Different forms of Personal incompatibility

Personal incompatibility may of course take many different forms, from the superficial “nothing much in common” to the deepest levels of personality differences. On the more superficial levels it is often found that the partners gradually drift further apart because they each become more and more involved in individual interests and fail to preserve or cultivate any worthwhile interests in common. This is one kind of inattention to the marriage, which will be dealt with later.

Another kind of personal incompatibility may be due to different levels of intelligence or education, especially when either partner is emotionally immature to the extent of being unable to avoid jealousy of the more advanced one. This is generally more common in our culture when the wife is much more intellectually advanced than the husband, and even though she loves him deeply and avoids anything that could be construed as “rubbing it in,” he finds it difficult to avoid feelings of inferiority, however able and successful he may be in his own field. This is important in pre-marital counseling, mainly for its recognition and for the awareness of the need for development of emotional maturity and psychic security so that acceptance is easier. With careful help this kind of difficulty can often be overcome by the partners.

There may also be gross differences between the partners regarding the principles and methods of child management, which may contribute much to marital disorder. The attitudes of many people to such things are derived more than they may realize from what they absorbed in their own upbringing, and to that extent they are not quite fully open to “sweet reason.” Ideally such questions should be faced before marriage, and at least before the arrival of the first child, so that they can present a “united front” to the children. But this is often not done, and arguments, backed by “righteous indignation” grow more and more intense.

The fact that children may suffer far more from the constant parental conflicts than from the kind of management either parent would employ does not seem to penetrate the emotionally disturbed minds of the parents until the emotional tensions are “unbottled” fully in good counseling. In some cases the conflict regarding child management is not what it seems, but rather a deep emotional conflict between the partners which fixes itself on any available battleground. As they unburden their feelings fully this will often become clear, and until it does, to the partners as well as the counselor, the fights will go on.

Another form of personal incompatibility may be found in the various kinds of “mixed marriage,” between Christian and non-Christian, between Roman Catholic and Anglican, Episcopal, or Protestant, and even at times between two closely related Protestant denominations. People’s denominational and religious attitudes are largely accidents of birth, and they are imbedded so deeply as to be often out of the range of reason. Here again the trouble is not so much the difference, although this has difficulties in it especially with training of children. The trouble is mainly on the level of emotional immaturity, which brings intolerance and attempts at domination or the imposition of religious attitude on the partner. Such differences need competent counseling if they are to be faced in the light of reality and resolved to the extent of mutual acceptance. The same principles apply, sometimes to an even greater extent, in the case of marked racial and cultural differences, especially when there are also color differences.

Deeper (though not necessarily more intense) than any of these “acquired” differences which may make for personal incompatibility are inborn “temperamental” differences of personality type, which may have much to do with marital disorder, especially when, as often, they are not understood and accepted. Here, for example, are Tom and Betty, married for four years, with two children. They have apparently been in increasing conflict almost from the beginning of their marriage. Now that they look back on it, the conflicts were there during their engagement, but they thought that it would be easy to work them out after their marriage.

There are masses of complaints on both sides, but they seem to be reducible to fairly definite differences. Tom’s main complaint about Betty is that she is so utterly careless and irresponsible that he is continually worried that he will be reduced to bankruptcy in his finances and humiliation with his friends. Betty on the other hand takes the view that there’s no such problem at all except in Tom’s imagination, and that he makes so much of a fuss about every decision that she is driven to desperation. When she wants to invite her friends to their home Tom does his best to dissuade her; or if they do come he behaves in a most ungracious manner, or retires into his den, which she feels is insulting.

As the stories unfold it soon becomes clear that Betty is what Jung called an extrovert type of personality, completely natural and spontaneous, friendly to everyone, and impulsive in almost everything she does. Tom has to admit that even with her impulsiveness she has so far proved that her judgment or “intuition” is sound, and that his deep apprehensiveness is not based on any previous failure on her part. But he finds her intolerant of his need to take time to think out all the different aspects of any proposition or decision, and also of his rooted suspicion of the motives of people whom she “just knows” are good and reliable.

Tom is an accountant, who is building up a first class professional reputation for his reliability and conscientiousness, and he has his office imbued with these great principles. He is not a good mixer, but he has the respect of his associates and clients, and feels content and competent in his work. In other words he is an introvert type of personality in Jung’s classification. He had always been shy of girls as he grew up, but Betty’s spontaneous friendliness and charm overcame his shyness to the point that he proposed to her, and she was attracted by his conscientious and steady nature; he was so different from many of the boys who had tried to sweep her off her feet. They got on very well together until they found themselves in the intimate relationship of marriage, and then each began to find the attitudes of the other difficult to accept. It is possible that with some encouragement Tom might develop more sociability, and Betty might tone down some of her impulsiveness, but these qualities of extroversion and introversion are deeply imbedded in Betty’s and Tom’s personalities and are not open to radical change. But with better understanding each can learn to accept the other, and to be more responsive to the better aspects of each other’s personalities.

Other types of personality which may bear on marriage are the “schizoid” or suspicious type, the obsessional or very particular, the “mercurial” or “cyclothyme,” and the “hysteric” or over-dramatic. Tom had some obsessional and schizoid elements in his personality. The way to better marital harmony is through acceptance of each other’s personality types. It seems obvious that in any consideration of incompatibility we must face the fact that it is a matter of degree, depending on what amount and intensity of difference people can tolerate. The word “compatible” comes from two Latin words and means “able to suffer with,” or “endure together.” There are obviously limits as to what can be endured together in marriage, but there are some considerations about incompatibility that are most relevant to marriage counseling.

The first is that people do not necessarily have to remain as they are. Sick marriages, like sick persons, can often be healed if given some help. It seems clear that any help is more likely to succeed when the underlying factors in the incompatibility are discovered and dealt with, and the plausible rationalizations are honestly faced. Many examples of “incompatibility” are more fittingly regarded as intolerance and these can only be dealt with when this is faced and accepted. Others as we have seen are not of the same kind as they appear, and “sexual incompatibility” may be a manifestation of personal incompatibility, in which case it needs to be dealt with from the personal rather than the sexual point of view.

Secondly the whole question needs to be seen in relation to the fact that if any two partners were completely “compatible” their marriage would become intolerably dull. Within the limits of what can be endured together, incompatibility provides a source of mutual interest, and a challenge to continued mutual exploration rather than an excuse for writing it off as hopeless. The good counselor may help the partners to learn to accept each other’s different feelings and attitudes, even the hostile ones; and each other’s conduct within the law. At the same time one of them may learn to keep on contributing what he can to the relationship, even when the other one seems to be doing very little about it.

Tags: Counseling