Catty is the word people bring me, usually with a small laugh attached, because it sounds too petty to book a session over. A remark about how you loaded the dishwasher. A comment about your job told at a table with four other people laughing. A correction delivered in front of your mother. The laugh is there because nobody wants to admit they are paying somebody to talk about a tone of voice.
I take it seriously anyway, and here is why. Take the word away and what is left is contempt. If you gave me one behavior to watch and asked me to guess which marriages come apart, that is the one I would pick. It is not the fighting. Couples who fight loudly, badly and often are frequently fine. It is the quiet, steady signal that one of you has decided the other is beneath you.
What people actually mean by catty
The word arrived carrying a lot of nonsense about women and I am dropping that on the floor. In my office the behavior splits about evenly. Husbands do it in a lower register and call it teasing. Wives do it with better aim and call it honesty. It is the same move.
What people mean is a small hostile act wearing a friendly costume. The compliment with a hook in it. The joke told in public where laughing along is the only exit you have. The sigh. The eye roll timed so everyone in the room catches it except the person it is aimed at, who catches it too and cannot say so without looking unstable.
The sentence out loud
What your partner actually hears
Wow, you actually finished it.
I expected you to fail and I want you to know I expected it.
He is not really a details guy, are you honey.
I am telling six people at this table what I think of you and using your name affectionately while I do it.
No, it is fine. I will just do it again after.
Your effort was worthless and I would rather you knew that than fixed it.
I mean, if that is how you want to spend the money.
I have decided you are the reckless one in this marriage and that is now permanent.
Every one of those has the same structure. The content is deniable and the message is not. Your partner cannot repeat the sentence back to you without sounding like they are inventing a problem, and they know it, so they swallow it. Nothing gets swallowed permanently. It goes on a pile.
The ledger nobody agreed to keep
Underneath almost every catty marriage I see is a ledger. Two of them, actually. Each of you has been keeping a private account of what you put into this life and what you got back, and neither of you told the other you were doing it, and neither of you would call it that if I asked.
Here is what makes the ledger so poisonous. You have complete information about your own entries and almost none about theirs. You know about the 5am you took with the sick kid, the invoice you chased on a Sunday, the call to his mother you made because he would not. You do not see the eleven things he handled in a week where you were underwater and grateful and never asked what it cost him. So your column is full and his looks thin, and his column is full and yours looks thin, and both of you are quietly certain you are the one carrying this.
I have never once had a couple where the two ledgers agreed. Not one, in years of doing this. The gap is not a sign that somebody is lying. It is the normal result of two people who can only see their own work.
The lines I hear in my office
People are always surprised by how specific this gets. It is never abstract. It is six or seven sentences on rotation, and once a couple hears them said back in a room with a third person present, the room goes very quiet.
Said with a smile
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Must be nice to sleep in on a Saturday
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No, go ahead, you clearly have it handled
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She is the fun parent, I am the one who reads the school emails
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I did not want to bother you, you seemed busy
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That is your version of it
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I already knew you would say that
Read those without the tone and they are almost harmless. That is the design. The tone is doing all the work, which is why the conversation afterward always collapses into an argument about what was meant rather than what happened.
Why I do not treat this as small
Loud arguing is not what worries me. A couple who yells and then eats dinner together has heat in the system, and heat can be aimed somewhere useful. I wrote about the mechanics of that in how to stop constant arguing in a relationship, and the whole first stage of what I see in couples is built out of it, which is stage 1, stupid arguments and constant fighting.
Contempt is different because it does not want a resolution. An argument is a request that went sideways. A dig is a statement of position. There is no version of a backhanded compliment that ends with the two of you closer, and after a few years of them the affection does not disappear all at once, it just stops being safe to show.
Couples who yell at each other usually make it. Couples who smile at each other with a knife in it usually do not.
Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC
How two people actually stop
This one is fixable and it is faster than most things I work on, because neither of you enjoys it. Nobody comes out of a dinner party feeling good about the joke they made. The behavior survives on the ledger, so the work is on the ledger, not on manners.
The repair, in order
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Both of you write your ledger down. Actually write it. Everything you believe you are carrying that goes unnoticed.
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Read them to each other with no rebuttals allowed. Not one. The rebuttal is the thing that has been killing this for years.
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Find the entries that are simply out of date. Most lists have a 2019 grievance still accruing interest on both sides.
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Name the format out loud. Say the dig back plainly: what you meant was that I am careless with money. Say it without heat.
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Agree on one rule going forward. Nothing about your partner gets said in front of other people that has not been said to them first.
Step four is the one that does the work. A dig only functions while it stays deniable. The moment you translate it out loud, calmly, with no counterattack, it stops being clever and starts being a sentence somebody has to own. Couples who get good at this find the digs simply stop being worth making. If the plain version of the sentence is the part you cannot get out, that is a communication problem and I have written the mechanics of it up in how to improve communication in marriage.
When only one of you is doing it
Sometimes it is genuinely one sided. One person is taking the shots and the other has gone quiet and polite, which people mistake for peace and which is usually the more dangerous of the two positions.
You are the one on the receiving end. What now?
Name it once, plainly
Not in the moment and not in front of anyone. Later, flat and specific: when you said that at dinner, this is what I heard. No apology demanded, no counterlist.
Most partners are genuinely shocked. They knew it was sharp. They did not know it was landing as a verdict.
Keep absorbing it
You tell yourself it is not worth the fight, which is true of any single instance and false of the pattern. So you get quieter and further away.
The distance gets read as coldness, which produces more of the behavior, and eventually somebody looks for warmth elsewhere.
There is a line past which this is not cattiness at all. If the remarks are constant, aimed at your competence as a parent or a person, and you have started managing your own behavior all day to avoid setting somebody off, that is a different subject and it belongs with a licensed professional. I am a coach. I do not diagnose and I do not treat, and I will tell you that on the first call rather than after your money is spent. What I do handle, all day, is two decent people whose ledgers got away from them, which is most of what the parent marriage is about.
Talk it through
If you read the sample lines above and heard your own voice in a couple of them, that is worth an hour. Book a free 25 minute call. It is for first timers, it costs nothing, and we will find out whether what you have is a ledger problem or something else.
Questions couples ask
Is catty behavior a sign my partner does not love me?
Usually not. In my experience it is a sign your partner feels unseen and has run out of polite ways to say so. Love and contempt sit together far more comfortably than people expect, which is exactly what makes this so corrosive. The affection is generally still there under it. What is missing is the belief that saying the plain thing would change anything.
What if I am the one making the remarks?
Then you are ahead of most people, because the person doing it is almost always the last one to notice. Ask yourself what you have been keeping score of. There is a list, and the digs are the list leaking out. Read it to your partner instead. It is a worse evening and a much better month.
How is this different from ordinary teasing?
Teasing goes both directions and both people are laughing at the end of it. A dig runs one way and the other person laughs on a delay, or does not, and then says nothing. If you are not sure which one you have, ask your partner in a quiet moment and believe the first answer rather than the second one they give after seeing your face.
Can this be fixed without both of us coming in?
Partly. One person changing how they respond does move the pattern, because the pattern needs both of you to keep running. But the ledger work is a two person job, and it is the ledger that produces the behavior. Plenty of people start alone and their partner joins within a few sessions once it is clear this is not a trial where they are the defendant.