How Are You Crazy?
The Four Horsemen of the Marital Apocalypse
In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”
- Alain de Botton.
My wife would find it hilarious that I have the nerve to write an article about relationships, but thankfully she’s too busy to read my Substack.
When people hear my story about enduring a two year depressive hell in Manhattan, the first question they usually ask is “were you married?” My answer is “yes; but barely.” We had been married for seven years before I became a different person literally overnight. At different times I was variously delusional, manic or deeply depressed. If those early years hadn’t been so easy, I doubt we would have made it through the impossibly hard ones that followed. It also made me realise how much I believe we undervalue resilience when picking a life partner. Most marriages I know have encountered at least one nuclear extinction event. Some combination of mental and physical illness, infidelity or unemployment. They don’t all make it through.
Our marriage survived my depression and insanity, thanks primarily to the strength of my wife. Eight years later, I would argue we are even better than we were before. But we still emerged with scars. So my wife requested we attend regular couples therapy. I initially resisted because “we were fine,” which is about as stupid as refusing to go to the gym because you’re not unhealthy yet. As usual, my wife was right and I was wrong. We’ve been in monthly couples therapy for several years and it’s been great.
We both agree that the most useful part of it has been to reframe our communication in terms of our own emotional states, not what the other person is doing wrong. So “why can’t you stop leaving water on the bathroom floor?” becomes “when you leave water on the bathroom floor it makes me feel disappointed that you’re not thinking about my needs.” It’s almost impossible to argue with somebody else’s emotional experience. It has also led to an interesting series of insights into the other person’s personality.
Four Horsemen of the Marital Apocalypse
In his decades-long work on marital interactions, Dr. John Gottman famously identified the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. Among those, contempt is considered the most destructive and the single strongest predictor of divorce. Exemplified by the eye-roll, it shows a fundamental lack of respect for the other person.
Coaches Brian and Nicole Whetten have an interesting theory that contempt for someone else is typically a sign of an “unacknowledged superpower” in yourself. Put simply: it’s triggering when your partner finds something difficult that you find intuitively easy. This relates to an evolution in my relationship with my wife that has been so transformational it makes me disappointed that it took over a decade of marriage to discover it.
My wife’s a News Anchor for ABC. She was recently diagnosed with adult ADHD, something she’s spoken about emotionally on Good Morning America.
Some of this is adaptive neurodiversity: as a news anchor, she can be reading an autocue, editing her upcoming script, and listening to the producers in her ear all at the same time. It makes my brain melt just thinking about it. During breaking news, she can instantly prioritise the most important things that require her attention.
But at home, what’s adaptive sometimes becomes maladaptive. With nothing being most urgent, she finds it hard to attend to the thousands of demands that come with living in a small apartment with two young children shouting at you constantly. So she has the mental equivalent of twenty browser tabs open at any one time. Without being able to prioritize tasks in a clear order, she constantly bounces between them wasting her time and effort. Things like her consistent failure to return the milk to the fridge aren’t petty acts of defiance, they are because she’s habitually distracted by something else.
Specifically, her diagnosis also revealed that she’s “time blind”; she can’t accurately estimate how long any task will take her. I used to assume she was being dismissive and inconsiderate when I asked her how long she’d be doing something, while I watched the kids. Now I realise that she simply struggles to do it.
For every fault my wife has, I have at least ten. The worst is intellectual dissociation. I really enjoy manipulating and combining abstract ideas in the safety of my head. And the shadow of that is the slightest amount of physical or emotional discomfort leads to me retreating, usually into my phone. One thing that led to me cutting down on alcohol was realizing my screen time often doubled when I was hungover. This headspace is so all-consuming that our apartment could be on fire and I wouldn’t notice until my legs started burning. In contrast, my wife notices literally everything. When she realised I was not being an inconsiderate idiot deliberately, she’s had a little more compassion for me. As long as I’m still actively working on solutions for it: an explanation isn’t an excuse. It’s become us against the problems instead of us against each other.
So when philosopher Alain De Botton suggests you ask your partner “how are you crazy?” I think he’s really onto something.1 A great refinement is to ponder your cognitive superpower, then its corresponding curse. When you can both identify the same dynamic in your partner you develop a degree of compassion and cooperative problem-solving that makes contempt nearly impossible.
A big contributor to the spike in diagnoses and awareness of ADHD among adult women is because they resonate with the diagnoses of their children. It’s only an accidental result of their concern for someone other than themselves. This is yet another reason to allocate time and money to the deliberate evolution of your own consciousness. The obsession with inner-work can sometimes be self-absorbed, but equally you can’t help your partner understand how you work if you don’t even know yourself.
“All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad.”
-Alain De Botton
“you can’t help your partner understand how you work if you don’t even know yourself.” ❤️❤️
Brilliant Tom. I do wonder how much we need to blame Hollywood though for misrepresenting what marriage is about - marriage (to me) is an agreement to form an alliance under the specific conditions that 1 + 1 = 3 for the next 50 years. Unfortunately, too many of us believe it to be about physical attraction and status (although they have their roles). I feel a better framing of marriage in society would lead to far better results.