On Wanting to Be Difficult
Some men need to be difficult first. Not all, and not permanently, but a certain number arrive with an unmistakable intention to be a problem, and how that is handled determines almost everything that follows.
The obvious reading is defiance, and the obvious response is to meet it firmly and settle the matter. That reading is usually wrong, and the response, while effective, answers a question he was not asking. He is not attempting to establish who prevails. He mostly assumes he will not, and would be alarmed if he did. He is asking something else, and the something else is whether I will still be here afterwards.
Because he has generally learned that being difficult ends things. That is the history he arrives with. Somewhere behind him is a pattern in which his more awkward qualities were tolerated for a period and then quietly became the reason for a departure, and he has concluded that the difficult part of him is the part that costs him people. So he brings it out early, deliberately, at a point where the loss would be small. It is not sabotage. It is a controlled test, run early, to avoid a much more painful version later.
Which is why crushing it is such a poor answer. It resolves the immediate behaviour and confirms the underlying fear, because being firmly handled is exactly what he expected and tells him nothing about permanence. He complies, and remains braced, and the bracing continues indefinitely under a surface of very good conduct.
What actually answers him is far less dramatic. I decline the thing, I do not become cold, and I am unchanged the next time. That is the entire response. No confrontation, no lecture about disrespect, no withdrawal to demonstrate consequence. The difficulty simply does not achieve any of the things it was designed to achieve, including the departure it was half designed to provoke, and it becomes uninteresting to him within a surprisingly short time.
I want to be clear that I do not indulge it. Declining the thing is not optional and there is no version of this where being difficult obtains something. But the declining is done without heat, because heat is the reward. A reaction, any reaction with temperature in it, confirms that he can move me, and once he knows he can move me the whole arrangement has a lever in it and he will find it again whenever he is anxious.
The men who come through this become notably steady afterwards, and it happens quite suddenly. There is usually a specific evening on which they realise the test has been running for some weeks and has been comprehensively failed to produce any result, and that the thing they were protecting themselves against was never going to happen. What follows that realisation is not obedience exactly. It is something more like relief, expressed as a considerable reduction in effort.
He was never trying to win. He was trying to find out what it would take to lose me, and the answer, which he could not have believed if I had simply told him, is considerably more than he had to offer.