Fairness in Marriage: Part 3

Complaints about "fairness" as a concept

The third in the series! Check out part 1 here and part 2 here.

There’s a gender divergence on fairness. A lot of men think the idea of fairness as a marital good is inherently suspect. For several reasons, this is understandable.

For one, if you consider “caring about fairness” to be perfectly correlated with “yelling, whining, begging, and/or punishing your partner for perceived unfairness”, you are likely to think that caring about fairness makes a person a bad partner.

Men may also have their own experiences with trying to extract fairness from a spouse - the Red Pill and associated manosphere subcultures will reference “covert contracts” and remind adherents of the pitfalls of this approach. Trying to do something for your spouse solely because you are expecting them to do something you like in return will often leave you enraged and nursing a deep sense of wounded resentment. It is definitely a good thing for men to avoid this type of behavior in pursuit of fairness.

Men do go further, for this and at least one other reason, to declare that fairness is not a good thing to value in a marriage. When men dismiss the concept of fairness, they are often trying - sometimes beneath their own awareness - to argue that any complaints are inappropriate in a marriage.

There’s some justification for this: men are vastly less likely to voice a desire for change from their wives than the wives are to ask for the same from their husband. Men therefore think, when they declare that no one should care about fairness, that what they’re asking for is a parity that will make the marriage better. In other words, they’re telling you to stop talking about fairness because it is unfair for you to do that when they do not.

Men often can only see that they find complaints from their wives stressful, awful, painful. Sometimes - much too often - such complaints veer into truly unacceptable territory. Wives who even occasionally berate or yell at their partners are not being maximally fair to them, and their criticism does not have equal moral standing with criticism that raises an issue with an effort at neutrality and an eye toward resolving the issue.

A good marriage can tolerate a small amount of unfairness, because a good marriage can tolerate imperfection to a reasonable extent. Provided both partners do not operate in that mode all or even half the time, a good marriage can tolerate differences in how much work each person is doing for weeks or even months at a time. In contrast, a husband who works 50 hour weeks while his physically and mentally capable wife stays home, does not cook, clean, bear or care for children, and does not work for pay, is an extremely unfair arrangement, and that man should not stay in that marriage.

Despite the popular meme that women are never direct about what they want (true to some degree and in some ways, which is to say, not quite true as written), men also aren’t direct about what they want. They just default to not talking about what they want at all - men quite frequently misunderstand stoicism to be a philosophy of not putting your feelings or desires into words.¹

Men are wrong to think that a marriage where no one raises issues is superior to a marriage where people do. They get this impression in part because the failures of criticism are much more salient to them than the failures of silence - it’s obvious to most men that having a wife who yells at or constantly calls them names is a raw deal of a marriage. A wife who never complains seems like a dream by comparison. No-conflict marriages failure modes get little press, and what content does reflect this reality is overwhelmingly consumed by women.

The fact is that if you have a marriage where you both refuse to raise your concerns with each other, neither of you will get what you want very often, and when you do get what you want, it will have little to do with your partner actively trying to make your life better. See this post - outcomes you want do require that you let your partner decide by themselves how to manage an issue once you have brought it up.

I talked about a failure mode in this when I appeared on Alex Kaschuta’s excellent podcast Subversive - I’d listened to a case study in couples therapy where the wife was your ideal soft, quiet, long-suffering trad type, and the husband clearly felt a duty not to upset her by asking for change. The result? 20 years of marriage with near non-existent sex, and a wife who cried at length when she tried to talk about why she did that.

It is difficult to grow the social skills to take a stance that you believe in and hold fast to it without using cruelty, mockery, or punishment. Complicating matters, even when you avoid cruelty or punishment, your spouse will rarely receive your stated desires with unreserved enthusiasm (hence the protective instinct not to ask for what you want at all). It is always worth developing the capacity to stand up for yourself without wavering but also without excessive, harmful emotionality; this requires a useful rather than a passive or stonewalled stoicism, and most men only ever develop the latter.

I’m comfortable saying that no one should stay in a marriage where they are consistently taken for granted and taken advantage of. One of the alternatives to divorcing yourself out of such a marriage is changing yourself, which always changes your dynamic in the marriage if not your partner.

Men experience greater stress/anxiety when they have a dispute with their partner than women do. Gottman found in his research that men “flood” quicker. That is, it takes less negativity for them to perceive threat and that they are more easily overwhelmed by marital conflict than women.

Gottman speculated that this was the result of different physiological responses to negative emotions - that male evolution favored a capacity to stay vigilant given aggressive threat signals of any kind (valuable in hunting and war), while female evolution favored the ability to soothe oneself to some degree following an interpersonal dispute (valuable in parenting and managing kin).

This finding is contested - to my knowledge, it has not consistently been replicated. I’m in full support of anyone choosing to discard it on that basis, but I include it because it’s a familiar pattern to me. Men have a depth and strength of emotion that is belied by their efforts to control their external presentation, and that’s if anything strongest in conflict with women. I’ve noticed that conflict with women can often result in male overwhelm and a strong sense that something is going wrong, even when the woman is acting fairly (moderate tone of voice, soft start up, reasonable complaint).

Conflict in general is not a universal signal of destructive behavior, nor is attention to fairness. Caring about fairness is both inevitable and useful - it can offer a signal towards the balance of good will in the marriage, and it is ignored at each couple’s peril. When men reject the concept of fairness entirely, often what they're really rejecting is the internal stressors of managing differences head on. Avoiding conflict can’t produce good will, it can only hope to avoid the worst of ill will - beware the dead person virtue marriage. When women become hyper-focused on fairness, they're often responding to a pattern of being consistently ignored or dismissed.

Neither extreme is functional - not a refusal to discuss differences in values (which can hide and even foster deep resentments under the pretense of stoicism) nor the search for perfectly matching values (which easily devolves into destructive behaviors) serves a marriage well. Instead, couples need to develop the capacity to raise concerns without cruelty while accepting that even valid requests won't always be met with immediate enthusiasm: differentiation sufficient to produce considerate requests for and responses to change, with closeness preserved.

Check out part 1 here and part 2 here.

1. “What I never say out loud can’t hurt me”