Odd Couples

     When I was a boy, one of my very favorite TV series was “The Odd Couple,” and lately I have been thinking a lot about that show.  “The Odd Couple” told the story of the ultra-neat Felix Unger and his very messy roommate, Oscar Madison.  I recently read Jack Klugman’s (who played Oscar) touching book about his long friendship with Tony Randall (Felix).  And then the following week, on  Christmas Eve 2012, Jack Klugman died at age 90 (Tony Randall died in 2004).  I was sad and will really miss those guys.

But all this “Odd Couple” material started me thinking about couples-  and couples therapy.  I began to think more about the issue in “The Odd Couple” of neatness versus messiness among couples, and how this often leads to feelings of anger and resentment between partners in a relationship.   Throughout my couples therapy work, I have witnessed how this issue seeps into and toxifies relationships over and over again.  It’s a problem, and I have some thoughts on how to address it.

The remedy does not lie in one partner attempting to persuade the other one that their way is the “right way.”  That will just lead to more bickering.  The solution is that the couple must try hard to understand the personal meaning of the neatness to one partner, and the personal meaning of the messiness to the other partner.

Let me give some examples of what I mean here.  One possibility is that for the neat person, a neat home is soothing- it provides a sense of calm, security, and order in a stressful world.  The person may feel that the larger world is often uncomfortably unpredictable and chaotic.  Therefore having a neat and ordered home provides a sanctuary, a place of comfort and ease.

To the messy Oscar Madison of the relationship, none of this applies. For example, and by contrast, he/she may feel that the world is often controlling, rigid, and stifling.  Coming home and being messy may provide a feeling of liberation and freedom.  The ability to not be neat may provide a sense of ease.

Therefore, at this point, each person in the couple has opposite needs.  Or more precisely, they may have similar needs- to feel relaxed - but their ways of going about achieving that relaxation are polar opposites.   The couple then stress each other out, and it can reach a point in which it feels as if their partner is actually intentionally trying to cause them to be tense and uncomfortable.  And that’s when the fighting can start.

The solution, therefore, is for both people to begin to take a deep breath and stop arguing about the latest incident of who did or didn’t do what (the dishes, the bathtub, etc.) and begin to understand each other- to understand they are just configured differently as individuals. It is essential that both partners understand that each person wants to feel relaxed- but that road to relaxation can be completely opposite, such as being neat versus messy.  If this viewpoint is attained, no one need be the “bad guy”; there is no culprit that likes to just cause problems for the other.  They are both just people who are trying, albeit in opposite ways, to feel a bit calmer in a stressful world.  If this mutual understanding is achieved, mutual compassion and compromise can result instead of anger and resentment.  Of course, achieving this is not easy when there is a lot of “water under the bridge” and resentment has built up.  Sometimes the help of a couples therapist is necessary to get the couple to this point of understanding and change.

Finally, I wish to make the point that in many ways the issue of neat versus messy is not unique.  Relationships tend to develop problems when the needs of the two people in the couple are opposite from each other.  Being neat versus being messy is only one subset of this dynamic.  Another example I commonly see is the issue of money.  Just as being neat can be soothing for one person, being careful  with money can help reduce one partner’s anxiety.  Spending money freely may be anxiety producing.  But to the other partner, such carefulness may have the opposite effect; it may feel depriving or controlling, much like neatness; while on the other hand spending money, like being messy, may feel liberating.  The point is that couples don’t fight when their needs are aligned; they fight when each individual’s way of feeling safe and free differs from the other, producing a clash.  Money, neatness, and a thousand other topics, while important in themselves, are also specific manifestations of how a couple is a combination of two very different individuals- who must learn to understand and work with each other if they are to be happy together.  It is hard work, and frankly, it sometimes seems easier to be alone. 

But Oscar and Felix, despite their bickering, were best friends who really loved and trusted each other.  In real life the actors paralleled these characters.  Jack Klugman, in his book, wrote about his closeness with Tony Randall:

"You see, I hadn't ever told Tony the real gift his friendship had given me….The real gift was the capacity to truly trust another human being completely. …Up until I was diagnosed with cancer, I had spent 75 years living like a hermit inside myself. It didn't matter who I was with, even my family, I had a strict policy that people simply couldn't be trusted. 

…If you're like I was, or you're someone who holds a grudge, or you've never really let someone know what they mean to you because you're afraid, ask yourself this question: what are you really protecting? If you look, you'll see it: nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just phantoms from old wounds that never healed. Give them up and join the people in your life who love you. Risk it all. For me, it was the best gamble I ever made."

For a couple to work, they have to try to see past the bickering.  Being a loving couple means trying to understand each other's motivations, and this takes a lot of hard work. This hard work is especially called for when there is heightened tension in the relationship because each person has opposite needs.  But in order to try to understand each other’s motivations, they have to start by trusting each other’s good will.  Sometimes this can be very difficult, but Jack Klugman made some excellent points about why working hard to find and keep a trusting love is worth it.

Money, Happiness, and Psychotherapy

David Brooks wrote a nice piece on the relationship between money and happiness in New York Times on March 29^th, 2010:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opinion/30brooks.html

One major finding from the studies on happiness is that money is only strongly correlated with happiness when it allows people to meet their basic material needs. When people have enough money to pay their bills and do not have to struggle to make ends meet, the ability of more money to bring more happiness decreases rapidly. Essentially, past a certain basic point, more money does not make us much happier.

And yet, as David Brooks points out, most Americans make earning more and more money a major priority in their lives. They sacrifice many other aspects of their existence in order to maximize their income. Mr. Brooks points out that interpersonal relationships, social bonds, and enjoyable daily activities are much more strongly correlated with happiness than the accumulation of greater wealth. Nevertheless, most Americans ignore this and focus on financial success.

Mr. Brooks suggests that we prioritize money because financial success is easily quantifiable, while enjoyable relationships and fun daily activities are not as readily measured. I agree with Mr. Brooks' point, but I believe that lessons that I have learned in my psychotherapeutic work with clients can also explain why so many people exhaust themselves pursuing money even though it yields such poor returns on happiness. I believe that psychoanalytic thinking can explain this phenomenon in a deeper way.

For example, I once worked with a client who was bullied and taunted by his peers in middle school. He was humiliated and made to feel powerless. Moreover, his father would sometimes fly into rages and scream at him and occasionally would hit him. He developed into an adult with great anxiety and a strong sense of vulnerability, even though he was a tall and strong man. He developed several coping mechanisms to try to feel safer. One of these was that he focused incessantly on accumulating money. He would work almost every free hour, depriving himself of leisure time or the opportunity to build his social life. He came to feel that money was his protection. It represented, psychically, a way to defend himself from threats in the world. The accumulation of wealth also came to represent to him the feeling that he was somebody, somebody of importance, and not just a powerless victim.

In a way, this kind of thinking is very similar to how anorexics view their weight. People sufferring from anorexia believe they will gain a sense of control and self-worth if they can only “lose a few more pounds.” Money, like weight, or like most other easily quantifiable things, can make us feel like we have done something to make us feel less threatened in the world and more important. That is a major reason, I believe, that people work tirelessly, at great cost, to earn more money instead of engaging in other activities which would make them happier. They are chasing the dream of finally no longer being vulnerable to the frightening feelings, or the low self-esteem, that plagued them when they were younger.

The problem with this approach is that it is external. The sense of safety comes from achieving an external goal, like a certain dollar amount or a certain number of pounds lost. The sense of security, of feeling that one has transcended the fear, has not been achieved internally. In other words, the individual has not faced their fears, worked on them, and come out the other side- the more healthy side- where they are finally comfortable within themselves. They are still not comfortable in their own skins, and must perpetually chase their external goals lest the psychological demons from their past catch up to them.

Psychotherapy can be of great help in achieving that sense of internal comfort. If the therapist and client both do their jobs, together they can help the client transcend the earlier fears and help him or her feel much more comfortable in the world. When this happens one is so much more at ease with oneself, and one’s place in the world, in a way that the illusory chasing of external quantitative things, like money or weight loss, could never achieve.