在一段关系中，我们通常会因为另一半太有条理，太有逻辑，而怒火中烧。当我们向伴侣倾诉忧虑时，我们想得到的是他们的理解，理解我们面对的困境。我们的目的是找寻抚慰，而非对方的理性说教。所以，当我们被困扰的时候，我们希望另一半能把他们的理性，运用到安慰我们上去。
It seems odd at first to imagine that we might get angry, even maddened, by a partner because they were, in the course of a discussion, proving to be too reasonable and too logical. We are used to thinking highly of reason and logic. We are not normally enemies of evidence and rationality. How then could these ingredients become problematic in the course of love?
刚看起来好像有点奇怪，我们会因为伴侣在交谈中太有条理、太有逻辑而生气，甚至怒上心头。我们通常认为逻辑清楚是好事，也不会反对证据与理性。那么，为什么在爱情里，这两个东西会变成麻烦呢？但仔细一瞧，再充分发挥一下想象力，我们的不爽其实很有依据。
But from close up, considered with sufficient imagination, our suspicion can make a lot of sense. When we are in difficulties, what we may primarily be seeking from our partners is a sense that they understand what we are going through. We are not looking for answers (the problems may be too large for there to be any obvious ones) so much as comfort, reassurance, and fellow-feeling. In the circumstances, the deployment of an overly logical stance may come across not as an act of kindness, but as a species of disguised impatience.
当我们遇到麻烦时，我们想从伴侣身上得到的主要是他们的理解，理解我们面对着什么。我们不是来找答案的（因为问题可能太大，以至于没有明显的答案），而是来寻找抚慰、慰藉和同情的。在这种情况下，使用过多的逻辑可能就不会被视为爱意，而是一种伪装之后的不耐烦。
Let’s imagine someone who comes to their partner complaining of vertigo. The fear of heights is usually manifestly unreasonable: the balcony obviously isn’t about to collapse, there’s a strong iron balustrade between us and the abyss, and the building has been repeatedly tested by experts. We may know all this intellectually, but it does nothing to reduce our sickening anxiety in practice. If a partner were to patiently begin to explain the laws of physics to us, we wouldn’t be grateful: we would simply feel they were misunderstanding us.
想象一下，有人向他们的伴侣抱怨恐高。恐高通常是很不科学的：阳台明显不会塌，我们和深渊之间有一道足够坚实的栏杆，专家们也早就检验过这栋楼好几次了。道理我们都懂，但这对于减轻我们的焦虑毫无实际帮助。如果这时候你的伴侣开始耐心地跟你讲解物理，我们一点都不会领情，反而会觉得对方一点都不了解我们。
Much that troubles us has a structure akin to vertigo; our worry isn’t exactly reasonable, but we’re unsettled all the same. We can, for example, continue to feel guilty about letting down our parents, no matter how nice to them we’ve actually been. Or we can feel very worried about money even if we’re objectively economically quite safe. We can feel horrified by our own appearance even though no one else judges our face or body harshly. Or we can be certain that we’re failures who’ve messed up everything we’ve ever done, even if, in objective terms, we seem to be doing pretty well. We can obsess that we’ve forgotten to pack something even though we’ve taken a lot of care and can, in any case, buy almost everything at the other end. Or we may feel that our life will fall apart if we have to make a short speech, even though thousands of people make quite bad speeches every day and their lives continue as normal.
很多困扰我们的事就和恐高一样，我们的担心并不一定是有理由的，但我们就是不能放下心来。例如，我们可能一直很内疚让父母失望了，不管我们对他们实际上有多好；或者我们也许会非常担心钱，即使我们实际上很宽绰；我们会对自己的外表感到恐惧，尽管没有任何一个人刻毒地批评过我们的脸蛋或身材；或者我们会认为我们就是个失败者，什么都干不好，尽管从客观来说，我们看起来做得很好；我们老是会觉得自己忘带东西了，即使我们早都准备得事无巨细了，而且无论如何，我们什么都可以在那边买到；或者我们会觉得一个短短的演讲就会让我们的生活四分五裂，尽管每天都有成千上万的人发表了极其糟糕的演说，他们也都好好活着。
When we recount our worries to our partner, we may receive a set of precisely delivered, unimpassioned logical answers— we have been good to our parents, we have packed enough toothpaste etc. These answers are both entirely true and yet unhelpful as well and so, in their own way, enraging. It feels as if the excessive logic of the other person has led them to look down on our concerns. Because, reasonably speaking, we shouldn’t have our fears or worries; the implication is that no sane person would have them; our partners make us feel a bit mad.
当我们向伴侣倾诉忧虑时，我们可能会得到一份精准无误、毫无激情的回答——比如“对父母来说我们已经很好啦，我们已经带足了牙刷啦，等等”。这些答案完全正确且毫无用处，也是一种激怒人的方式。感觉好像对方过度的逻辑让他们根本不在乎我们的担忧。因为，从理性角度分析，我们本来就不应该去害怕去担忧，没有哪个理智的人会这样，我们的伴侣让我们有点抓狂。
The one putting forward the so-called ‘logical’ point of view shouldn’t be surprised by the angry response they receive. They are forgetting how weird and beyond the ordinary rules of reason all human minds can be, their own included. The logic they are applying is really a species of brute common-sense that refuses the deep insights of psychology. Of course our minds are prey to fantasms, illusions, projections, and neurotic terrors. Of course we’re afraid of many things that don’t exist in the so-called real world. But such phenomena are not so much ‘illogical’ as deserving of the application of a deeper logic based on a sympathy for the complexities of emotional life.
那些提出所谓的逻辑观点的人收到火冒三丈的回复后不应该感到惊讶。他们忘记了人类究竟是会多么奇怪、多么超出常规规则的生物，这其中也包括了他们自己。他们用的逻辑其实是一种粗野的常识，他们拒绝去深入了解心理学。诚然，我们的大脑是幻觉、臆想、投射和病态恐惧的猎物，诚然，我们害怕很多在所谓的真实世界中并不存在的东西，但这些现象与其说是“不合逻辑”，不如说是用了更深的逻辑，这种逻辑基于对复杂情感生活的同情。
Our sense of whether we’re attractive or not isn’t about what we actually look like; it follows a so-called logic that goes back to childhood and how loved we were made to feel by those we depended on. The fear of public speaking can be bound up with long-buried and tortuous emotions of shame and a fear around competing and dealing with another’s envy. An excessively logical approach to fears discounts their origins and concentrates instead on why we shouldn’t have them, which is maddening when we are in pain.
决定我们眼中自己到底有没有吸引力的，不是我们究竟长的什么样，而是一种可上溯到童年的所谓逻辑，是我们从家长身上得到的爱。对公众演讲的害怕可能来自长期埋藏的扭曲的羞耻感、对竞争的恐惧感和对他人的嫉妒感。用一种过于逻辑的方法来解释恐惧会让我们忽略恐惧的起源，而变成关心我们为什么不该害怕，当我们被困扰的时候，这很令人生气。
It’s not that we actually want our partner to stop being reasonable; we want them to apply their intelligence to the task of reassurance. We want them to enter into the weirder bits of our own experience by remembering their own. We want to be understood for being the mad animals we all are and then comforted and consoled, so that it will (probably) all be OK anyway.
实际上我们并不希望我们的伴侣停止理性思考，而是希望他们能把他们的聪明才智运用到安慰我们上去。在我们莫名其妙开始害怕的时候，我们希望他们能回忆起自己的经历，我们想要他们理解我们身上那只疯狂的小动物，接着被安抚，接着被慰藉，这大概就足够了。
Then again, it could be that the application of excessive logic isn’t an accident or form of stupidity. It may just be an act of revenge. Perhaps the partner is giving brief logical answers to our worries because their efforts to be more sympathetic towards us in the past have gone nowhere. Perhaps we have neglected their needs.
但是，过度逻辑的出现可能并不是一次意外或者智商低，这可能是一种复仇。他们之所以用简短的理性答案来回应我们的忧虑，也许是因为他们当初给予我们的同情落得竹篮打水一场空，也许是因为我们曾忽视了他们的需求。
If two people were being properly ‘logical’ in the deepest sense of the world—that is, truly alive to all the complexities of emotional functioning, rather than squabbling around the question of ‘Why are you being so rational when I’m in pain?’, the person on the receiving end of superficial logic should gently change the subject and ask: ‘Is it possible I’ve hurt or been neglecting you?’ That would be real logic.
如果两个人在世界最深层的意义上都完美地“合乎逻辑”，换句话说，就是真正地理解了情感世界的复杂性，比起一直纠结于“我难受的时候你为什么还能这么理智”，作为收到冷淡回应的那方，应该轻柔地换个话题，去问对方：“我是不是曾经伤害了你或者忽视了你？”这才是真正的理智。
By: The School of Life