The Notion Of Toxic Relationships Is Toxic To Relationships

I read an interesting television review in the Guardian by Lucy Mangan today about the Channel 4 drama “I Am Nicola”, which apparently deals with what is today commonly known as a “toxic relationship”.

I am yet to watch it myself but intend to do so when I find the time.

What strikes me about the notion of toxic relationships however is that the terminology does not seem to be very helpful.

The general and quite fundamental rule of the evolution of language is that where words have a utility their use becomes widespread. But what do we make of an anomaly like the 21st Century where in very rapid fashion a whole new language unto itself seems to have evolved (interestingly in the Western Liberal Capitalist world specifically) to describe and label behaviours which we subjectively define as things like “toxic” and “coercive”?

I do not have a daughter but like most men if I had one, and she reported to me that she was being abused by her partner, I would be inclined to smash every tooth out of his mouth.

But what if she described her partner’s behaviour only as “toxic”? Would this satisfy you that there had been some form of wrongdoing? Or would you in fact recognise that the word “toxic” in this sense simply means “bad” and press for specific details (as opposed to more synonyms for the same word)?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word “toxic” as meaning “poisonous”.

In the end, there is not a great qualitative difference between calling a relationship toxic and Donald Trump labelling certain countries as “shitholes”.

There is ultimately a very real question as to the utility of the terminology in circumstances where it reveals so little that you are compelled to find meanings in other words anyway.

The plays of William Shakespeare do deal with issues such as racism and sexism in very real levels of detail. They do not however deal with the subject of “toxic relationships”.

Can we really believe that our generation is simply so much more enlightened than previous ones?

That would seem dubious per se. When one considers how limited modern day relationships in the West have become, that argument rapidly becomes completely implausible.

In Lucy Mangan’s “I Am Nicola” review, she writes “The task Savage and his actors have set themselves is the much harder one of limning the intangible violence recently named and outlawed as “coercive control” – the emotional manipulation, the erosion of a supposedly loved one’s mental freedoms, the gentle battering of a psyche into submission.”

Yet as emotive as this language is, in truth, I do find it to be deeply problematic to the extent that I do not really know what it means. 1) Violence in its traditional and purest sense entails physical force and so by definition cannot be “intangible”. 2) Every relationship between humans (and indeed arguably between much of the animal kingdom) will entail one party trying to influence the emotions of another, or to put it less delicately – emotional manipulation. Does any (even healthy) marriage exist without it? Parents and children employ the tactic on one another all of the time (what of parental discipline for example?) – yet this fact alone would not satisfy most reasonable minded people that those parent-child relationships are “toxic”. 3) The erosion of a supposedly loved one’s mental freedoms is again to a very real degree a feature which is fundamental to and inherent in any relationship. A relationship by its very nature entails compromise and compromise can indeed be defined in a less flattering sense as the erosion of a supposedly loved one’s mental freedoms. The paradox for anyone in love is indeed in a philosophical sense how to resolve the tension between being a “1” and a “2” where “1” is two people so in love that they become for all intents and purposes two halves of the same whole - but "2" is where they remain in fact “2” people. There is no doubt that this does entail the erosion of a supposedly loved one’s mental freedoms. 4) By definition, a battering cannot be “gentle”. It is natural to try to persuade and to convince someone into accepting an argument – although it would be a strange use of language to call this a “battering”.

Nature abhors a vacuum. It is extraordinarily unlikely, if not impossible, that two people will ever share power in a relationship in 50:50 proportions. It is also true that almost every person, including men and women, has experienced relationships where there has been a difference in intelligence levels, which has involved one party being able to defeat the other where points are disputed.

How helpful is it to define these relationships as “toxic” and being characterised by “coercive control”?

Does it really represent an advance for our freedoms for the state to make our protection against behaviours and views that we experience as destabilising our sense of identity and our automatic claim to recognition a matter of legal regulation?

As I have noted above, a question is posed around why 21st Century Western society has developed such a uniquely low threshold for experiencing “harm” so that it is today dominated by a culture of fear in which virtually every experience known to man is labelled with some form of health warning.

Literal definitions of physical harms have been supplemented and massively outnumbered by recently invented metaphysical definitions of emotional ones so that the Western state as therapist has refocused and oversensitised the manner in which harm is perceived by us.

Yet this trend does not necessarily always correlate in any meaningful way with the discovery of objective evidence of these emotional harms.

In fact, in contrast to physical harm, emotional harm is defined only by the activity of our imaginations.

Modern Western society’s preoccupation with the crystallisation and protection of identity and the problematisation of emotion (much of which was previously experienced more simply and somewhat revealingly less “painfully” by us as mundane existential dilemma) has resulted in an ever expanding inflation of harm.

This is deeply problematic for a number of reasons. Once we demand the right to label words as inherently harmful, we effectively shatter any distinction between what we do and what we say (as is evidenced by the invention of "hate crimes").

When Liam Neeson, fundamentally I think a very decent man, had the moral courage and honesty during the promotion of his 2019 film Cold Pursuit to question his own racist reaction to his female friend having been raped by a black man 40 years ago, he did so with shame and expressly stated that this was wrong. Predictably however this was followed by a global witch hunt and call for his career to be sanctioned, as well as the cancellation of the red carpet premiere of the film. Yet what Liam Neeson said was that he was ashamed of a fleeting racist thought which he thankfully did not act upon.

Where does this all leave the men and women of the modern Western world?

The inflation and widespread acceptance of the concept of psychic “harm” has also led to the cultivation of vulnerability and consequently in this age of Tinder and Instagram to a widespread fear of the emotional commitment that is intrinsic to love (because of excessive fears of the “risks” entailed).

To turn to the wisdom of another great British writer, where does this leave the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson - “'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”?

I am a passionate man and I accept that a real relationship will by its very nature express itself with drama (and indeed sometimes with chaos).

If we all mutually engage in therapeutic censorship, state regulation and self protection against harm (whether real or imagined), where does this leave the possibility of a relationship in which we attempt to gift each other with the freedom of expressing ourselves fully in order to know each other completely?

And if we can no longer achieve that outcome, how can we ever feel fully accepted by anyone anyway?

It is not possible to exploit these concerns by transforming them into a defence of men who abuse women for the simple fact that there is no question from me that a man who rapes his wife should be charged and tried with rape and a man who batters his wife should be charged and tried with battery.

Nor would I question that we should not accept being treated badly.

Where someone is badly treated by another more generally, a question needs to arise as to whether this was an act of calculated cruelty and whether that treatment has recurred to the extent that that relationship has become one that can be characterised as abusive.

But this is an exercise which we would be wise to take responsibility for ourselves, as opposed to making use of an ever expanding body of state guidelines and regulation.

Simply labelling these relationships as “toxic” severely curtails that process because doing so involves a fundamental and quite fatal flaw in logic.

A logical conclusion follows from us considering the facts and overall circumstances and then reasoning forwards towards our own conclusion. If instead we adopt phrases like “toxic partner”, we really just adopt a conclusion which is necessarily generic and to a large extent superficial and reason backwards in order to identify any evidence which supports that conclusion.

In an environment in which we have been socially conditioned to imagine ourselves as inherently vulnerable and the idea of harm is expanding in an inversely proportional way to our threshold of it, this brand of reasoning backwards from an entirely new checklist predicated upon therapeutic censorship and intervention is problematic.

Around 50% of marriages in the UK today end in divorce.

The question as to why the Western world has been so actively involved in a longstanding project to drive men and women apart (despite the nuclear family having formed the basis of modern civilisation) is an interesting one which merits further investigation.

But in the end the overall effect of us believing that we do indeed need to be protected from one another has arguably made us as lonely as it has “safe” from the “enemy”.

Perhaps this is the real poison in the arteries of the Western world of today.