Oskar Holzberg column
Should there be a fight in marriage?
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In the column of our couples therapist Oskar Holzberg, everything revolves around typical love wisdom and its truth content, he dissects proverbs, song lyrics and famous quotes. This time: “When married, you sometimes have to argue, because that’s how you learn something from each other” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet).
In a nutshell: The baron is right, of course. But without courtly etiquette, things can go terribly wrong these days.
Now in detail: Dear Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, like most people, I know and appreciate you as, as we would say today, an author (although Faust I and II really annoyed me when I was at school). You were an important psychologist at a time when there were no psychologists. Not only because you knew how to aptly describe mental processes and insights into relationships. They also overcame their fears through methods still used today, known as Exposure therapy and desensitization knows: When you noticed that loud music triggers a certain terror in you, you ran alongside the trumpets of the pageant until the noise no longer bothered you. You overcame your fear of heights by climbing the “highest peak of the cathedral tower” again and again until you didn’t mind anymore and you could stand there carefree.
And you’ve found that couples should argue to learn more about each other. Which, in my humble opinion, is still true today. However, today’s couple therapists would distinguish between arguments and arguments. This may seem petty and subtle to you, but in our time it is an important difference.
The idea of self-awareness
The idea of self-awareness emerged in the 1960s. People in western countries were getting better and better materially, but at the same time they were still constrained by moral rules and conventions. That was starting to feel too tight for more and more people. The younger generation in particular turned away from external pursuits of material things and turned to inner experiences. You wanted to be free and discover who you really are. One no longer wanted to bend oneself, but to be able to be authentic. In so-called encounter groups, people learned to defy inner prohibitions and taboos and instead “let everything out” without censorship. That wasn’t a bad idea back then, to break through the walls of inhibitions. Because most of them actually didn’t dare to show their feelings in everyday life. Here they were allowed to roar, rage and cry unfiltered.
But we now know that this unfiltered roar and roar is not good for you. And certainly not the relationship. It only makes us angrier. And we say hurtful things that we can’t undo. Brutal openness has become a real problem for romantic relationships. Nobody wants to hear that the ex behaved differently in bed, that our intelligence is insufficient and that we are a shitty egoist of the first order. And with the attitude that we are the way we are and that we have to be taken as such, no relationship can be maintained. Therefore, dear Goethe: Today’s people also have to learn a lot about each other. But not in an argument where we’re in danger of letting it all out.
Oscar Holzberg has been treating and writing about couples for almost 30 years. He says: “Love is not an illusion, but we have too many illusions about love.”