Teaching Your Children By Fighting With Your Spouse

To disagree is a powerful form of empathy.

Hello Clan of the Global Jigsaw,

Licks of winter are whipping about Madrid as fall lashes us a little too hard, and suddenly. But there is something warming about posting on a dreary day like today. This week I revisit a counterintuitive line of reasoning that keeps coming up when I talk with my friends, irrespective of nationality.

Apologies for the Oxford Union debate like introduction, but it is my contention that arguing with your spouse in front of your children might be the key to a less polarized world.

xxx

My spouse and I have been together for more than 24 years. We have spent these decades arguing our way across the multiple countries that we have lived in - the UK, China, Belgium, Indonesia, Japan and Spain.

The first year that we began dating as students at university in London, we went to a café in Bloomsbury for a bite to eat. Even as we chomped down on paninis, we ended up getting so heated with each other over a disagreement on how China should handle Tibet that an elderly gentleman sitting on a nearby table became irate. He showily folded the newspaper he’d reading and huffed his way over to us. “Thank you for destroying my morning,” he said icily, before stomping out while muttering, “I was trying to have a peaceful coffee.”

Fast forward a couple of decades and a few days ago Russia and NATO had us so riled with each other that the friend we were having a drink with at a bar in Madrid, asked if we spoke like this in front of our children as well. And if so, whether they ever worried that we’d get divorced.

We did. And they didn’t.

***

It is conventional wisdom that parents should present a calm, impregnable, united front before their children. That they shouldn’t fight within earshot of them, keeping any disagreements private. In this, my husband and I, are spectacular failures.

 It’s not as though we only debate world issues, we also squabble about the mundane, you-forgot-to-buy-the-cat-food-again, variety of universal marital resentments. In regular games of family blame-pong, he says I am overly anxious, and I say he doesn’t plan enough. We even disagree on the boundaries we set for the boys. Julio is far more laissez faire than me when it comes to screen time, but I am more forgiving of their habitual foot dragging while getting dressed for school in the morning.

None of these conversations happen in hushed tones, behind closed doors, after the children are asleep. They are daylight-drenched broadcasts that form part of the humdrum aural backdrop of our family life. But - and herein lies the significant bit - so are the make ups and the little gestures of big love that frame the squabbles. The cup of chamomile tea that my husband might bring me, unsolicited but so perfectly timed, while I’m reading in bed. The dentist appointment I take a break in arguing with him to make - for him.  Those moments when we are in complete agreement – on the importance of pluralism, on the need for forging one’s own path through life, on the kids practicing piano.

For my boys, disagreements are normalized. They understand that arguments need not end in catastrophe. Fights exist so that compromises can be found. They know that divergences can be tolerated, even in the long term, without the need for any final solution. They have been shown that agreeing to disagree is a powerful form of empathy.

Their mother is not long-suffering. Their father does not seethe in silence. Sometimes their parents are angry, after all they are human. They may even hate each other momentarily, but they love each other constantly. Our boys know that love does not need agreement. That a person is not loved merely because they are pleasing. That reaching across boundaries is harder, but more rewarding than living a life circumscribed by an uncrossed border.

The story of every marriage, and every family, is one of War and Peace.  There can be no peace without war. We’re doing our children a disservice if we have them believing that relationships are about perfect consonance. A marriage should be like a democracy, rather than an authoritarian regime: a place where dissent is valued over enforced harmony.

Within a marriage, fighting is a ritualized performance. It can be damaging, of course, but if handled well, it is a safe space within which to enact and process the frustrations of the outside world. For children, learning how to fight with compassion is a crucial life skill.

The world today is increasingly polarized, plagued by culture wars and social media trolls. What’s needed to heal some of these ruptures is the ability to break out of ideological silos and to engage with those whom with we disagree. This may not make us agree with them but learning to “fight” our opponents well - vehemently, but not violently and with at least a soupçon of humour - is an art desperately needed in global public discourse. One that could perhaps take a leaf or two out of the book of every successful marriage.

*****

Hope you enjoyed this. Please do consider subscribing if you did. And as usual, share share share.

Pallavi