Why We Sometimes Try to Make Our Partner Sad

there is a kind of argument that begins
with one partner deliberately and for no
immediately obvious reason attempting to
spoil the good mood and high spirits of
the other the cheerful partner may be
cooking a cake for their visiting nephew
or whistling a tune while they rearrange
the kitchen they may be making plans for
the weekend or discussing what fun it
will be to see an old school friend
again soon
they may be expressing unusual optimism
about their professional future and
financial prospects despite our love for
them something about the situation may
suddenly grate with us within a short
time we may find ourselves saying
something unusually harsh or critical we
may point out a floor with their school
friend
they tell very boring anecdotes and they
can be pretty snobbish we may take
exception to the arrangement of the
cupboards we find fault with that cake
we bring up an aspect of their work that
we know our partner finds dispiriting we
complain that they haven’t properly
considered the roadworks when planning
the weekend we do everything to try to
induce a mood of anxiety friction and
misery on the surface it looks as if
we’re simply monsters but if we dig a
little deeper a more understandable
though no less regrettable picture may
emerge we are acting in this way because
our partners buoyant and breezy mood can
come across as a forbidding barrier to
communication we fear that their current
happiness could prevent them from
knowing the shame or melancholy worry or
loneliness that presently possess us we
are trying to shatter their spirits
because we’re afraid of being lonely we
don’t make this argument explicitly to
ourselves but a dark instinct in our
minds experiences there upbeat mood as a
warning that the uncheered parts of
ourselves must now be unwelcome and so
we make a crude wholly immature but
psychologically comprehensible
assumption that we will never be
properly known and loved until our
partner can feel a sad and as frustrated
as we
do a recalibration of mood that we put
into motion with malicious determination
but of course the truth is quite the
contrary we may succeed in making our
partner upset but we almost certainly
won’t thereby secure the imagined
benefits of their gloom
they won’t once their mood has been
spoiled emerge with any greater appetite
for listening to our messages of
distress or for cradling us indulgently
in their consoling arms
they’ll just be furious the better move
if only we could manage it would be to
confess to rather than act out our
impulses we would learn to get to know
the mechanisms of our immaturity with
unfried and curiosity while making every
effort to protect others from its
effects we would admit to our partner
that we had been seized by an ugly fear
as to the consequences of their
happiness
we’d laughingly reveal how much we would
ideally love to cause a stink and would
then firmly pledge that we naturally
aren’t about to we would all the while
remind ourselves that every cheerful
person has been sad and that the buoyant
among us have by far the best chances of
keeping afloat those who remain
emotionally at sea the spoiling argument
is a wholly paradoxical plea for love
that leaves one party ever further from
the tenderness and shared insight they
crave knowing to spot the phenomenon
should lead us when we’re the ones
baking or whistling a tune to remember
that the person attempting to ruin our
mood isn’t perhaps just a monster though
they are a bit of that too they are
childishly but sincerely worried that
our happiness may come at their expense
and they are through their remorseless
negativity in a garbled and maddening
way begging us for reassurance
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