A Theory for Marital Conflict

The idea of microaggressions, like many brilliant concepts that have political implications, has become weaponized in diversity dialogues to the point where scholars are arguing about whether they exist at all (Williams, 2020).

But there are many methods by which people foster, promote, and impose a view of a situation (Goffman, 1959); when that view is prejudicial because of race, the methods are called microaggressions. It seems obvious that one cannot know the meaning of a behavior solely from its topography, and, as Williams emphasizes, context is crucial.

Couple's Work

Of special concern to me with respect to the couple’s work is the way other prejudices besides race are maintained by analogies to microaggressions. These are not of a sort that promotes a dominant racial hierarchy, but the dominance of a narrative about the spouse’s character. Racial microaggressions may usefully be considered a subset of unconscious strategies for keeping people in the roles assigned to them by situational/cultural expectations and personal agendas.

In other words, they are instances of what psychologist Gregory Bateson called the command function of communication, defining how the people involved relate to each other, rather than conveying information.

Source: Master1305/ Shutterstock

A woman who sees herself as super-competent, because she is horrified by her own all-too-human foibles, comes to see her wife as unreliable, which bolsters her self-definition. She calls easily to mind the myriad ways her spouse, like any spouse, can be defined as unreliable, from being late for dinner to forgetting to lock the door. Fading into the background is the wife’s constancy of affection and success in her career. When this woman says to her wife, “I’ll do it,” it’s not a favor, a collaboration, or an efficiency—it’s likely a microaggression communicating that the wife is incompetent.

A man perceives himself as valuable for being a breadwinner, and a financial supporter of his husband because he isn’t sure if he is loveable otherwise. He ignores his husband’s general frugality, and his lack of expensive tastes in clothing and restaurants, and focuses on the lights the husband leaves on in every room he leaves. The man perceives his husband as a spendthrift. When he turns off lights, he’s not efficient, ecologically conscious, or part of a team—he’s likely a microaggressor, communicating that the husband wastes money.

The analogy to race is that a fantasy of racial superiority is hollow unless it is accompanied by a perception of inferiority in other races. Likewise, a fantasy of special brilliance requires ignorant companions, and, as George Eliot said: If you are fond of not caring about the opinions of others, you must locate or invent contemptible people whose opinions are worthless. We cast our spouses in roles that suit our authentic, human needs, but also in roles that suit what Horney called our astonishing specialness.

Microaggressions in Marriage

Much thought has gone into what to do about microaggressions (e.g., Sue et al., 2019). In a marriage, though, there’s only one healthy way to manage them, which is to discuss them like two spouses trying to make the relationship as liberating and gratifying as possible.

A key element of that discussion involves the management of feeling offended: Many diversity trainers admonish us to treat a feeling of offense as evidence that offense was given, although scholars like Williams (2020) and Caselli et al. (2020), take a more subtle and contextual approach. Still, in most situations, the offended person doesn’t want to capitulate by suggesting they may have overreacted, because that can feed a microaggressor’s agenda when the exchange was in fact a microaggression and not a misperception of motives.

In a marriage, the agenda ought to be a mutual interest in understanding what really happened, and if that’s not the case, establishing it as the agenda is the first order of business. Diversity discussion leaders exhort us to act as if everyone’s voice is equally valuable and to treat others’ opinions with goodwill and respect. This is hard or even impossible to do, as hard to do as it is to treat others generally with kindness and compassion. But it’s possible to treat one person that way.

Spouses who feel offended often assume, often correctly, that their partner knows them well enough to know what will hurt their feelings: They infer causality: “You know how it upsets me when you leave the lights on so you must do it to upset me.”

In fact, nobody loves anyone so much that the beloved’s reactions are the primary consideration all the time. Even a baby, once asleep in the bassinet, is blissfully ignored. If a spouse were continuously motivated by the partner’s reactions, we’d suspect an unhealthy dependency or even abuse. It would be nice for the light-switch-checker and the clock-watcher to infer, not that the spouse is wasteful or unreliable, but that their spouses are not afraid of them.

Many couples have never seen a collaborative resolution of conflict, so they are not equipped to say, “You’ve done these six things that seem to construe me as [such-and-such]. I’m open to the possibility that you never see me that way, you sometimes do, or you generally do. Let’s discuss it.” One of the main ways couples’ therapists can help is to call out these role-confining potential microaggressions in real time and help the couple explore them with mutuality and respect.

Microaggression Essential Reads

How White Supremacy Is Built Into Societies

Crazy Rich, Multicultural, Asians

To find a therapist, please visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.