Not only does this make your husband feel good, it cements in your mind your absolute good fortune in having married such a splendid chap, instead of the sort of chap who might have made you absolutely miserable. This creates a beautiful mental walled city that can withstand the force of any puny annoyances you might have with your husband when you or he is in a temporary bad mood.
She uses fancy language like “beautiful mental walled city,” but what she’s really doing is making delusion sound romantic(!).
This is to me in the same category as “fake it until you make it” advice, which has likewise bothered me since the first day I heard it. I don’t deny that acting as if something is true will make me more likely to believe/feel it is true, but I am very, very uncomfortable with the implicit philosophy of the approach, which suggests that we should be working to assemble a fuzzy and likeable set of beliefs and feelings, without any regard for their validity.
The best argument I’ve heard for such a FIUYMI / delude-yourself philosophy came from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in the behavioral economics-y book Nudge. I’m going from memory here, but their argument was something like delusion/bias is unavoidable, so we might as well nudge ourselves in the direction of the delusions/biases that benefit us the most.
So, for example, if we’re asking people whether they want to be organ donors, we might as well make the default option “yes,” because which option is default makes an enormous difference in which option people end up choosing. Similarly, if we’re deciding whether to praise our husbands, we might as well make the default behavior “yes,” because which behavior is default makes an enormous difference in how you end up perceiving and feeling about that person.
The logic passes my filters, but it still doesn’t sit well with me. Then again, not much in this mess of a universe does.
The implication for the previous post, about whether it’s possible to non-deludedly know the person you are in a relationship with, is that no, it’s probably not possible, so you might as well nudge yourself in the direction of the delusion that benefits you.
