Not long ago, a man sat across from me who was one month away from giving his wife a get. What struck me in that room wasn't the divorce itself, it was the look in his eyes. They were bright, confident, utterly certain. For an hour, he laid out a detailed case: how much he had suffered, how right he was, what unthinkable wrongs his wife had done to him over the years, and how he, in this marriage, had been the innocent victim while she was the sole cause of every trouble.
He was convinced, one thousand percent, that he was in the right. At a certain point I stopped him and asked quietly: "But tell me, where were you in all of this?" He froze in complete shock, as if the very thought that he bore any part of the blame was an insult too absurd to consider. Then he went right back to telling me how much he was the victim.
That conversation was not unusual. I see this pattern again and again, in different forms. It feels sometimes exactly like two cars driving toward each other at high speed on a narrow bridge where only one can pass. Each driver says to himself: I'm right, I was here first, why should I move?
And the shameful, painful result is a head-on collision that crushes them both into the abyss. Marital fights are exactly that narrow bridge, where blind stubbornness leads to shared disaster.
Couples caught in serious fights spiral into a vortex where each believes with perfect faith in their own absolute righteousness. He is upright and just; she is hurtful, uncomprehending, cruel and unsuitable.
When a fight escalates, something confusing happens in the human soul: it becomes difficult to impossible to see that there is another side to the coin. Slowly, a person convinces himself that he is the pure victim, and the spouse is the abuser. At the start there may still be some mutual listening, understanding or attempt to appease; but as the flames rise and the blood boils, a person feeds himself so many negative thoughts against the other that he becomes completely certain that all the problems in the home stem solely from the presence of the other side.
"And if despite everything a moment of clarity arises and he admits he has something to fix, or understands he did things that were wrong and hurtful, the mechanism immediately kicks in and minimizes the value of his own actions: 'True, maybe I wasn't okay, but look what she did to me!' He takes his small share of blame and immediately drowns it in the sea of accusations against the other side. This is how a wall of hatred and deep loathing is built."
The complex reality versus the psychological trap
But the truth, and it is always more painful than the comfort of arguing "I am the victim", is that in the vast majority of marital fights, there are two sides to the coin. I am not speaking here of extreme cases, such as severe personality disorders or fundamental, essential incompatibility; I am speaking of the vast majority of homes. In these homes, usually both sides are at fault, one less and one more, but every coin has two faces.
And this is exactly where most people fall. The moment a person locks onto the internal feeling that he is righteous and right, his soul recruits a series of sophisticated psychological mechanisms to justify that position at any cost:
Fundamental attribution error: the mechanism by which we measure ourselves and our spouse with double standards. When we do something wrong, yell, explode or hurt, we immediately blame the circumstances and the situation: "I was stressed at work," "life is hard," "they drove me crazy." In other words, our character is perfectly fine; only the situation was bad. But when the spouse does exactly the same thing, we immediately attribute it to their character: "He is a bad person," "she is domineering and cruel." We forget that he too was under enormous pressure.
Confirmation bias: a cognitive mechanism by which a person selectively seeks out only the arguments, facts or thoughts that reinforce what he already wants to believe — that he is right. He ignores, consciously or unconsciously, contradictory information or criticism, and interprets neutral reality in a way that serves his existing perception. Thus he is able to distort memories, magnify the hurts he suffered and completely erase the hurts he himself caused.
Cognitive dissonance and ego defense: the human soul simply cannot bear the internal contradiction between "I am a good and righteous person" and "I hurt someone badly." To resolve this discomfort, the brain creates a defense: it convinces itself that the other side is so terrible and bad that they deserve this treatment. This way the person preserves his distorted self-image as a righteous victim and escapes responsibility.
Stop for one moment, between you and yourself.
Stop for a moment. Don't think now about the neighbor, about the friend, or about what happens in other homes. Think about the last argument you had yesterday at home with your spouse. What exactly did you fight about? Was there really a principled, fateful issue there, or were you once again fighting over just one small, sacred thing: which of us will come out right?
Our ego is not just a bad character trait; it is a hidden and dangerous partner that nests in every home and waits for the moment when we hand it the keys. The ego does not seek solutions; the ego seeks victories. Except that in marriage, the cruel rule is that whoever wins the fight loses all the life that comes after it.
To stand before the mirror, remove all the armor of ego defense, and say out loud: "I also made mistakes. I also hurt. There are things in me that need fixing." This is one of the hardest challenges a human being can demand of himself. Many tragic divorce cases would have been prevented if each spouse had stopped for a moment and asked himself honestly: Am I one hundred percent right? What is my part in this?
