I recently started reading a book called “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin, and it got me thinking about marriage and communication. In her book, Gretchen talks about her approach to improving her marriage as part of a larger project to increase her overall happiness. Her marriage is not “in trouble,” but there are things that she wants to improve, including focusing less on small disputes, nagging and blaming less.

Thinking of new ways to improve a marriage or relationship is always worthwhile, but I think she overlooks the issue of communication and collaboration in her approach. She starts off by saying “we—I—had fallen into some bad habits that I wanted to change” (39). It seems that she sees having disputes, nagging, and blaming as bad habits of hers that can be remedied, when in fact these are issues that involve both her and her husband. When a relationship has “bad habits” like these, it is never just about one person. If petty disputes occur often, this does not mean that one person is more domineering or has a bad tendency to start fights. On the outside this looks like the truth, but in reality small disputes involve both people because they are indicators of tension that results from a lack of communication. Arguing, blaming, and nagging are signs of deeper hurt or angry feelings that haven’t been communicated, and have been left to stew and ferment, only to come out later in strange and confusing ways.

It’s pretty amazing how easy it is to tuck away our feelings and forget about them, only to later wonder in a confused daze why we blew up about something meaningless. The smallest instances of hurt or angry feelings should be examined as immediately as possible. It’s not as effective if we wait until much later to say, “hey remember a few weeks ago when you said that thing in front of those people? It really hurt my feelings.” If we allow our feelings to be ignored and buried, the petty arguments will occur more frequently and escalate to become big fights in which blaming occurs. We start to say all-encompassing phrases such as, “you always…!” or “you never…!”. This is when it becomes harder and harder to see through the fog of our anger or hurt feelings to the root cause. All we see is blame and a desire to make the other person feel hurt or at fault.

Gretchen Rubin says, “there’s no evidence for the belief that ‘letting off steam’ is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn’t relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces” (64). It is true that aggressively expressing anger, or “blowing up” makes things worse. Remember what it was like to be a kid? Remember when your parents got mad at you for something and yelled at you? That felt horrible. But this is where we first learn about conflict resolution (incorrectly). It would have felt much better if our parents had sat us down and explained to us why they were feeling angry, instead of expressing the anger at us. The idea that not expressing anger allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces is absolutely incorrect. Leaving anger unexpressed will in fact leave ugly traces inside of us, which is why petty disputes occur later and resentment builds. It would seem that keeping our anger to ourselves is better for the relationship and that by doing this we are sparing our partners stress and discomfort, but this is detrimental to a relationship.

We need to instead focus on expressing anger in a healthy way instead of trying to repress it. Expressing anger does not have to be about making the other person feel the anger, by yelling and saying hurtful things or acting passive aggressively. It’s about making the other person understand why we feel the anger and where it comes from so that it can be resolved and avoided in the future. This is the more responsible way to handle feelings and the more likely way to elicit empathy from our partners. If a significant other is unresponsive to our efforts to share our feelings and can’t seem to “handle” hearing about our feelings, this is a sign that the relationship is not very strong. For two people to grow together, both people have to be able to share their feelings comfortably without fear of driving the other away because they “can’t handle it.”