Do not destroy me on that day.
Quaerens me, sedisti lassus:
Seeking me, you sat in weariness,
Redemisti Crucem passus;
You redeemed me by enduring the Cross.
Tantus labor non sit cassus.
Let such effort not be in vain.
Iuste iudex ultionis,
Just judge of vengeance,
Donum fac remissionis
Make a gift of remission,
Ante diem rationis.
Before the day of reckoning.
Ingemisco, tamquam reus;
I moan like a guilty criminal.
Culpa rubet vultus meus;
My face blushes with my fault.
Supplicanti parce, Deus.
Spare me, God, your suppliant.
Qui Mariam absolvisti,
You who absolved Mary,
Et latronem exaudisti,
And heard the thief,
Mihi quoque spem dedisti.
Have given hope to me, too.
Preces meae non sunt dignae:
My prayers are not worthy:
Sec tu bonus fac benigne,
But you, being good, act kindly:
Ne perenni cremer igne.
Do not burn me in eternal fire.
Inter oves locum praesta,
Grant me a place among the sheep,
Et ab haedis me sequestra,
And separate me from the goats,
Statuens in parte dextra.
Setting me on your right hand.
Confutatis maledictis,
When the wrongdoers are confounded
Flammis acribus addictis:
And thrown into the sharp flames,
Voca me cum benedictis.
Call me with the blessed.
Oro supplex et acclinis,
I implore, bent down, a suppliant,
Cor contribum quasi cinis:
My heart as contrite as ashes,
Gere curam mei finis.
Show concern for my end.
4
Intimate Relationships
The Trap of Anger
Do you acknowledge your wife?
— Seneca, Medea 1021: Medea to Jason, as she throws
the murdered children down from the roof
He tried to let reason rise to the surface— how hard he tried.
— Philip Roth, American Pastoral: Swede Levov, learning
from his estranged daughter Merry, the “Rimrock Bomber,”
that she has murdered four people
I. Vulnerability and Depth
Betrayed wife, abandoned mother, she says that her anger is morally
right, and the audience is likely to agree. She invokes Juno Lucina, guard-
ian of the marriage bed, protector of childbirth, to come to her aid. But
since her anger demands misery for Jason, she also calls on a darker
group of divinities:
Now, now be near, goddesses who avenge crime, your hair foul
with writhing serpents, grasping the black torch in your bloody
hands— be near— as once, dread spirits, you stood about my
marriage bed. Bring death to this new wife, death to her father,
to all the royal line. (Seneca, Medea 13– 18)
Medea’s anger seems both justified and hideous. Before long, she mur-
ders her own children, in order to inflict the maximum pain on Jason—
despite the fact that their death also deprives her of love, a fact of which
she has long since lost sight. She tosses their bodies down to him from
the roof on which she stands, the “last votive offering” (1020) of their
marriage. Now finally, she says, he must acknowledge the presence of
his wife. Punishment accomplished, she feels her dignity and self- respect
restored. “Now I am Medea,” she exclaims (910). “My kingdom has come
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back. My stolen virginity has come back… . Oh festal day, o wedding
day” (984– 86).1
Medea’s story is all too familiar. Few betrayed spouses murder their
children to hurt their betrayer, but many certainly aim to inflict pain, and
these efforts often have heavy collateral damages. Even when self- restraint
prevents the enactment of anger’s wishes, ill will seethes within, just hop-
ing for some bad outcome for the wrongdoer and his new family. And so
often that ill will sneaks out after all, in litigation, in subtle deflection of children’s affections, or maybe only in an unwillingness to trust men again,
which Medea aptly expresses through her fantasy of restored virginity.
But many will say that her payback wish is justified— so long as it
does not go quite to the extreme point of crime. In the intimate domain,
even people otherwise sympathetic to a critique of anger often hold that
anger is morally right and justified.2 (I used to hold this view.) People,
and women especially, should stand up for themselves and their dimin-
ished status. They should not let themselves be pushed around. They
owe it to their self- respect to be tough and uncompromising.3 Maybe,
just maybe, if the wrongdoer apologizes with sufficient profuseness and
self- abasement, some restoration might possibly be imagined— or not.
And if not, the ritual of apology and abasement can become its own
reward.
Life is too short. That is in essence what I shall say in this chapter.
And we could stop there. Nonetheless, since this is philosophical argu-
ment, I won’t stop there. Instead, following the lead of chapter 2’s analy-
sis of anger, I shall ask about the role of both anger and forgiveness in
intimate relationships, and how my previous account of payback, status
anger, and the Transition applies in this domain. I shall focus on anger
involving parents and adult children, anger between spouses or partners,
and anger at oneself.4
I shall try to accomplish four things in this chapter. First, I’ll describe
the features of intimate relationships that make them require special
treatment, where anger is concerned. Second, I’ll argue that in this spe-
cial domain a Stoic response is usually inappropriate and that emotions
such as grief and fear are often appropriate— but not anger, apart from
Transition- Anger. Third, I’ll respond to the claim that anger is essential
in order to assert one’s self- respect and stand up for one’s dignity when
one has been seriously wronged in this realm. And fourth, I’ll answer
the related claim that anger is necessary (in this realm) in order to take
the other person seriously: that a non- angry response does not show
sufficient respect for the wrongdoer. Along the way, I’ll attend to related
issues concerning forgiveness, and also to the issues of empathy and play-
fulness, which I’ve tentatively marked out as playing a productive role.
Intimate Relationships
93
Here’s where we are. I have argued that the conceptual content of
anger includes the idea of a wrongful act against something or someone
important to the self, and that anger (with one important exception) also
includes, conceptually, the idea of some sort of payback, however subtle.
This being the case, even when a serious wrongful act has really been
committed, anger is ethically doomed, in one of two ways. Either the vic-
tim imagines that payback will restore the important thing that was dam-
aged (someone’s life, for example)— but
this is metaphysical nonsense,
however common and deeply engrained in human cultures, in literature,
and, probably, in our evolutionary equipment. Or the person imagines
that the offense is not really about life, or bodily integrity, or other important goods, but is a matter of relative status only: it is what Aristotle calls a
“down- ranking.” In this case, the payback idea does after all make a grim
sort of sense, since lowering the wrongdoer does relatively raise up the
wronged. But this emphasis on status is normatively defective. A rational
person will therefore reject both of these flawed roads, which I call the
road of payback and the road of status, and will rapidly move toward what I call the Transition, turning from anger to constructive thoughts about
future welfare.
There is one species of anger, I argued, that is not flawed in these
ways. I call it Transition- Anger, because, while it acknowledges the
wrong, it then moves forward. Its entire cognitive content is, “How out-
rageous. That should not happen again.” Transition- Anger, a borderline
case of anger, is not as common as we might at first think. So often the
wish to return pain for pain sneaks in, contaminating it.
Let’s also recall another piece of terminology. Anger is “well-
grounded” when all of its cognitive content is correct apart from the
payback idea: the person is in possession of correct information about
who has done what to whom, that it was wrongful, and also about the
magnitude of the damage that has been wrongfully done. It is something
worth being intensely concerned about. Anger in intimate relationships,
I’ll argue, is often well- grounded.
II. Intimacy and Trust
What is special about intimate relationships? Four things, I believe. First,
they are unusually pivotal to people’s sense of what it is for their lives to go well, to their eudaimonia, to use Aristotle’s term. The other person, and the relationship itself, are cherished component parts of one’s own flourishing life— and the relationship weaves its way through many other ele-
ments of life, in such a way that many pursuits become shared pursuits,
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and goals shared goals.5 A rupture thus disrupts many aspects of one’s
existence.
Second, such relationships involve great vulnerability because they
involve trust. Trust is difficult to define, but one can begin by saying,
with Annette Baier,6 that it is different from mere reliance.7 One may rely
on an alarm clock, and to that extent be disappointed if it fails to do its
job, but one does not feel deeply vulnerable, or profoundly invaded by
the failure. Similarly, one may rely on a dishonest colleague to continue
lying and cheating, but this is reason, precisely, not to trust that person; instead, one will try to protect oneself from damage. Trust, by contrast,
involves opening oneself to the possibility of betrayal, hence to a very
deep form of harm. It means relaxing the self- protective strategies with
which we usually go through life, attaching great importance to actions
by the other over which one has little control. It means, then, living with
a certain degree of helplessness.
Is trust a matter of belief or emotion? Both, in complexly related
ways. Trusting someone, one believes that she will keep her commit-
ments, and at the same time one appraises those commitments as very
important for one’s own flourishing. But that latter appraisal is a key
constituent part of a number of emotions, including hope, fear, and, if
things go wrong, deep grief and loss. Trust is probably not identical to
those emotions, but under normal circumstances of life it often proves
sufficient for them. One also typically has other related emotions toward
a person whom one trusts, such as love and concern. Although one typi-
cally does not decide to trust in a deliberate way, the willingness to be
in someone else’s hands is a kind of choice, since one can certainly live
without that type of dependency, and Stoics do.8 In any case, living with
trust involves profound vulnerability and some helplessness, which may
easily be deflected into anger.
A third distinctive feature of intimate relationships pertains to break-
down scenarios. The damage involved in the breakdown of an intimate
relationship, because it is internal and goes to the heart of who one is,
cannot fully be addressed by law, though people certainly try. Even
though, as I’ve said, most forms of wrongdoing are in some sense irrep-
arable (the murdered person cannot be brought back, rape cannot be
undone), nonetheless a decent legal system does relieve people of much
of the practical and emotional burden of dealing with such cases, by
incapacitating the wrongdoer and deterring future wrongs. It thus assists
what I’ve called the Transition. When someone you love harms you,
however, even though in cases of violence or fraud one should turn to
the law for assistance, the relationship is sufficiently central to one’s well-being that the law cannot exhaust the emotional task of dealing with it.
Beyond a certain point there is really no place to go, except into your own
Intimate Relationships
95
heart— and what you find there is likely to be pretty unpleasant. So there
is something lonely and isolating about these harms; they involve a pro-
found helplessness. Once again, this helplessness can easily be deflected
into anger, which gives the illusion of agency and control.
A fourth feature might point in a more constructive direction,
although all too often it doesn’t: We typically form intimate relationships
with people we like. We choose our spouses, and even though parents do
not choose their children or children their parents, there is typically, in
cases that are not really awful, a symbiosis that produces liking on both
sides, though adolescence certainly obscures this. Most other people in
the world, by contrast, are not people with whom one would choose to
live. It’s pretty easy to find them irritating, or off- putting, or even disgusting. How many people who sit next to one by chance on an airplane are
people with whom one would be happy living in the same house for an
extended period of time? But a spouse, a lover, a child— these people are
welcomed, and there usually remains something nice about them that is
not utterly removed by whatever it is they have done. The target of anger
is the person, but its focus is the act, and the person is more than the
act, however difficult it is to remember this. This nice something could
become another knife to twist in the wound of betrayal (to the extent that
a person is appealing, it’s harder to say good riddance), but on the other
hand it could also be a basis for constructive thought about the future— in
a restored relationship or some new connection yet to be invented.
We now need to figure out how, in this special domain, anger and
forgiveness properly figure. Is anger often well- grounded? If so, might it
ever be fully justified? What becomes, or should become, of its fantasies
of payback? Do people owe it to their self- respect to get angry and to be
uncompromising (as so many suggest)? Or is anger more likely to be an
impediment to constructive forward- looking projects and healthy rela-
tionships, a narcissistic “dance” in which one indulges at the price of not
trying to figure out what the real problems are?9 As Bishop Butler notes,
“[C] ustom and false honor are on the side of retaliation and revenge …
and … love of our enemies is thought too hard a saying to be obeyed.”10
But we don’t have to agree with custom.
Such breakdowns typically, and rightly, involve deep grief, and
grief needs to be dealt with. Grief is amply warranted: intimate relation-
ships are very important parts of a flourishing life. (Here the Stoics are
wrong.) But grief, and the helplessness it typically brings with it, are
usually not well addressed by allowing anger to take the center of the
stage. All too often, anger becomes an alluring substitute for grieving,
promising agency and control when one’s real situation does not offer
control. I shall argue that the way to deal with grief is just what one might expect: mourning and, eventually, constructive forward- looking action to
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repair and pursue one’s life. Anger is often well- grounded, but it is too
easy for it to hijack the necessary mourning process. So a Transition from
anger to mourning— and, eventually, to thoughts of the future— is to be
strongly preferred to anger nourished and cultivated.
And what of forgiveness? Is forgiveness of the classic transactional
sort a healthy and morally admirable process, or is it, all too often, a
covert form of retaliation? Even at its mildest and most morally valuable,
might it not be (to use Bernard Williams’s phrase, in a different context)
“one thought too many,” a labored deflection from a spirit of generosity
and spontaneity that is more valuable still?11
And if the standard transactional sort of forgiveness turns out to
have serious defects, might there be a type of unconditional forgiveness,
a struggle within the self to free oneself from corrosive anger, that does
have considerable moral value?
Let me concede at the outset three points in favor of anger that
I already conceded in chapter 2. Anger is often useful as a signal (to one-
self and/ or to others) of a problem; thus it is a good idea to attend to one’s angry responses— bearing in mind many of them are unreliable, signs of
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