Of course, there are a multitude of answers to that question. First of all, and most importantly, anger is a safer way to express fear. Feeling fear makes a person feel vulnerable, but anger gives a false sense of power. Fear transformed to anger seems to give us energy of sorts, although it is generally not an energy that results in good. Anger and fear are both addictive, so that we can become not only accustomed to both, thinking we cannot live without one or the other or both.
What would our spouse be fearful about? Of course, people are afraid of a multitude of things, but if our spouse is angry at us much of the time, we can be assured we are one of the objects of his/her fear. My spouse is afraid of me? I have never laid a hand on him/her, you might say. But we are afraid of much more than physical things. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me is one of the greatest falsehoods ever crafted to sound pithy and wise. Words spoken with intent to upset, dismay or otherwise hurt can last a lifetime. How many of us can recall, years, even decades later, something a parent or other close, trusted loved one said to us, even though we have long since forgotten the various physical insults we’ve received.
Ask yourself this question now: Do I have the capacity to say some really clever, sarcastic things? Is it possible that I have directed such speech at my spouse one time or another? Is it possible I said something exceedingly hurtful to him/her, making him/her wary of me, fearful I might say something equally hurtful again. Is it possible his/her anger at me, (expressed as a sullen silence, sharp, brief communication, a look of fury, a lack of engagement in any way, sabotaging activities of any kind) might be because our spouse is continually on his/her guard against us, keeping up the anger so he/she has something to defend him/herself against us.
If this is the case, it is, once again, time to act now. How do we go about initiating communication with our beloved, when they are doing their best to avoid any sort of interaction. The first thing we do is apply the three D’s, which stands for Deadly Dukes Down. ‘Dukes’ is an old fashioned word for fists, and in this case, our dukes are any sort of weapon we might use against our spouse, remembering that more often than not, our mouth is very possibly the worse one. As James says, “And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature: and it is set on fire of hell.”
Of course, physical violence to our best beloved is never an option. It is immoral and illegal and reprehensible. Words spoken with intent to harm are not illegal, but they are, no differently, immoral and reprehensible.
How do we apply DDD to our words? We speak to our spouse of something about ourselves that does not involve them. For instance, if we say, “Honey, I am so sorry I got impatient with you,” we do not add a slap to the end of the sentence, such as, “but it is because you are so neurotic about everything being put away in your special little hidey holes.” Do we think that will help our spouse not to be afraid of our nasty little tongue. Let’s try again. “Honey, I am so sorry I got impatient with you. It was nothing but selfish of me.”
If we haven’t said anything of the sort in a long time, of course, our spouse is not going to trust this first humble statement we’ve made in ages. In actuality, our dukes need to stay down, permanently. When unpleasantries are just so clever, we feel we have to say them, we must remember that the only one who will be impressed by our cleverness is us, and our spouse will be driven even further away. It is not worth the price we pay.
Do you not know how good it feels to our spouse to hear us say, “I made a mistake. I’m sorry I was so careless,” or “I can’t believe what a pig I am. I’m going to do my best to clean up after myself.” (If we call ourselves the name, there is a very good chance our spouse will not.)
And here’s a promise. If we keep our dukes down and confess to our own faults and shortcomings completely without the slap ultimately blaming our behavior on our spouse, miraculously, our spouses will slowly start admitting his/her own faults. When we take our dukes down, eventually our loved ones will too.
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