Tim wakes first. He quickly gets out of bed, and the doodles follow him, knowing he is the giver of their morning treat. I slip back into slumber until he appears with a morning latte and a warm, friendly word. Then he shuts the door, a signal that he is going to turn on the morning news.
A few minutes later, he returns to the bedroom and says he has a good report. My latte-fueled gratitude quickly gives way to annoyance as he tells me some headlines, he has carefully selected about how the world is getting better and how the political mess is turning around.
I’m annoyed, and even worse, sometimes I let the cynicism leak out or just ask him to stop. I resist the impulse—which I sometimes manage and sometimes do not—to point out a recently heard fact to prove the opposite is true: that things are getting worse. We go back and forth, and then he says, “Well, I’m an optimist, and YOU are a pessimist.” This is followed by another loop in our conversation, where I again, for the thousandth time, insist that I am not. I just want to be grounded in a balance of facts about what is happening without trying to spin it either way.
I give him my lecture on “optimism bias,” a close relative of “toxic positivity,” and tell him that it causes one to overestimate the likelihood of positive events while underestimating the likelihood of negative ones.
But, he argues, overestimating the likelihood of negative outcomes is another kind of bias, and he smugly announces that if he has to choose one, he will choose positivity.
At this, something in me shifts closer to what psychologist David Schnarch called “marital sadism,” where I want to point out all the ways his strategy has been wrong in the past. Then we are in one of our familiar relationship loops—those circular arguments that feel as if they could go on forever. It’s like standing in quicksand: You feel yourself sinking but don’t know how to get out. Knowing this would go nowhere, we each back off, silently and righteously indignant.
That morning, I watch a TED talk by Angus Hervey called “Is This the Time of Monsters—or Miracles?” The talk spoke directly to me, reaching not just the heart of the loop but also offering a solution for me to avoid it in the future.
Hervey says that there is a dual narrative to which we are all subjected about the state of our country and our world.
One narrative is that we are in a state of inevitable collapse, citing global issues such as climate change; conflicts in Ukraine, Palestine, and elsewhere; refugees; and all the issues facing us in the United States. The other narrative is that there are reasons to be hopeful advances in science and medicine, wildlife underpasses, and the return of the bald eagle and giant panda.
There is no denial that many humans are wired for negativity bias; I certainly am, and I see it as a protective mechanism to prepare for the worst. On the other hand, a positive bias helps us cope by strengthening emotional resilience and enabling effective, solution-oriented responses to adversity rather than feeling stuck in fear. So, which of us is right? Of course, the answer is that we both are.
Like so many arguments between couples that recycle, this “loop of doom” moves quickly into the arena of who is right, and we can suddenly shift from feeling warm, appreciative, and connected to a sense that we are fighting for our lives. Like stepping into quicksand, it happens fast, and my appreciation for my sweet partner’s generous gift of a morning latte is replaced by suspicion that he is asking me to give up my protective stance toward the world.
What do you think? Have you ever felt the craziness of being in such a loop with your partner about this or anything else? How do you break out of it? What if you realize that both sides are right, and the more we dig into “our side,” the more the chemicals of fight-or-flight intensify our position and decrease our ability to hear the other person or feel any empathy for their position?
Where do you find yourself in this world of monsters and miracles? It is another loop, and both are true. We live in an extraordinary time of miracles, including the rollout of malaria vaccines and the recovery of sea turtles, which are happening alongside the “monsters” of the problems facing our world. We can avoid most of the loops we get into with others and within ourselves if we can learn to hold more than one truth at the same time and remember how many things can be true at once.
