THAT'S MEN:Men generally wait for the storm to pass
IN HIS POEM on Yeats and Shakespeare, Gavin Ewart wrote of the Bard that:
“. . . a bitter wife,
it is presumed, told him the what and which
of all his faults, and told him pretty soon.”
That the job of a wife, bitter or not, is to tell her husband “the what and which of all his fault” is a fairly common notion in literature.
I think it was Robert Louis Stevenson who expressed the view that when a man marries a wife, he marries a witness to his faults. I can’t pin down the quotation, but I know he also opined that “marriage is one long conversation, checkered with disputes”.
And in The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare himself indulges in some ultimately unconvincing wish-fulfilment when the ill-tempered Katherina gives up complaining and douses her new husband in docility and praise. She goes from describing him as "a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen" to "Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,/Thy head, thy sovereign. . ." and more to that effect. It's almost as though Katherina, much more fun as a shrew than as a sort of Stepford Wife, has been medicated up to the eyes to make her change her behaviour.
All of this makes one of the much-vaunted techniques of marriage counselling risible to me. This is the one where your spouse expresses their (to be gender neutral) grievances against the other. The other listens and then repeats back the list of grievances to give the critical spouse the opportunity to add any clarifications and corrections that may be required. Then the spouse who did the listening gets to speak and the other has to repeat what was said.
At the end of this process, everybody understands everybody else and the road to peace and reconciliation is open.
But imagine standing in the kitchen as your wife lists “the what and which of all your faults” and responding to them by repeating them back and then saying, “Now, is there anything you’d like to add to that, dear?”
Before adopting that ploy, it might be best to ensure that all sharp objects have been put under lock and key. And to engage in that protective action that football players use to protect their much-exercised assets when they’re standing in the wall before a free kick is taken by the other side. Either that or stick a marriage counsellor in the middle.
Is this all misogynistic, chauvinistic twaddle? Maybe, but most men, I think, simply accept that cataloguing “the what and which” of their all faults is a tendency which even the most loving wives slip into from time to time.
They wait for the storm to pass, adopting Tolstoy's view that, "What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility". He was, after all, the author of War and Peace.
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My Irish taxi driver of the other day favours civil war as a first step towards resolving the country’s problems. He also advocates the execution of 450,000 people whom he believes wouldn’t be missed, including certain named politicians. His social policies include the return to the home of all mothers in the workplace and the establishment of a special brigade in the army for criminals. Members of the brigade would do manual work for farmers, thus solving the need to import all our food (I know, I know). Any criminal who disobeyed an instruction would be shot on the spot. He declared all this as he weaved through heavy traffic, no quarter asked or given.
On the return journey, my Muslim taxi driver had not had anything to eat or drink for 16 hours because of Ramadan. Still, he was able to drive, discuss politics and take calls on his mobile phone.
That I am alive at all is a tribute to the capacity of the human brain to drive a car while the human mind is otherwise occupied. Long live the brain.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy