How Protesting Ruins Relationships

Back in the 1990s, I heard spiritual speaker and recent presidential candidate Marianne Williamson give a talk on love and acceptance. In that talk, she gave an example of the futility of trying to elicit love by punishing and berating people. She was walking through her self-help spiritual call center and noticed how short and intolerant the operators sounded. So, in a subsequent group meeting, she told them, “If I don’t hear more love in this room, people are going to start getting fired!” The point she was making is that it usually doesn’t work to elicit love with anger, fear, or threats of retribution.

But in a world too often dominated by fear and a belief that there is not enough love to go around, this kind of behavior is all too common. Consider a restaurant manager who berates his servers for not being more pleasant and kind to the customers; someone who nags, complains, and cajoles their spouse for not paying them enough attention; a person who expresses displeasure and flings accusations at a new dating partner because, despite being only four dates in and not having a commitment, they think that person might be dating other people.

Protest behaviors are an outgrowth of the roadmaps of intimacy and love relationships that people developed in childhood and what they had to do to get their needs for interpersonal security met. Anyone can engage in protest behaviors given the right circumstances, but understanding attachment styles will help you understand and work with this phenomenon.

Look at it this way. If you had a parent who rarely comforted,cuddledd, or held you or told you they loved you, you probably never developed an expectation that people would truly be there for you in the first place. You will have developed an avoidant or dismissing attachment style and viewed protesting the lack of love and comfort as futile.

So, when you perceived threats of rejection or having love withheld from you, you would simply have accepted it without protest…. And you would do the same in adulthood. If your parent was scary or abusive, you might ask for love and affection (even ragers and abusers can express love). If you didn’t get the love you wanted, you might have engaged in one very loud, intense, and volatile protest (behavior that was modeled for you), but then you would have run away and disappeared rather than risk retaliation… a typical pattern for fearful avoidants in adulthood.

But if you had a parent who was inconsistent, often loving and affectionate but sometimes rejecting or withholding, you probably would have viewed sustained protest behavior as a viable option. Getting mad, crying, or having a tantrum were likely to have worked in drawing the parent back in and getting love to pay off often enough to make it worth the upset (think about a variable ratio reinforcement schedule in operant conditioning and addictively playing a slot machine). This anxious or preoccupied person will have learned that love is in short supply and unreliable but attainable if you scream loud enough. In childhood, this strategy works because our society views having the stork take the child back or simply abandoning it as unacceptable (and illegal) behavior. But when practiced by adults, protest behavior is often a killer of relationships.

Protest behaviors might include the following (all of which I have seen in my therapy clients):

1. Calling out a new dating partner and accusing them of being a bad or dishonest person because, after four dates, you suspect they may have gone out with someone else.
2. Being angry and stomping around the house because your spouse is not being attentive enough to you.
3. Not smiling, hugging, or saying “I love you” to your partner because they are not in the mood to have sex with you.
4. Attacking someone mercilessly and heaping on the shame because they are not as sexually desirous as you are.
5. Berating your partner for other shortcomings like doing things around the house because you are too afraid (or it doesn’t work with an avoidant partner) to tell them gently what you are really feeling.
6. Add your own examples. You probably have a myriad of your own that I did not capture here.

The point that I hope you get from this is that protest behaviors are unlikely to get you what you need on any kind of sustained basis. The other person might give you what you want in the short run because they simply want to calm you down and avoid a crisis. But the cost is huge. The partner is likely to feel resentful for the way you treated them (even though you think they deserve it), lose trust in you as a viable long-term partner, and maybe want to avoid you because you are simply no fun.

In short, not only are you not likely to get more love with this approach over time… you are likely to get less. And if you fail to see your own part in this pattern, you are likely to increase your protest behavior to the point that you blow up the relationship. This then contributes to your belief that love in the world is lacking and unpredictable… and you then engage in yet more protest behavior in your next relationship.

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Here are some things you can do instead:

1. Get an accurate take on the state of your relationship. If you are dating and have not had a discussion about commitment, then you may be hurt or disappointed by the other person’s behavior, but you probably are not in a position to demand loyalty or make accusations.
2. If you are dating and want to be able to ask for reassurance (reasonably), then ask the other person to date you exclusively. If they say no, then you may choose to continue dating them, but you will know not to expect their loyalty or for them to put your needs first.
3. Be honest about how you feel and talk about your behavior: “I feel sad and unloved. I’d really like it if you would hug me more.” “Sex indicates love and desire to me. Not having sex makes me feel unloved and not wanted.” “I know I don’t have a right to control your behavior, but I’m feeling scared and uneasy when you….”
4. Find other support systems and people to talk to and get reassurance from other than your specific relationship partner. Otherwise, you may find yourself seeking reassurance from the same person you have labeled as the offender.
5. Instead of protesting the other person’s behavior, respond by setting clear boundaries and making your own decisions to take care of yourself and your emotions. If you have to plead with someone to love you, you won’t believe it anyway and won’t feel good about yourself.
6. Learn to love yourself. Otherwise, you will always be looking for other people to sustain this feeling for you… and most people will not be able to boost you up indefinitely. If you love yourself and believe you are worthwhile, other people’s unavailability will not hurt you as much.

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