Unhappy Couples and Flaw Fixation

Leo Tolstoy famously opens his novel Anna Karenina with the words, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Statisticians have derived from here something they've come to call the "Anna Karenina principle"—roughly, the idea that success in any enterprise requires that everything go right: remove a single important prerequisite, and your endeavor will fail. [1] Say the preconditions of success are A, B, C, and D. Then in every successful case, all of A, B, C, and D, will be in place, but each failure may have its own profile. Lack of success may be due to the absence of A, or B, or C and D, and so on. Successes then can be expected to resemble each other much more than failures. The Anna Karenina principle is said to hold true in a wide variety of contexts, from family dynamics to the banking system.

Couple having a misunderstanding

Source: Cottonbro/Pexels

But unhappy couples often do have something in common, or so I want to argue: a tendency, on the part of either partner or both, to focus on a single blemish in the relationship to the exclusion of everything else. Say, for some biological reason, the sex is no longer as good as it used to be, or one partner in a monogamous relationship has a brief affair, or talks too loudly on the phone, or wrecks the car, and the other can't get over it. Whenever something like this happens, the aggrieved person lets the one bad thing outweigh everything good: all the battles fought jointly, all the joyful times, the mutual support over the years, everything.

This phenomenon needs a name. I propose to call it "flaw fixation." We observe it in cases unrelated to coupledom as when people become obsessed with an imperfection in their own appearance — sometimes, not even a real one — and persuade themselves that they are unattractive on account of it.

It is quite possible that if one looked at the amount of both good and bad in a relationship, some happy couples' balance sheet would resemble that of many unhappy ones. It is just that the happy partners take both the debit and the credit columns into account. Relationships, much like people's characters or appearance, seem quite different when considered from a broader, more generous point of view. (An overall wonderful person may, after all, have a character defect, and if you fixate on that, you'll easily miss her numerous counterbalancing virtues.) While there are, indeed, many different things that can go wrong in a romantic relationship — as per the Anna Karenina principle — there is a general strategy for dealing with most of the less egregious bads. Unhappy couples often lack this strategy, and to that extent, they resemble each other.

I wish to note here that I am, by no means, against all fixations. Scientific achievements, great works of art, and revolutions that bring about better social order often require exclusive focus – to the point of obsession – on a single thing. Since fixation portrays the thing we have focused on as more important than anything else, it may help us stay motivated, which is key to success in general but it is crucial when we are facing a very difficult task. This is probably why we have a propensity to get obsessed: It can be useful. (There is a separate question of whether socially useful obsessions — for instance, Einstein's obsession with space and time — are psychologically healthy for the person who has them, but whatever the answer to that, the occasional utility of tunnel vision is undeniable.) The point here is that in relationships, fixation on a single flaw can undermine happiness by obscuring it. Stand too close to a tree, and you won’t see the rest of the forest.

On the flip side, a person may stay in an unhealthy relationship for a long time, because he or she focuses on a tiny amount of good to the exclusion of a large amount of bad. Sometimes, there is one day of love out of thirty; one happy night followed by weeks of struggle and strife. In these cases, we see flaw fixation's shadow, or if you wish, its mirror image. There is tunnel vision again, but at the end of the tunnel is a flicker of light, not an imperfection in the relationship. It is as though a person ignores the signs of winter visible everywhere by directing all her attention to a single remaining green leaf. This opposite tendency may explain how people can stay in a relationship with a selfish and even narcissistic person for years. But that is a topic for another discussion.

There are two more points I wish to make before closing. First, if there is something you tend to do that really gets on your partner's nerves, it may be a good idea to avoid the behavior rather than insist that your spouse or lover take the broader view. That's particularly true when making a correction would cost you little but would save the other much exasperation. (Think of the toothpaste squeezing issue some couples fight over.)

Second, there really is, sometimes, a problem big enough to break the deal all on its own. If your partner, out of spite, burns the project you've been working on for months or takes a solo trip to Hawaii as you battle cancer, it may be difficult to put the issue in perspective. Most cases, though, are not like this. Frequently, the good would outweigh the bad if we would only put it on the scale. If we do not, the bad does not so much win as it gets a walkover: It tips the balance in its own favor, because there's simply nothing on the other side of the scale. The good about a relationship cannot prevail over the bad if we never give it a chance to compete. That's just how the good loses the battle, and we lose a relationship, in the case of a flaw fixation.

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