I have just learned that a new and possibly entirely unreliable survey claims that the average Briton spends 66 nights banned from the marital bed over the course of their marriage. That sounds about right to me, although I have never kept count.
A number of reasons may be proffered – sneezing, coughing, fidgeting, farting, snoring and so on. But the most common reason, of course, is punishment. For being sent to the sofa is a form of exile, and exile is one of the most painful forms of chastisement.
The subject of punishment within relationships has vexed me over the last 40 years. I have considerable long-term experience of receiving punishment and, on occasion, meting it out.
In wider society, once upon a time, the pattern would be quite simple – some men would resort to physical violence and some women to psychological warfare. Nowadays, physical and mental abuse has been made illegal, which isn’t to say they don’t still go on.
Probably the most common form of exile, apart from being sent to the sofa, is the silent treatment – a profoundly disquieting strategy that can cause acute distress in whoever happens to be the recipient. It is as blatant as it is unpleasant and can last for days, weeks, even months. It can be as bad as physical violence – as John Grant sang in his treatment of the subject in Vietnam: “Your silence is a weapon / It’s like a nuclear bomb / It’s like the Agent Orange / They used to use in Vietnam.” Powerful, toxic and deadly.
A lower grade, but equally effective, version of the silent treatment is the “interrupted signal”. This is a deliberate, slight miscalibration of the usual responses, cues and habits within a relationship. A slightly tardy answer to a normally routine question, a somewhat more aggressive request for a certain task to be completed, a tiny variation in the space held between bodies on a bed. The dishwasher may be loaded with marginally more noise than is customary. The beauty of this particular punishment, from the punisher’s point of view, is its deniability. One can accuse the other of paranoia and continue the punishment.
Gaslighting, another technique, is not quite a punishment, more a long-term strategy, and is very powerful indeed. This is a variation of false memory syndrome, in which the false memory, is, so to speak, not unconscious, but deliberate and disseminated rather than internalised. Past facts are distorted or denied, past realities reimagined to establish the dominance of the gaslighter’s real or imagined version of the truth. The fact that everyone’s memory is fallible anyway makes this ultimately impossible to challenge.
Punishment, in the home as in schools, is deployed for a variety of reasons. Some use it as a corrective – in the hope that the person who receives it will adjust their behaviour accordingly (as in schools, it doesn’t really work). Some use it out of spite or malice. Others use it because they think it is the right thing to do, that it has some intrinsic worth whatever the practical result. And some just enjoy it for the feeling of power it bestows.
Punishment at root – even though I am sometimes guilty of it – strikes me as fundamentally futile. It hardly ever achieves its aim, because people don’t change, and because, if they do, it’s because they choose to as a result of love and encouragement rather than punishment.
The danger of punishment is that after a while it becomes an unconscious habit rather than a deliberate strategy. Then you may or may not be hiding it from your partner, but you might be hiding it from yourself. Then, when retaliation comes, you will find yourself not only unprepared, but also uncomprehending. What may follow is the cruellest kind of punishment of all – not the punishment of the other, but of the self.
