the pendulum move around the graph in real time. It’s an often chaotic mess punctuated by incredible highs and incredible lows that change rapidly. One minute you’ll be weathering a tantrum and just a few minutes later they’ll be happily playing like nothing happened.

As we mature things change.

We learn to manage out own emotions. When something would move the pendulum to one part of the graph or another we learn to resist the change if it’s negative, and embrace the change if its positive. Much of what we associate with the concept of maturation is simply learning to be more resilient to changes in our emotional plumb bob (EPB if you will). This is why strong unchained emotional outbursts are associated with childlike behavior.

In many ways its as if there have been physical changes to the pendulum itself. A heavier weight, a longer string, maybe even some temporary supports that anchor the weight closer to one side or the other.

An emotionally mature person could be see as having both a heavy weight and a long string, that is the small perturbations that might set off a child, not getting what you want, have little or almost no effect on them, they are centered and stable. You can look to modern examples of immaturity for confirmation of this.

Others may have supports, things that change how the plumb bob moves. They may have something that anchors their center point towards one state or engagement. Imagine the string of the pendulum is stapled a few inches over towards sadness, effectively creating a false center, or what we could chronic depression. It takes more effort to move into happy, and the swing back is more abrupt and violent. Supports are temporary so a depressed person can pull that staple out, resulting in their center being neutral, and also their string being longer, they’ve grown as a person.

A positive example of a support might be a simple as a good home and family life. Having a loving supportive spouse and children can “staple” your string towards calm and happy, making the stress of the outside world less impactful. Personally I think the role of positive supports on emotional management is under discussed, and as marriage and birth rates decline while anti-depressant usage continues to climb it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch to say there’s a connection.

Not Your Own Emotions

In marriage things change again. You are no longer you.

If you take marriage seriously there is a very real loss of individuality as you blend with your spouse. I like the biblical interpretation of this, becoming one flesh. Your marriage represents a new organism, composed from parts of you and your spouse, but it also has many of its own new characteristics, just like a child. Your emotions are no longer your own, for better and for worse. Your spouse’s bad day may become your bad day, your bad day may be completely reversed by their good day, etc.

It’s important to understand this because your plumb bob may be moved, drastically, without much or any input from you. Similarly you may find yourself with supports you never built, your spouse’s depression can become yours as it influences this new organism you both are.

Managing your emotions is no longer a singular event, there are now two inputs pushing that plumb bob around, and because of its pendulous nature this can create issues. A manic sad input (anger) met with a second manic sad input will hold the plumb bob in that quadrant, spend too much time there and a support will form, stapling the string, causing it to shorten and pushing your center point into a negative space. Think about couples who’s marriage is constantly punctuated by fights and arguments despite their earlier relationship being much more happy and positive.

You may think the easy answer is to respond to your spouse with the opposite state and engagement but too much constructive interference creates wild fluctuations, these are often the hallmark of “toxic” relationships, flitting back and forth between extreme joy and extreme anger.

In a healthy relationship both people quickly become aware of how to manage the emotions of the other, how to return the EPB to neutral or even push it into a positive position. It’s worth repeating that you can’t simply reverse a negative position with positive influence, the fluctuations become too wild and hard to manage. A very good example of this is trying to hug it out with a small child who’s in the middle of a tantrum. All that positive energy and influence becomes confining and in many ways its just a passive version of telling the upset person to “calm down”.

This highlights the necessity of expressing negative emotions in a constructive way. The idea of “crying it out” has become a bit of a trope but there’s truth in it as it pertains to the EPB. The other reason I like the plumb bob comparison is that much like our emotions, given enough time it simply reverts back to the stable neutral center point.

Trying to counteract a negative movement with a positive one doesn’t do anything to bleed off the energy already in the system. The only way you can really achieve a reduction in “movement” by adding energy is through destructive interference, that is to match their input in an equal and opposite manner.

In physics this concept is pretty straight forward because everything is well defined. With human emotions it can be much messier, and honestly sometimes impossible to simply figure out. In my experience creating destructive interference is something you learn through trial and error or even by dumb luck. The hard part is that it what constitutes “equal and opposite” rarely actually looks equal or opposite.

An example of this from my own marriage is reversing an existential or external bad mood in my wife (something happened at work, with her family, etc) with a very small simple act of buying her a candle. On its face this seems neither equal nor opposite, certainly a $5 candle doesn’t seem like it has the oomph to undo a massive fight she had with her sister. But my wife loves candles, they’re some of her favorite things. On top of that if it’s done seemingly sporadically it helps shift her out of the funk because its unexpected.

Gender Roles

This is, in my opinion, where things get messy in most relationships. Men and women are different, very different, but the meat of that discussion is for another time. What’s important is that men and women have two very opposite natures.

Men are pragmatic, we like things to be straight forward, taken at face value and simple

Women are mercurial, they like things to be spontaneous, emotional and serendipitous

This is why as a man the delivery is almost as important as the content. If my wife is clearly in a bad mood from an argument with her sister and I bring her candle, telling her “I saw you were upset so I got you this candle, you like candles” it “unaligns” my input, changing it from destructive interference (cancelling out her negative input) to constructive interference (amplifying her negative input)

You see this played out a lot in TV and movies, the exasperated husband or boyfriend desperately, but earnestly, trying to make his upset wife or girlfriend happy only to fail miserably because of his blunt pragmatic delivery. This kind of straightforward approach lacks the feeling of romantic spontaneity, and to be fair it kind of does. With women the thought doesn’t count nearly as much as the feeling does.

The other side of this might be a wife who knows her husband is overworked and hasn’t really had any kind of fun or positivity in while, organizing a surprise party at their house after he gets home from work. Instead of being happy at the earnest spontaneity he’s upset that he’s been put on the spot and been made unaware.

In both scenarios the result is a fight or argument because the constructive interference has pushed the EPB farther into the negative because a lack of understanding of these gendered differences.

This brings us back to the beginning, to the very idea of the article, emotional management. That’s really what it is, management. You don’t successfully run a business by simply always doing what you think is right, or what feels right. You look at your situation and evaluate courses of action, you do what’s right, even if it doesn’t feel right, like letting an employee go to improve labor and signal to staff certain things wont be tolerated.

This is where “relationships take work” comes into play. You must be aware, observant and both reactive and proactive at times. You have to be conscious of the fact that you and your spouse are intertwined, that your emotions and actions can play off each other in both constructive and destructive ways, and that intentions aren’t often good enough.

Coping with and understanding the fact that you’re intentions wont always be received the way you want them too might be the single hardest thing for most people. I blame the wider culture for this. We live in an “E for Effort” society that treats attempting the same way it does succeeding, but that isn’t the case. The work you have to put into a relationship is understanding that you have to read your spouse, interpret them and maybe do and deal with a situation that’s less than pleasant.

The hardest part about marriage is that no matter what, you have to work it out. The good news is that when you really stop and dedicate to learning how your spouse functions you can start creating destructive interference to quell their bad days. After a while it becomes second nature and you’ll find yourself doing it without thinking about it.

Epilogue: But Why?

The entire concept of this kind of emotional management in a relationship doesn’t feel under discussed to me, it feels completely undiscussed. Why is that?

I think it’s the fault of a culture that embraced divorce and began treating marriage like trying on shoes. Much of this article was about handling negative inputs to the EPB, because that’s the hard part. Creating constructive interference to amplify your spouses happiness is easy and almost second nature, no one needs to teach you how to have fun; but creating necessary destructive interference is unnatural and takes understanding and work.

In the society of today when things get difficult or seem to stop working people get divorced. They never bother to learn how to manage the emotions of their spouse and just chalk it up to incompatibility. We’re now 3+ generations deep into this behavior and the concept of emotional management is seemingly lost.

But wait, not everyone gets divorced?

In my opinion that’s because some couples are just more in-tune with each other, managing the emotions of one another is much more second nature for them, they might not even know they’re doing it. Where this has left us is with a society where we believe either relationships work, magically, or they don’t. All while people pass around the same worn out platitude that “relationships take work”