Joe comes home late after a long day at the office. After dinner, he wants to go to bed. Barbara, who has been alone with the kids all day, is hungry for interaction. She launches into an account of her day, her feelings and problems. Joe is annoyed; he puts her off with a few terse grunts and heads for the bathroom. Both of them are angry. Neither has negotiated anything. Joe’s caricatured image of his wife, at that moment, is that she is a bottomless pit of emotional need; that anything he does will be wrong anyway, and that she has no appreciation of either his needs or his contributions.
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