Taking Another For Granted - and - Passive Aggression

Passive aggression is sometimes the direct response to an even less apparent form of aggression. Passive aggression, which can often take the form of withdrawal from the other, refusal to participate (sometimes seen as laziness), uncooperativeness, and even adultery, is the person’s reaction to the feeling that they are being aggressed. It is retaliation for the subtle hostility they detect from the other person.

For example, a couple has been together for many years before one half of the couple decides to move to a city 800 miles away from her partner in order to be with her sister who seems to be in need. What she sees as the preeminent responsibility to her sister supercedes her feeling of responsibility to her partner and to their relationship.

Let’s imagine that the partner who was left behind has already been feeling insecure about his partner’s devotion to him. He is under stress of his own (he is struggling to pursue his dream of establishing himself as a musician). Having an insecure professional life cannot but cause him to feel insecure in other areas of his life – Does she truly support my pursuit of this dream? Would she still love me if I failed? Is she leaving me because I am failing?

So, the woman moves 800 miles away to be with her sister. Her partner of so many years can’t help but perceive this as an affront to him and to the relationship. He can’t help but feel that his partner will find things to put before him/Them. The relationship seems to be of secondary, rather than primary, importance to her. He lets her go without expressing his feelings because he has taken her action as a form of communication about her esteem for the relationship.

The woman moves to the other city, under the assumption, however, that they will maintain the relationship over the long distance since there was no discussion about ‘breaking up’.

To assume the faithfulness of her partner while she moves away is the act of taking her partner and his love for granted. To take someone or something for granted can only be done in the absence of love. Although this act of aggression by the woman would not be apparent to most onlookers, the man has been caused to feel taken for granted by the woman in a not-so-subtle way.

The man then proceeds to have an affair with another woman (who, incidentally, strikes him as identical to his former partner, only ‘less complicated’).

Upon learning of it, the woman and onlookers are in an uproar – how could he cheat on her after all their years together? How could he do something so indulgent and superficial at the risk of losing something so profound, so stable?! The man is vilified as the cause of disruption in the relationship.

They both concede that they want to get beyond this incident and continue to be together ‘somehow’. However, there remains an underlying lack of satisfaction: the man feels his protestation for the aggression he has received has been misread and he will continue to be misrepresented in the relationship; the woman feels that there is some discontent under the surface but is unwilling (out of fear) to contend with it head on.

Taking-each-other-for-granted had begun long, long before any of this had happened. Although they were physically and psychologically ‘together’, they had forgotten to truly love each other. They had assumed that a love continued to exist between them without actually loving between them.

(By the way, what I deem the most common and most insidious form of taking-one’s-love-for-granted is “workoholism.” And a common and insidious form of passive aggression is to over-spend the other person’s money.)