The Hamilton Spectator

Should you get involved in a couple’s argument?

JEN KIRSCH TWITTER: @JEN_KIRSCH

Many of us have been there. You’re out, minding your own business when, suddenly, you witness a random couple arguing.

A friend of mine was recently in this position. He was at a Toronto bar and overheard a woman say she’s going to order fries, and her boyfriend said “Really? I thought you were trying to lose weight.”

My friend was bothered by the boyfriend’s aggressive tone and after hearing him continue to treat the girlfriend disrespectfully, he approached the woman and said, “You know you don’t have to sit there and listen to that.”

The woman had an appreciative but worried look on her face, and moments later, my friend was punched. Despite that, he told me he would do it again.

“I don’t like it when people speak to women like that, but especially since having a daughter,” he said. “Men have treated women poorly for generations and it’s up to us to stop it.” He says that if anyone saw a man hitting a woman they would step in, and words are no different.

I, too, had an incident. During the summer, I had a bad reaction to eye drops after a gnat flew into my eye. My boyfriend and I were walking down the street, to the walk-in clinic, and I had my hand over my stinging eye, which was tearing profusely.

A man stopped us, asking me if I was OK. I said yes, and then my boyfriend — suddenly aware of how it might look — started to explain what happened, when the guy cut him off saying, “I’m not talking to you, I’m asking her.”

He then asked me again in a more stern voice if I’m sure I’m OK. When I confirmed, he apologized to my boyfriend and said he didn’t mean any offence, but said, “These days, you never know.” Though I wasn’t in any danger, I appreciated the gesture.

“A man made the choice to be an upstander,” says clinical psychologist and author Alexandra Solomon, who is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, defines an upstander as a person who recognizes injustice, knows their personal strengths and uses those strengths to create change.

Solomon says that sometimes in a conflict, there’s a bully, there’s a bystander and there’s an upstander, as in my situation.

“The man who stepped in wasn’t sure, but he was moving through a public space with the sense and awareness that — as a man who lives in a world where one in three women is a survivor of some kind of physical and/or sexual violence — women are frequently not safe in the context of their most important relationships; their most intimate relationships,” Solomon said.

She thinks that one of the most important things about the #MeToo movement is that the invitation is being extended to men to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

“There’s something more than not just being abusive to your partner that is being aware that as a man, there’s a measure of responsibility that you as a man have toward other men and that you as a man can be part of the solution instead of the problem,” Solomon said.

She says in both these stories, a man is leveraging his own privileged identity in attempting to be part of the solution to a massive, collective, societal problem, which is violence against women.

Solomon says that it’s one thing for women to say, “This has to stop,” but it’s another thing for men to say to other men, “This has to stop.”

She says there’s a next level here of becoming intolerant of other men being abusive or potentially abusive.

We’ve been taught “if you see something, say something,” but before jumping in next time you bear witness to what you deem to be a problematic situation, licensed marriage and family therapist Elizabeth Earnshaw, author of “I Want This To Work,” says to be mindful of context.

Earnshaw, who is the co-founder of Actually, a website that provides couples therapy and premarital counselling, says that regarding the french fry situation mentioned earlier, we might agree that what the boyfriend said (and how he said it), was a rude, if not a harmful thing to say, but we don’t know the full story. For example, the woman could have asked her partner to keep her accountable for a diet.

Even if what the boyfriend said was harmful, she says at that moment, a stranger getting involved isn’t necessarily helpful. “In fact, it added a lot of conflict-laden energy to the situation which, ultimately, the stranger walked away from,” Earnshaw said. “I would be concerned about what the couple had to deal with together afterwards. Did they get into a bigger fight? Did the person the stranger was trying to protect get blamed and abused further?”

She encourages people to ask themselves “What am I trying to get from saying this?” or “What will be helpful about me saying this?”

In terms of my situation, she says that clearly the stranger was coming from a good and protective place. “Again, the stranger gets to walk away from the situation, often leaving the partner they were trying to protect behind to clean up the mess,” Earnshaw said.

That said, if you run into the victim in the bathroom, or if you catch them in a moment alone, it can be beneficial to validate that what they’re going through is not right and that they don’t need to put up with it.

“This type of validation and reassurance might be what they need to hear to make a different move in their relationship,” Earnshaw said. “Remember, though, you don’t want to approach this from a condescending space because that will only create shame in the victim and you also should avoid applying pressure.”

If you need to get involved to diffuse immediate danger, she says it’s up to you to make a judgment call, but you might also want to consider other resources like calling for help, privately providing the person being verbally/emotionally abused a domestic abuse hotline number, or anything else that might help deescalate (rather than escalate) the situation.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that since the pandemic, people have been checking in on you when you’re having “a moment” with your partner in public. Gaslighting (when you’re manipulated by someone by psychological means to doubt your own sanity,) has become such an overused term as of late, but it’s an experience that happens all too often.

If you’re the one who’s getting a knowing look from a stranger, or are being pulled aside by a wellmeaning observer about the way your partner is treating you, instead of getting defensive, get curious. Solomon says that part of the nature of an emotionally or physically abusive relationship is that you take on the aggressor’s world view and perspectives, and because your partner invalidates your experience, you start to invalidate your own experience.

“So having outside people offer reality testing or validating is helpful,” Solomon said. Sure, it’s stressful because it creates dissonance between “I want to stay in this relationship,” and “This relationship is actually harmful,” and then you have to get that dissonance resolved, which is difficult and scary, but she says this is how change happens.

“That’s how people get out of dangerous and unhealthy situations; by beginning to recognize that they deserve to be treated with kindness and empathy and validation,” Solomon said.

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2021-11-30T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-11-30T08:00:00.0000000Z

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