She avoids his look. “I have. At least a thousand times.”
“But it’s funny.”
“So you think.”
Now the incident has reached a turning point. The guy can finish telling the joke, which will annoy his wife. Or he can stop telling the joke, in which case he’ll be irritated.* When they get home, it’s easy to imagine the conversation.
“Why do you always interrupt me when I try to tell a joke? When we started dating, you liked my jokes.”
“That’s all you ever do at dinner parties. Tell jokes. We were talking about politics, and you pipe up with your dumb joke about strings.”
“Why do you always have to interrupt me at dinner parties? Can’t you ever let me finish a thought in public? Can’t you let other people decide what they do or don’t want to hear?”
And so on.
A reasonably well-adjusted couple will weather this contretemps. For a troubled marriage, it could take them one step closer to the end. Diane Felmlee has thought a lot about the circumstances that bring couples to this predicament. She’s a sociologist at the University of California, Davis. After decades of research, she’s convinced that she knows what’s going on.
The answer first occurred to her in the 1980s when she was just starting her academic career at Indiana University in Bloomington. She even remembers the day. She was having lunch with some of her women friends when the conversation turned to relationships. The women were sharing complaints about their partners. “One woman was saying her husband was never there on the weekends,” Felmlee recalls. “He was always working so hard, and she wished he was around more. So I asked her what drew her to him in the first place.”
Felmlee says her friend replied that she and her husband had been high school sweethearts, and what had first impressed her about him was that he was an incredibly hard worker. “It was clear he was going to be one of the more successful people in the class,” Felmlee remembers her friend saying. “Another woman said that her fiance never talked with her about his feelings. ‘He won’t tell me what’s bothering him.’ So I asked her, ‘What drew you to him?’ and she said, “Well, he had this cool about him, a kind of cool demeanor.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Cool, reserved men don’t emote. They’re not going to talk about their feelings.’”
Felmlee says that she saw a pattern. In each case, it seemed that the very quality that was initially attractive became an irksome characteristic later in the relationship. Were her friends unusual, or was this a common occurrence? Felmlee decided to investigate. At the time, she was teaching a big lecture class. College sophomores are a common proving ground for new psychological theories, so it only made sense for her to engage her class. “I just had them pull out a piece of paper and asked them to think of their boyfriend or girlfriend and then write down what first attracted them to that person.”
Now, when you are the teacher, and you ask your class a question, you run a high risk of getting the answers your students think you want to hear. So she then asked a few unrelated questions to disguise what she was getting at. “And then I asked them what they least liked about that person. And if their relationship had ended, I asked why it ended.”
The answers confirmed her initial suspicions. It was fairly common for the students to be turned off by the very thing that first attracted them to the person they were—or had been—dating. In the last few decades, Felmlee has been conducting studies with couples to further explore this problem of what she calls “fatal attractions.” She says that virtually any positive trait that you can name can also be looked at as an annoyance.
“We asked one guy what he liked about a former girlfriend, and he listed every part of this woman’s body, including the most intimate parts. And when he answered the question ‘Why did you split up?’ he said that the relationship was based only on lust. There wasn’t enough love. I thought, ‘Well, he got what he wanted initially. Now he’s not happy with it.’” Similarly, Felmlee remembers a woman in one of her studies who really liked her husband’s body, and then she complained that he was always working out, instead of spending time with her.
The list goes on. Felmlee says that someone who is seen as humorous at the start of a relationship can later be considered “flaky” or “immature.” One woman reported that she was attracted by her boyfriend’s sense of humor, but then she complained that he “doesn’t always take other people’s feelings seriously (jokes around too much).”
Caring is another positive quality with a downside. Felmlee reports that one woman was attracted to a man who was “very attentive” and persistent, but she disliked that he “tries to be controlling.” Another woman described a former partner as “caring,” “sensitive,” and someone who listened to her. Yet she did not like the fact that he also got jealous very easily, and “he hated it when [she] wanted to spend time with other friends.”{36}
For nearly every positive quality that you can think of, there’s a flip side that can become annoying over time:
• People who are nice and agreeable can later be seen as passive and prone to letting people walk all over them.
• Someone who is strong willed and knows where he is going can later appear stubborn and unreasonable.
• The outgoing, garrulous life of the party can become the nonstop performer who won’t shut up.
• The solicitous, caring suitor becomes the clingy, needy partner.
• An exciting risk taker turns into an irresponsible parent.
• The physically attractive love interest becomes the high-maintenance spouse.
• Laid-back turns into lazy.
• A successful person becomes a workaholic.
In a way, the concept of fatal attraction bears a resemblance to hedonic reversal but backward. With relationships, we start off finding a quality of our mates attractive, and over time it becomes annoying. With hedonic reversal, something that is intrinsically unpleasant—like eating hot chili peppers—becomes enjoyable with repeated exposure. This is not only an American phenomenon. Felmlee has tested people all over the world, and the same pattern seems to hold.
The other thing she consistently finds is that the more strongly someone exhibits a particular trait, the more likely that trait is to become annoying. Again, the dose matters. So, for example, a spouse is more likely to become annoyed with a partner who is exceptionally funny and always telling jokes than with one who makes a witty remark on occasion.
What’s going on here? Why do strengths become weaknesses and endearing qualities, irritants? “I call it disillusionment,” says Felmlee. She believes the answer may be related to something called social exchange theory. “Extreme traits have rewards,” she says, “but they also have costs associated with them, especially when you are in a relationship.”
Take independence. “Independence can be valued in a partner, one who can stand on his own two feet,” says Felmlee. “But if you’re too independent, that means you don’t need your wife. And that can have costs in a relationship.”
Felmlee has thought a lot about how couples might get around some of these points. Self-awareness helps. She recalls one man who complained that his wife was stubborn. “On the other hand, what he really liked about her and loved from the beginning was her strength of character. And he said he was entirely committed to her and planned to be with her for the rest of his life.” This man, at least, seemed to be aware that positive qualities have an inherent downside. “And he seemed aware of his own limitations. He said, ‘I’m stubborn, too, and she has to put up with that.’
“It’s not like you get this perfect person, and there are no downsides to his or her qualities,” says Felmlee. “It just doesn’t happen.”
The other thing that can create annoyance in relationships is repetition. Even if your partner only occasionally leaves a clump of hair in the drain or talks while he’s eating, spending a lifetime with someone creates ample opportunities for repeated exposure. “The same thing keeps happening over and over and over again in a marriage,” says Elaine Hatfield, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii and a fiction writer to boot, “because we all have our goofy little quirks.” Anything can become annoying with time, but Hatfield says that these annoyances get amplified according to the principles of something called equity theory.
The idea is that individuals and groups are encouraged to behave fairly with one another, and that people are
