Thread by @amelapay

Alright I’ve opted into Venkat’s game du jour.

1 like = 1 opinion from me on this,

at some point in the near future.

https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1206647031424380928

ok this is finally beginning. hold onto your hats.

1/ in the several days since I was assigned "fighting clean vs. fighting dirty in relationships," I already mentally transmuted it into "healthy vs. unhealthy conflict."

Provisionally, let's accept the idea that conflict hygiene = healthy.

2/ as a methodological individualist, I am forced to conclude that the "health" of a relationship just reduces to the health & wellbeing of its 2 participants.

(stipulating the scope of this discussion to be pairwise relationships)

3/ that does NOT imply that the participants in a relationship ought to simply "maximize utility," as some types of inter-relationship utility distribution break the relationship in a way that precludes long-term utility gains at the expense of short-term utility production

4/ the language of "conflict" in relationships is much preferable to the language of "problems"

because speaking of relationship "problems" suggests that they are discrete issues with specific possible resolutions

but that is rarely the case.

5/ context shifting between

(a) reifying/anthropomorphizing a relationship as having its own needs & wants and

(b) conceptualizing partners are completely distinct and potentially at odds on anything

is real hard.

6/ goal-oriented relationships can assume a plausible telos which feels motivating and can smooth conflict

e.g. producing/raising children

c.f. my husband @byrneseyeview

medium.com/@byrnehobart/t…

@byrneseyeview 7/ in the absence of a specific goal or telos, the presumed telos of a relationship is its own perpetuation.

but that's bad!

many relationships ought to be ended for the sake of their participants and not continued.

@byrneseyeview 8/ which means that

"fighting clean" can end up destroying relationships

"fighting dirty" can end up salvaging relationships

OOPS

@byrneseyeview 9/ you may have heard that "you can't show up in a relationship until you get right with your own self"

or some such.

but this is patently false.

broken people can and do participate in healthy relationships. adversity has long been humanity's greatest teacher.

@byrneseyeview 10/ at the same time, that does not imply that every pairing of broken people is potentially fertile ground.

for reasons often out of either party to the relationship's control, the types of conflict that arise are not in fact resolvable (c.f. tweet 4)

@byrneseyeview 11/ this means that part of the art of fighting clean is knowing how to pick one's battles in the first place (either through battle selection or relationship selection).

to a truly virtuous person, if you can't fight clean, don't fight at all.

@byrneseyeview 12/ circling back to the light that methodological individualism sheds on fighting clean:

is it really the fight itself that is "clean" and morally above boards? or is it just the people themselves?

I don't think it makes sense to judge the fight per se.

@byrneseyeview 13/ very few forms of human interaction are wrong per se.

when forms of human interaction seem categorically wrong, it is typically in virtue of an empirical fact that humans widely share

e.g. reacting badly to name-calling

@byrneseyeview 14/ "fighting dirty" must be distinguished from mere "fighting badly"

"fighting badly" is perhaps more like "fighting ineptly"

they are not the same thing at all.

@byrneseyeview 15/ "fighting badly" i.e. ineptly means that a person chooses methods that are unlikely either to actualize value in terms of her getting what she wants on the ground, or her getting what she wants in terms of preserving a healthy ongoing relationship

@byrneseyeview 16/ "fighting badly" failure case 1:

not advocating for one's actual needs, becoming a doormat, giving too much over and over and over

@byrneseyeview 17/ "fighting badly" failure case 2:

getting what you want/need - but at a clear, steep cost in terms of jeopardizing the relationship... without killing it outright.

result: relationship purgatory.

@byrneseyeview 18/ in contrast, "fighting dirty" often entails an element of knowing what one is doing.

knowledge of badness renders sub-optimality fully wrong.

@byrneseyeview 19/ "fighting dirty," then, is often akratic.

someone may have an identifiable pattern of "button-pushing" or similar, but tends to indulge it in the moment.

@byrneseyeview 20/ this means that relationships conflict tactics that were initially merely inept can become wrong over time.

for instance your fucked up family taught you that you fight like this and at first you didn't know what else to do

(but now you do)

@byrneseyeview 21/ even children have some intuitive sense of which conflict tactics are clean and which are dirty.

this is why brown-nosers and teachers pets get ostracized.

@byrneseyeview 22/ so then, other than simple akrasia, why do people sometimes choose to fight dirty over and over?

another explanation is that they feel locked into relationships that can't actually be healthy.

yet they can't completely give up on meeting their needs, either.

@byrneseyeview 23/ it is very, very bad to end up with a relationship dynamic wherein one person is the Bad Guy (i.e. the dirty fighter).

even if it's kind of true, that underlying dynamic robs the Bad Guy of the possibility of atonement and demotivates marginal improvement.

@byrneseyeview 24/ is there always some possibility of "fighting clean" i.e. pursuing health via a relationship no matter the circumstances?

I'd say no. virtue is not a *purely* internal matter, following Aristotle it also depends on external goods which may involve luck/chance/etc.

@byrneseyeview 25/ that said, some choice between more and less dirty will at least be available.

e.g. standing down (which may be perceived as "stonewalling") rather than lashing out

@byrneseyeview 26/ "manipulation" is a completely non-useful frame for thinking about conflict in relationships.

there exists no objective way to distinguish manipulation from ordinary compromise, renegotiation, attempts at change, etc.

@byrneseyeview 27/ that was 27 I'm a little tipsy

@byrneseyeview 28/ "setting boundaries" is having a moment but I find it similarly not useful for managing conflict.

"boundaries" are just requests or even ultimatums, they do not actually succeed in walling off the way other people do or can affect you.

@byrneseyeview 27/ I thought I had two 26s but I was wrong

@byrneseyeview 28/ I like this idea that when you choose between jobs/apartments/cities/partners you are really just choosing between sets of problems.

the problems never disappear, but they can change.

which set of problems can your wring meaning from? which are sustainable for you?

@byrneseyeview 29/ the upshot is that if you are never tempted to fight dirty (or at all), you might be participating in a relationship that is too far inside of your comfort zone.

@byrneseyeview 30/ too much dirty conflict = relationship is DOA

no difficult conflict = relationship is shallow

just enough difficult sometime dirty conflict = inhabiting relationship zone of proximal development

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_p…

@byrneseyeview 31/ have you considered that you can choose not do anything when conflicts arise?

like just nothing? literally nothing. not stew, not keep score, not act out, not withdraw in.

N
O
T
H
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@byrneseyeview 32/ I heard this idea from a parenting book recently, that "children behave well when they can."

This is a good model for dealing with children who are obviously, uncontroversially "still developing."

But adults are not children.

@byrneseyeview 33/ If the adults around you are behaving badly i.e. fighting dirty, you're going to have to choose how to interpret it.

Child model: if they could do better, they would

Adult model: Get it together, strive up

@byrneseyeview 34/ Either can work, I suppose.

But it's confusing when some of the time you provide a cushy womb for your adult relations and other times you put your foot down on bad behavior.

@byrneseyeview 35/ According to pop/folk psychology, emotions are like tasks that must eventually be "processed," perhaps with professional assistance, and you ignore emotional backlog at your own peril.

But what if this is just... not... true...

@byrneseyeview 36/ "fighting dirty" could be seen as a manifestation of the possibly misguided advice to process/actively deal with all your shit.

if you have to do something dirty with it, maybe just don't?

@byrneseyeview 37/ unresolved conflict is NOT in fact necessarily some kind of relationship technical debt that must eventually be sorted for the good of the relationship.

@byrneseyeview 38/ "compromise" is commonly taken as an indicator of the fighting having been clean.

but the compromised outcome can easily be worse than either of the non-compromised outcomes.

maybe it's better to learn to live with someone having "won" instead.

@byrneseyeview 39/ what's wrong with bringing a gun to the knife fight?

it's against the de facto norms of the encounter.

it dramatically narrows the range of possible outcomes.

@byrneseyeview 40/ so if someone you know literally always fights in ways that would otherwise seem "dirty," you do not necessarily "lower yourself to their level" in reciprocating.

instead, you merely opt in to their kind of game.

@byrneseyeview 41/ (you're not obligated to do that, but you may)

@byrneseyeview 42/ it's a big mistake to treat every conflict as a negotiation.

many conflicts are simply expressive.

@byrneseyeview 43/ people who are trying to become less passive-aggressive might end up with a layover at aggressive-aggressive.

I don't make the rules, this is non-ideal theory 🤷

@byrneseyeview 44/ if you try avoiding conflict by avoiding relationships, you're in for a treat - the real conflict was inside you all along

pamelajhobart.com/blog/cognitive…

@byrneseyeview 45/ balance is fake.

the people who challenge you won't nurture you. and vice versa.

if you flail against this, it'll probably be dirty.

@byrneseyeview 46/ the dirtiest fighters think they're the cleanest.

this never changes.

never ever ever

@byrneseyeview 47/ Venkat is ruining my marriage bc my husband just finished this game and I'm not even halfway through

@byrneseyeview 48/ has any "emotional abuser" ever copped to it? I have my doubts.

as dirty as they were, you're going to have to choose whether it's useful to you to frame it as "abuse" per se

@byrneseyeview 49/ the hardest place to be in a relationship is not-fully-dirty not-fully-clean

@byrneseyeview 50/ (if someone you know and love is there, try not to make it any harder!)

@byrneseyeview 51/ communication skills are maybe necessary but certainly insufficient.

at every turn, people want to believe that arguments are merely verbal.

but real, fundamental arguments absolutely exist and it's dirty to pretend otherwise ("If you really cared about me then you'd...")

@byrneseyeview 52/ yet, don't dig into a conflict prematurely. for all you know, the person on the other side isn't actually that into it - until you are.

(this is bad/inept conflict, not dirty, until someone realizes what's happened)

@byrneseyeview 53/ "closure" isn't real and if you try to fight until you feel it you'll be fighting forever

@byrneseyeview 54/ if people *always* seem like they're fighting dirty to you, maybe it's you.

@byrneseyeview 55/ relationship bromide makes it sound like healthy conflict *necessarily* leaves the relationship better off than it was before

lolwut

@byrneseyeview 56/ I read Nonviolent Communication and it gave me the skeevies. like it's in the uncanny valley of human conflict.

@byrneseyeview 57/ the force of moralistic language is a feature, not a bug.

@byrneseyeview (intermission)

@byrneseyeview 58/ relationship struggle sessions: just don't do it.

it might make sense to attempt a kind of relationship work sprint if conflict & emotional backlog were a real thing.

but it isn't, so it usually doesn't work to handle like that.

https://twitter.com/amelapay/status/1207883151961415680

@byrneseyeview 59/ despite precious little evidence that it works, people maintain a stubborn faith in the emotional healthfulness of "venting"

@byrneseyeview 60/ fundamental personality clashes may not be reducible to specific points of disagreement.

instead, these clashes are essentially aesthetic.

@byrneseyeview 61/ the internalization of norms

like wrt ways of interacting are "clean"/good vs. "dirty"/bad in relationships

serves the purpose of reducing how much people have to police each other socially

@byrneseyeview 62/ but like all biologically and culturally evolved things, these norms are very blunt tools indeed.

@byrneseyeview 63/ this means that your individual sense of what counts as fighting dirty and fighting clean might be pretty far off from consensus

@byrneseyeview 64/ the whole ecosystem of norms around pairwise conflict pretty much depends on heterogeneity of individual conflict strategy.

a few persistently bad actors, a few saints, most people somewhere in the middle

@byrneseyeview 65/ bad apples can dominate saints and even ordinary folk within a relationship (e.g. by fighting dirty)

@byrneseyeview 66/ but there are natural limits to how much norms violations you can observe within a system before either

(1) the norms change

or

(2) pursuing the now-neglected strategy offers disproportionate social rewards and guides people back

@byrneseyeview 67/ tit-for-tat doesn't work as well within pairwise close relationship conflict as within other actual or modeled interactions

@byrneseyeview 68/ that's because part of what makes fighting "dirty" dirty is its effect of pushing people's buttons, flooding them emotionally, etc such that they're no longer fully capable of choosing their next conflict move rationally

@byrneseyeview 69/ also because fighting dirty tends to have a flooding effect on others, at some point it may no longer be meaningfully possible to figure out who's fighting clean or dirty, when, & why.

beyond clean and dirty fighting we just have FUBAR fighting

@byrneseyeview 70/ it is probably impossible to get past FUBAR fighting without someone taking the extremely high road - without getting all self-righteous about it

@byrneseyeview 71/ someone standing down from a conflict vs. just plain losing may be completely indistinguishable to the other party

@byrneseyeview 72/ (I wonder whether standing down vs. losing a conflict is also sometimes indistinguishable to oneself...)

@byrneseyeview 73/ I want to say more about this ideal vs. non-ideal theory of conflict in relationships

ideal theory is fairly self-explanatory.

non-ideal theory is more geared towards understanding what does/could/should happen under conditions of noncompliance.

e.g. fighting dirty

@byrneseyeview 74/ if there is any such thing as an ideal theory of how to approach conflict in relationships, it says something like:

always do and be the morally best person that you can (including and especially during conflict)

i.e. always always take the highest possible road

@byrneseyeview 75/ this ideal theory of conflict in relationships, then, leaves room only for genuine, honest moral mistake-making.

@byrneseyeview 76/ but as previously established, that's just fighting ineptly/badly, not fighting *dirty* which involves an element of knowingness.

https://twitter.com/amelapay/status/1207866320727019521

@byrneseyeview 77/ and everyone knows that "fighting dirty" is real.

so we have no choice but to take a non-ideal perspective on conflict in relationships.

@byrneseyeview 78/ the messiness of dealing with norms non-compliance is part of why lowering yourself to someone's else's dirty level is not necessarily wrong.

https://twitter.com/amelapay/status/1207886529089200128

@byrneseyeview 80/ after all, the point of engaging in conflict in relationships is not to win imaginary moral points redeemable for prizes at the pearly gates

@byrneseyeview 81/ instead, conflicts: invite the consideration of change, allow one or both parties to express themselves, reveal what the relationship is going to continue to be like, reveal whether the relationship should continue at all.

@byrneseyeview 82/ even if someone doesn't comply with what seem like the norms of conflict, those functions of conflict may still need to be fulfilled.

@byrneseyeview 83/ a non-ideal perspective on relationships means that sometimes 2 wrongs DO make a right

where "right" = local maximum

@byrneseyeview 84/ is ignorance a reasonable defense for not meeting someone's needs in a relationship?

sometimes.

let's consider 3 subsets of cases:

@byrneseyeview 85/ you do something that would not go over well with the overwhelming majority of people

(idk, disappear for a week without warning after talking every day for a year?)

then claim: "I didn't know you wanted to hear from me so often!"

@byrneseyeview 86/ this is at the very least culpable ignorance.

which makes the "I didn't know!" insistence quasi-dirty.

knowledge condition isn't strictly fulfilled, but could have been had the perp stopped to think for half a second

@byrneseyeview 87/ case 2 - A does something that upsets B, but the effect was not readily foreseeable.

(for instance, A scheduling over B's social event not realizing its extreme importance to B)

pleading ignorance is ok & clean. simple explanation. had A known, they wouldn't have done it.

@byrneseyeview 88/ case 3 - A & B have the same type/domain of conflict repeatedly.

each time, B objects to A's behavior in some regard and A insists they "didn't know" in some way or another.

over time, the ignorance of B's wishes becomes culpable and A's plea of ignorance becomes dirty.

@byrneseyeview 89/ in other words, ignorance of one's own making does not exonerate relationship failures.

if you are persistently unwilling or unable to do something someone wants from you, you should say that instead of making it seem like you have the theory of mind & memory of a goldfish

@byrneseyeview 90/ "stonewalling" gets a bad rap but I don't think it's necessarily the wrong choice every time.

whether or not refusing to actively engage in a conflict is wrong depends on how bad the alternatives are.

they might be real bad.

@byrneseyeview 91/ sandboxing is an interesting but lesser-discussed choice available in face of persistent, intolerable conflict.

sandboxing = using an arsenal of tactics (such as limiting phone call length, meeting only on neutral terf, etc) to make relationship small enough for comfort

@byrneseyeview 92/ sandboxing is not the same as ordinary drawing of "boundaries," though I'm not too excited about the latter.

sandboxing *does* aim at genuine walling-off, but that's exactly what makes it extreme

https://twitter.com/amelapay/status/1207877840479379457

@byrneseyeview 93/ viable sandboxing candidates: your very old friend who just isn't a fit anymore and who stirs up too much drama for your taste, your C- parent

less viable sandboxing candidate: your spouse

@byrneseyeview 94/ it is not ordinarily a healthy way to approach relationships, tightly circumscribing their scope.

but it may be healthier than the alternatives: total estrangement or total entanglement.

@byrneseyeview 95/ "name calling" seems categorically denounced by relationship advice people.

but as far as I can tell, name-calling: gets people's attention, sticks in memory, often makes them not want to do the thing that gets them called the name.

@byrneseyeview 96/ it may be that the name calling = dirty norm makes sense simply because some instances of name calling are downright poisonous but people can't be trusted to make their own case-by-case judgments

@byrneseyeview 97/ there is a piece of folk knowledge floating around that "one person can never meet all your needs" so you ought to assemble a kind of diversified social portfolio as a conflict-prevention tactic.

this isn't exactly wrong, but it isn't exactly right either.

@byrneseyeview 98/ for reasons varying from practical/logistical to spiritual, it can still be quite frustrating when someone refuses to bundle needs that you'd like to come from specifically them.

totally a la carte social life is as untenable as a completely unified one.

@byrneseyeview 99/ still, deciding where to stop at searching for friends/partners (a kind of secretary problem) is *your* problem, not other person's.

so it's fighting dirty to dig into relationship for a while then way after the fact try to cram them into your unfilled social needs.

@byrneseyeview 100/ "attachment" has been oversold.

surprisingly, the less you need other people to support/soothe you, the closer you can get to them.

I am influenced by the concept of differentiation in the work of David Schnarch, good overview here

psychologytoday.com/us/articles/20…

@byrneseyeview 101/ dirty tactics may be better at getting people to do what you want. indeed, that's part of why they're wrong!

fighting clean asks us to be satisfied with that which may not in fact satisfy

@byrneseyeview 102/ but differentiation is the gift that keeps on giving:

not needing other people to do what you want in the first place.

@byrneseyeview 103/ bodily hygiene is about managing dirt properly, not seeing that it's never created or encountered - a fool's errand with steeply diminishing marginal returns.

similarly, social hygiene is about knowing when, where, why, and how much to avoid dirtiness.

@byrneseyeview 104/ ask me about my Aristotle tattoo.

I'm going for diner food now.

@byrneseyeview 105/

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@byrneseyeview 106/ followup insight-

postrationalism : rationalism

non-ideal relationship conflict theory: ideal theory

(all that stuff I said) : ideologies like nonviolent communication, boundaries, fixing "communication," etc