Here is a bitter and familiar picture from a great many living rooms: you are arguing, or more precisely you are arguing with him, and he is silent.
Here is a second picture: you keep reminding her of things that matter to you, and somehow it turns out that she always forgets them.
Steel your heart and summon your best strength: you have run into passive aggression.
Why have I married the passive-aggressive to the word "lie"? Simple: because passive aggression is a defence mechanism, and like every defence mechanism — projection, denial — it is a sophisticated and not always conscious self-deception.
In other words, instead of directly expressing what is really troubling us, we escape into a behaviour, or in fact into an absence of behaviour (and that is the passive part), and this is both a lie and something that drives the other side up the wall.
And it matters to me to say to couples wherever they are: excessive passive aggression is a lie. A relationship that runs for months, and sometimes years, in the shadow of passive aggression is founded on a lie.
What is the lie? That we are really a couple, and that we can really go on living like this forever.
Because if passive aggression is a significant chunk of your communication, it may be that you are not a couple — meaning two loving people with a sense of shared fate — and it may be that you can stay together forever, but I wouldn't call that "living."
Right, enough heat. Let's be methodical. Let's describe the monster.
At the practical, everyday level, passive aggression will take three prominent forms:
1] Silence — both inside an argument and as a prominent mode of response. True, this is the best known and most infuriating type of the phenomenon, but it isn't the only one.
By the way, not every prolonged silence from a partner is necessarily passive aggression. Sometimes it expresses genuine distress and a feeling of having no legitimacy to speak, or a real fear of speaking. Go easy on the analyses.
2] Forgetting, or brushing aside all sorts of subjects that matter to me — for example, somehow you didn't remember to bring me the yoghurt I like from the supermarket.
Again, calm down the inner Freud who is tempted to analyse every esoteric instance of forgetting. Within the load placed on couples — especially those with children — instances of forgetting here and there are only to be expected. Only if it's consistent and persistent forgetting of something that matters specifically to the partner would I pull the suspicions down from the attic.
3] Diverting the discussion or the subject elsewhere — a sophisticated and relatively new version of the product. I would phrase it differently: to fudge something is a particularly infuriating and cowardly way of lying.
Every defence mechanism, and passive aggression is no different in this respect, tries to make it easier for us to deal with something loaded, and diverting the discussion or the conversation to a side subject — or seizing on marginal details — allows the passive-aggressive to avoid that reckoning.
You've been going out for four years and the question "where is our relationship going?" has never been more relevant. And here, somehow, you never manage to talk to him about it. In the good case, you discuss something marginal instead: "Darling, what do you fancy watching on Netflix today?" In the bad case, it gets turned back on you: "What's the matter, did they get you down at work again and you decided to have a go at me?"
Well then, what do you do with it?
Let's start with what not to do: don't hurl the expression "passive-aggressive" at each other in moments of storm and distress, and don't play cheap Freud.
No man has yet been born who enjoys hearing the other analyse him psychologically in passing. In other words, people don't like being caught out.
So what then?
First of all, do a quick mental preparation. It's important to internalise that the important question is not "why the hell are you always being passive-aggressive?" but "what are you defending yourself against?"
If people flee in panic from a certain subject, believe me they have good reasons for it. Usually in situations like this we — the other side — make the classic mistake, meaning we focus on our own side, and worse, on our own rightness.
Big mistake. Something significant is threatening the other side. Otherwise they would not have recruited such an infantile mechanism into their service.
First of all, point out what is happening; mark it.
Leave the discussion of the original subject and say, gently, that you've noticed the other is silent and not really taking part. Don't pressure them to talk.
Don't ask, "Why the hell are you doing this?"
And how do you draw out someone locked inside passive aggression?
Ask the other in what state it would be comfortable for them to talk. Ask them what would make it easier.
Tell them that it also matters to you that a conversation happen here and not a one-sided speech. Emphasise that you are not opponents wrestling for victory in the conversation — an idiotic goal by any account — you are two lovers trying together to find a way over an obstacle.
And a few closing words to you, from the depth of my heart.
Look, sister, I understand the difficulty of setting your pain aside. Pain tends… to be painful, and pain asks immediately for only one thing: relief.
Do you understand that this is exactly what the other side is going through?
If you want to be right — with pleasure. My secretary will write you out a certificate of rightness for a symbolic sum. (Actually I don't have a secretary. Just a writing technique.)
But if you want to leave the conversation in a better state than you entered it… well, for that you'll have to go around the passive aggression gently, and not charge straight into it.