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When willingness to leave a relationship functions as coercion

7 tweets · September 2019 · 25 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter

Replying to Lulie @reasonisfun ·

Counter-intuitive fact about commitments (job, relationship, etc.): Being prepared to leave if things go wrong makes it less likely that they will.

@reasonisfun Mmm, important difference between being committed to caring for your own needs and threatening to ditch the relationship if something makes you uncomfortable. The latter structurally functions as coercion, even if not intended as such.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@SamoBurja On further reflection it was apparent that that non-attachment concept was clearly enabling ways in which I was putting our relationship at stake to get what I wanted. My current sense of integrity is that I wouldn't continue to be in a relationship I was willing to do that to.

@reasonisfun I say this as someone who a few years ago would have resonated strongly with your original tweet, and part of my resonance was related to this coercive pattern. AND, I still resonate with a core thing in what you're saying. I'm just wanting to point out that it's complex.

@reasonisfun I think part of my situation was that there was an asymmetry in our mutual willingness to leave, and so I was able to say (implicitly) "I'd rather end the relationship than have this conversation" and that meant the convo never happened. (this was somewhat a bluff, somewhat not)

@reasonisfun If my partner had been more willing to leave, then they might have been like "fuck this, I'm not persisting through this." NOTE: that from my blindspotted perspective it seemed like things were effectively not going wrong because I was prepared to leave. But it was illusion.

@reasonisfun It's equivalent to how if you chew out anyone who gives you feedback you don't like, you will soon get less feedback you don't like. Success! .......err. No feedback means you don't actually find out what's going on.

@reasonisfun Relatedly, part of the whole point of committing to a relationship such as a marriage is that you have the security to know that if either of you encounters hard times (say a major injury/illness) the other person isn't just going to leave. Yet that may involve unpleasantness.

@reasonisfun I find myself wishing I were doing more YesAnding of you here. I do think there's a deep wisdom in what you're saying about BATNAs and not forcing yourself to suffer. I also think there are pathological ways to take this advice, and I want to point at those failure modes.