The Mollification Bribe

Today we had a fight. It’s not uncommon for couples to fight. You want things done a certain way. Your partner doesn’t see eye to eye on that. And there are words spoken. Actually, today’s fight is a left over from yesterday. Yesterday’s fight went something like this.

F is asthmatic. Smoke, chemical odors (burning mosquito repellent coils in this case), if inhaled on a continuous basis will trigger off a wheezing attack. And if you don’t know about it, an asthmatic’s wheeze is the penultimate stage before death, if not treated properly. Earlier, I used to smoke at home. She’d warned me about the problem but I assumed that if I smoked in the loo, it would be a sufficient safety net. She didn’t seem to be none the worse for wear either. Till inevitably there was a wheezing attack and scrounging the subject on the net led us to the factoid that cigarette smoke lingers in the air in the room for at least seven days after the last stick is lit. That, along with the frightening sight of her flailing about like a fish out water convinced me to make our home a smoke free zone.

So what was I really thinking when I picked up a packet of mosquito coils? Sure we have a terrible mosquito problem but from a rational point of view, it seems inconceivable that even with knowing the obvious possibility of killing someone, and not just any someone, a person who you claim to love, it seems inconceivable that you would pick up the mosquito coil no?

The excuse of her wheeze-trigger being just cigarette smoke is actually a convenient white wash as we had already discussed the possibility of using mosquito coils to combat the motherfucking mosquitoes who swarm over us at night and she had confirmed that mosquito coils are deadly to her. So what was I really thinking?

Self sabotage is an old habit. Laziness is another habit. Both combined together to work a real Sunday evening special. Ended up leaving her upset, and me silent and uncommunicative and on my mean, unforgiving, self defensive, arrogant, unrepentant best: Yeah, I fucked up. I lit the coil. I cared less about your health than my comfort. And you can go fuck yourself.

This wasn’t said of course. But silence has a deafening way of announcing the unsaid. I guess that upset her even more. Sometime during this stand off I realized that I was really up jerk street. This realization and the response to it are almost knee-jerk. The usual way is to jump up, go kootchie koo and play kiss and make up. Predictable; sweeps the problem under the carpet, jump up and down on top of it with a convincing display of sincerity (even to yourself), swear it ain’t going to happen again and, you have peace. A thing many couples indulge in. The mollification bribe. Like some wives trade sex (with the hubby) for an evening out with the girls or running up the credit card. Mind games.

The phoniness in the kootchie koo usually gets to me and I scan my solution centers for an answer that will a) make amends b) put a smile back on her face. I don’t usually find anything to say that fits within a and b. So I usually stay silent and on days I don’t feel it is too hypocritical I end up kootchie kooing mollification nuffins. Though in general I feel that kootchie kooing after a fight without getting to the root of the problem is the lazy out. And I swear to myself that I will find the solution to the problem and it wouln’t happen again. But the fact is the problem hasn’t been addressed. It's still there under the carpet, stinking, straining, slithering and as the days go by we forget about it. And eventually it slithers out coils around someone’s neck and wham – back to square one.

I realized that the entire fight set up was cyclical in nature. The terms in which it is described is also fucked. Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus thing. It sounds like its true and there is enough empirical analogy to give it a ring of truth. But it stinks. You know what the stink smells of? Convenience. It’s easier to live within the formulaic: oh that a “manly” reaction, boys will be boys, how typically female, girls will be girls. Sure, there are some typically female and male reactions, but subscribing behavioral patterns as standardized along gender, ethnic or any other lines is more an acceptance of cultural defaults than actual behavioral traits. We may fit into some or all of them but rest assured we are not a prisoner to those traits with no chance of change.

What got to me was that here I was indulging in some sort of behavioral pattern which sent the silent message – I don’t care whether you live or die but these mosquitoes are killing me so am going to light up this coil and if you live (shrug) good for you and me and if you die (shrug) shit happens.

The real problem here is a lack of love. In the absence of love what rushed in was inertia and laziness. Don’t look beyond the end of your own nose. As is wont to happen and well documented (by Peck and others too I would think), we’d moved out of the in-love phase and into the loving phase. For F this transition was not much of a problem. For me the association behind love and actual conscious choice is still a hard one. A left over from the Devdas school of thought I guess.

Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled, talks about the process of giving up. That how on the highway of spiritual growth one has to give up “desires and attitudes”[1]. One of the attitudes he talks about is the ‘freedom’ of uncommitment. As long as I wasn’t making any overtly conscious choices and as my comfort zone wasn’t too challenged, the act of loving F was good and perfect. The in-love phase glossed over all those pesky irritating little things that are bound to crop up. But as we move out of the in-love phase and into the loving phase, the conscious choices that we make will determine the success or failure of our relationship.

Truthfully, I’ve been less than enthusiastic about it. Not because F is not a beautiful person. In terms of companionship I doubt there is anyone else out there into whom I can sink as effortlessly as I do with her. No, the problem is something less. A misplaced sense of values. Yes, this is a recognized problem and sigh, yes, its been repeated to me and shoved in my face a million times and yes its possible that there are other issues that are triggering the value misplacement.

In direct line of sight as of now, the problem I would think is inertia. It takes effort to consciously love and act on that love. Where the inertia comes from is also pretty clear – trace it back to 15-16 years when I actively embraced indifference as a conscious choice. A conscious choice to stay indifferent when I should have acted with rage or grief … that’s another story …

Agreed. Crawling out of self imposed suspended animation is hard. But don’t make that an excuse for fucking up. There is no excuse for your sins (Sin defined in this context: Anything you don't like in your life and want to change). And there is no excuse for not re-examining yourself – constantly.

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[1] M Scott Peck – The Road Less Traveled: Part one, second last chapter: The Healthiness of Depression:

“…roughly in order of their occurrence, some of the major conditions, desires and attitudes that must be given up in the course of a wholly successful evolving lifetime:

• The state of infancy, in which no external demands need to be responded to
• The fantasy of omnipotence
• The desire for total (including sexual) possession of one’s parent(s)
• The dependency of childhood
• Distorted images of one’s parents
• The omnipotentiality of adolescence
• The ‘freedom’ of uncommitment
• The agility of youth
• The sexual attractiveness and/or potency of youth
• The fantasy of immortality
• Authority over one’s children
• Various forms of temporal power
• The independence of physical health
• And, ultimately, the self and life itself

I have my reservations about immortality being a fantasy but the rest seem spot on.