On Communication in The Ultimatum: Queer Love

To the surprise of literally no one, there are a few things to pique a therapist’s interest within the absolute chaos of 2023’s reality TV zenith, The Ultimatum: Queer Love. While potential subject-matter abounds, I thought I’d go back to basics, and discuss the fundamental subject of communication in TU:QL. Spoiler alert: I’ve accidentally written a literal pamphlet - there is quite a lot to say about this show (!), and I am cursed with an incapacity to use one word when I could use twelve. So, grab your personal metallic goblet and break out the biscuits: it’s time for a (very) deep dive.

To re-cap the premise, The Ultimatum brings together five couples at a crossroads: each couple has one partner asking to get married (like, now), and another who’s unsure. Participants are encouraged to explore this impasse by forming a new couple with another participant and living together for three weeks, sailing the stormy seas of WLW-U-hauling and the resulting pet-ownership politics (most egregiously, nobody has a cat – the real question mark of this series). Finally, they return to their original partners for a further three weeks of living together, before coming back to the original question posed by their ‘ultimatum’ – and, this time, answering it: will it be marriage, or bust?

The therapy-speak bit - what makes communication challenging?

Before we get into the specifics of the show, let’s zoom out, and talk about a few basics of communication. One of the challenges with communication is that it’s heavily contextual: we bring big chunks of our history into many of our present conversations, often without even noticing. This means it’s actually quite easy for two people to be having very different experiences of the same conversation, and for the other’s point of view to be missed entirely. Which goes to say, communication is hard at the best of times - let alone when you’re trying to navigate it with a stranger, with cameras rolling, during a grilling from their highly confused and concerned friends.

Context can influence communication in a few ways:

1. If past conflict hasn’t gone well for us, we might anticipate future conflict also going badly, which intensifies the stakes and stress associated with it;

2. Present conflict can stir up memories of previous conflict, and we can find ourselves reacting to the memories as well as the present;

3. Our reactions impact others’ reactions - we create a cycle of contextual responses together, which can escalate a situation.

For the participants of TU:QL, conflict is often intense, and highly stressful. When exposed to intense stress, it’s hard to stay in our ‘normal daily life’ mode, or to feel or act as we would in a calm situation. You’ve probably heard the terminology used to describe our defensive responses when we’re really out of our comfort zone: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn (some theorists also discuss ‘flop’, but we will leave that to one side for today). In brief, these terms describe:

· Fight: increasing levels of aggression or defensiveness, to overpower the threat;

· Flight: escaping from the threat to a place that feels safe;

· Freeze: feeling paralysed, unable to react, waiting to see what happens next;

· Fawn: trying to appease and placate the threat; showing docility to demonstrate that we’re not a competing threat.

So, how does this all this figure into TU:QL?

I think each of these defences is illustrated by the participants of the show. Tell me more, you say? I thought you’d never ask…

Fight – Mildred (she/her)

Unsurprisingly, Mildred is a fitting example of the ‘fight’ response, which kicks in whenever she perceives a threat to her relationship (e.g. an unmet need, a concern about incompatible values, or an atmosphere of friction). It significantly raises the temperature of an interaction, putting her and her partner straight into that ‘high-stakes’ feeling of the relationship being on the line. Both her aggression and defensiveness become palpable, and the more nuanced Mildred we see outside of conflict feels less present – she fights back on everything her partner says, taking them away from the issue they’d wanted to talk about in the first place, and putting them on separate sides. Fight takes over to the point that any sense of collaboration is lost – instead, we get well into burning bridges, ‘me-vs-you’ territory. It often bubbles over into inappropriate, violent interactions.

When Mildred is calmer, she reflects that her reaction to conflict has been influenced by past experiences of being abandoned. With the fight response, perhaps she’s testing her partner, to see whether they show signs of leaving. If they don’t pass the test, her aggression may push her out of the situation before the other person leaves, thus avoiding repeating the pattern (‘I left them, they didn’t leave me’). Mildred’s fight wants to overpower the other person, to prevent feeling powerless herself.

An important addendum: while we can understand some of what might be going on for Mildred, we also recognise when her resulting behaviour is not OK, and acknowledge its profound and distressing impact on those around her.

Flight – Aussie (Aussie)

Aussie is often spotted delivering the line ‘I’m not running away’, usually while throwing clothes in a suitcase and closing the door on the cameras. While Aussie might disagree, I’d say this makes Aussie a good candidate for the flight response. When a partner wants to talk about their relationship, Aussie experiences this as a significant conflict, shuts down, and departs for somewhere ‘safe’. Aussie’s flight response makes it difficult both for Aussie and for Aussie’s partners to express their needs, and we see Aussie’s partner Sam (she/her) describe trying to avoid conflict by staying quiet about her feelings (maybe a bit of a fawn response from Sam, for bonus points).

Aussie is another participant who offers us insight into past experiences’ influence on present feelings. Aussie describes growing up with family who always judged, blamed and criticised, and how hurtful and unfair that felt. Throughout the series, we can see that Aussie ‘hears’ those same accusations being made by partners, even when they haven’t been. When Sam says she wants to be able to talk with Aussie in more depth, Aussie’s response suggests that Aussie ‘hears’ this as Sam judging, blaming and criticising Aussie for having done something wrong. Aussie’s flight response comes in to protect Aussie, and to get Aussie away from someone who’s treating Aussie unkindly - but because the defence is so alert and ready to mitigate any threat, it’s perceiving and acting upon ‘threats’ even when they’re not present (Sam isn’t treating Aussie unkindly, even though Aussie experiences these interactions as unkind). Aussie is so ready to run, it prevents Aussie realising that staying could be OK.

Freeze – Rae (she/her)

Often seen feeling overwhelmed and speechless, Rae is our model for the freeze response. Rae has a number of difficult experiences throughout the series, and we can see how tough she finds conflict at times. She arrives at TU:QL as the recipient of the ultimatum, given by partner Lexi (she/her) in frustration at Rae’s ‘indecision’ about their future. For Rae, communicating vulnerable things is challenging – we see it’s hard for her to keep speaking even in ‘relaxed’ situations of exchanging compliments with Vanessa (she/her), let alone in high-conflict arguments with Lexi. In these confrontations, Rae often shuts down, and gets stuck. She doesn’t physically leave the interaction like Aussie does, but she struggles to communicate in the moment, and will often silently cry instead.

Rae and Lexi provide a good example for how conflict can escalate when we get into the ‘chain reaction’ of responses dynamic. When Lexi feels vulnerable, she moves into a fight response, which overwhelms Rae and pushes her to freeze. Seeing Rae go quiet, Lexi doubles-down into fight, trying to goad Rae into reacting - which only serves to entrench Rae further in freeze. Both of them now read the situation as much more threatening than at the start of the interaction: Lexi, because she interprets Rae’s shutdown as indecision about the relationship, and Rae because she’s feeling railroaded. They consistently reach this impasse when in conflict, and both leave the interactions dissatisfied and upset. Maintaining this chain-reaction pattern perhaps gives them a sense of having the same argument over and over: the repetition prevents them reaching the possibility of different outcomes, and they keep getting stuck. While Lexi is ostensibly trying to get Rae to talk to her, her approach shuts Rae down, as it doesn’t give her space to feel safe enough to come out of freeze. In this pattern, neither of them gets what they want or need. Which isn’t ideal.

Fawn – Xander (she/her/they)

Xander shows a few different behaviours throughout the series that we might characterise as ‘people-pleasing’, thereby exhibiting the fawn response. They arrive at TU:QL in a relationship with Vanessa, in which it seems several dynamics have been established that prioritise Vanessa’s needs at the expense of Xander’s. In the early period of the series, Vanessa continually provokes Xander, to which Xander responds by trying to pacify Vanessa, instead of advocating for herself. Even when other participants call this behaviour out, Xander defends Vanessa, and doesn’t express her own feelings about experiencing Vanessa’s unkindness. At the start of the series, it seems Xander is invested in trying to stay in a relationship with Vanessa at all costs – and to ensure this, they put their own needs and boundaries aside.

As the series continues, and Xander develops feelings for another participant, Yoly (she/her), they continue to use the fawn response to avoid conflict – now with both Yoly and Vanessa. While she makes progress towards communicating more of her feelings, she stops short of talking about some of the difficult stuff head-on, avoiding any friction. Although this means there aren’t big, blow-up conflicts between them and their partners, it also leaves a lot unexplored, under the surface. We could wonder how many of Xander’s feelings throughout the series went unexpressed. And this is where the fawn response can get us into trouble: sometimes, conflict and anger are appropriate responses, to push back and advocate for ourselves when things don’t feel right. Xander makes their own way through the series and shows kindness, respect and compassion throughout – but they unfortunately don’t receive the same level of care, and maybe that would have been worth fighting for.

And…what next?

So, we’ve come to the end of my dissertation on TU:QL. If those biscuits have tided you over and you’re still here, what can we take from all we’ve discussed? Certainly, conflict is a difficult balancing act, in which there is a lot going on – what’s happening in the present moment, yes; but also, both our own past context, and the other person’s. The more awareness we have of those two latter parts, the more we’ll be able to notice and respond to them, and thus better stay engaged in the present moment. But, of course, the main thing we can all take from TU:QL is - Mal. With their patience, compassion, and ability to stay listening in the tough conversations, they are a shining beacon of communication capability for us all to admire and adore. So, maybe that’s our closing thought: how can we be more Mal, at any given moment?!

Also…maybe the best communicators are all cat people?!