Reaction Formation in Couples

Like all defense mechanisms, reaction formation is a process that protects the person from acknowledging or accepting information that contradicts the person’s definition of who they are. This has been called a defense of the ego, but “ego” is merely the Latin word for “I.”

When we say the word “I,” we typically mean a set of memories, thoughts, impulses, and feelings that are more or less acceptable, or at least familiar, to us. Intimate relationships such as marriage (and therapy) threaten the definition of “I” because they occasion a broader range of impulses and feelings than most situations do. Someone who is uncomfortable with sex or conflict can generally avoid them, but sharing a living space and sharing a project like parenting or building a marriage tends to elicit sexuality and conflict (and other unfamiliar responses).

People who use reaction formation as a defense have discovered that they can disown unacceptable impulses by enacting their opposite. Someone who can’t stand to see themselves as powerful or superior claims victimhood or inferiority in every encounter. Someone who can’t acknowledge their sexual impulses embodies chastity and purity. Someone who can’t live with their vulnerability acts forceful and domineering. Someone who can’t accept their own aggression acts saintly and serene. Someone who can’t accept their mortality acts transcendent or godlike.

Not all serenity, dominance, submissiveness, and chastity is a reaction formation. As always, we can’t tell the meaning of a behavior from its topography. We need to know its function to know its meaning. When it comes to reaction formation, we need to know whether the person is capable of acknowledging or expressing whatever the behavior in question is the opposite of.

Also, appearing sexless or angerless or whatever is often a performance, the adoption of a mask or role that facilitates social interaction. It’s a reaction formation only when people are also convincing themselves.

Between couples and other people, reaction formation means they protect their definition of “we.” They might fear being ordinary and insist they are especially romantic or star-crossed. They might fear vulnerability and constantly insult each other to prove how tough they are.

Conflict

Within couples (and elsewhere), it can often seem as if the person who brings up a conflict has created the conflict. People who can’t accept conflict within themselves or within their marriage may use reaction formation, adopting a mawkish posture of marital harmony that defies belief. This is different from the healthy stance of appreciating your partner and contextualizing their foibles with affection. Reaction formation against conflict can lead to a Stepford marriage in which both parties are replaced by either saccharine or emotionless automatons. When a conflict finally arises that must be dealt with, they are so ill-prepared for it that it can destroy their relationship.

Another relatively common reaction formation in spouses is the posture of not being on a team because dependency on others is intolerable. The person is like a basketball player always complaining about the lack of quality teammates. These people are devoted to the idea of rugged individualism or self-reliance or taking credit because they can’t stand to see themselves as embedded in a social network.

Sexuality

A partner who can’t accept their own sexuality may adopt a posture of sexlessness—or, what can amount to the same thing, a posture of vanilla sex that can look like sex but removes almost all the lust from it. The invitation to spice things up then feels like an attack on the person’s self-definition. Even though it’s true that married people on average have sex more often than people who are single, there are a lot of couples who report not having sex at all (Ueda et al., 2020).

People may get caught in the gender trap of not only performing masculinity and femininity but also insisting that they are far from androgynous. Some people can’t acknowledge their similarities to the other sex. Their partner may appreciate their use of reaction formation because it facilitates the partner’s own reaction formation in the opposite direction. This limits the kinds of interactions available, and it creates a crisis when the masculine one is vulnerable or the feminine one is masterful. A similar synergy happens with the posture of tidiness (“I am not a messy animal”) and sloppiness (“I am not constrained”), but the ensuing complementarity is one of animosity rather than appreciation.

Similarly, some people can’t deal with being ordinary (ordinary people die, among other things), so they insist they’re stellar. They often find depressive and dependent spouses, born to orbit, not to be orbited. This can be a stable, if unsatisfying, arrangement, especially if the satellite has a reaction formation against aggression, and never complains except in wheedling tones of feared abandonment that reinforce the division of roles between the obscure object of desire and the earthbound slug.

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Self-Assessment

Reaction formation has the interesting, undesirable effect of maintaining the use of troublesome yardsticks for self-assessment. This effect is observable in other psychological patterns as well. All too often, a painful self-assessment uses a particular yardstick—for example, losing a job makes a man feel like a failure on a yardstick of masculinity, or cheating on a diet makes him feel like a failure on a yardstick of willpower. For many reasons—one of them might be reaction formation—the person solves the problem by trying to improve their measure on that same yardstick. What they really need to do, oftentimes, is to question the use of that yardstick in that situation.

Thus, reaction formation can provide temporary relief from internal distress regarding aggression, sexuality, mortality, and so on. But it perpetuates the method of self-assessment that led to the distress in the first place.