Fighting Well

Last month, my husband and I celebrated our 13th anniversary together. In total, we have been together 20 years. That is a long ass time! When my sister got married a few weeks ago, we were out on the dance floor during the anniversary dance and the DJ was really rushing those numbers. He ushered people who had been married less than 15 years off the dance floor in like 30 seconds and I can remember thinking, hold on a second! This was a lot of hard freakin work people! Give me a minute!

What makes a relationship last? I have heard though out the years all kinds of advice: never go to bed angry, if momma aint happy nobody’s happy, pick your battles. The list goes on. While those all hold a grain of truth, I think what really makes a relationship last is fighting well. I know that seems weird to say and I am only just starting to get good at it, but its true. I love my husband, I think he is one sexy piece of man, but I fight with him weekly about any number of things. What do we fight about mostly? Our four biggest arguments and you may think these are weird, are money, cleaning, hanging out with people and sports. The money one is a no brainer. I don’t make a ton of money, but I like to spend it. I spend it on my classroom. I love a good monthly box of clothes, food, cleaning supplies, anything really. I love the sound the scissors make cutting through that cardboard and discovering a new deliciousness that I really didn’t need. My husband is more sensible. He likes budget flow charts, pie graphs. He loves to point out to me that 95 % of my income in the last month went to online shopping, but he is also very good at saving and gets us to that vacation in the end! We need to balance each other out. When our kids were babies we would fight about the cheapest brand of diapers to buy. Now we both check the online banking and text each other at the same time, like we need to settle down and by we, I mean me.

Our next argument and this is sometimes a daily one, is around cleaning and organization. I am one of the kindest people you will ever meet, but also one of the least tidy. I am a dirty slob. I leave clothes all over the place, I take two sips and leave a drink on the counter, I pile crap in the corner of the kitchen and walk off to watch Netflix. I make three dozen muffins and leave a sign on the dirty dishes in the sink that reads if you liked the muffins, thank the cook by doing the damn dishes. These are all infuriating traits to my husband, who is the neatest of neat freaks that you have ever met. I sometimes clean up the kitchen and then call him to tell him I did. He always finds this curious. Doesn’t it make you feel better to have a clean kitchen he will ask me? No, I tell him. That is my cleaning I did to make you happy and I’ll wait another three months until I do it again. At the start of our marriage, we would fight about a messy house, especially when I’m not working in the summer and it wouldn’t matter if I stayed home all year long.I am just always organizing feelings before towels, I take walks instead of doing the dishes. I sit on my front porch and read books instead of changing the bedding. When he points out the state of filth we are in, sometimes I completely ignore him all together. This is a form of warfare, he wasn’t prepared for when he married me. I literally go into the other room, turn on the Sam Smith Pandora station and pretend no one is home. I have told him countless times, that if something bothers him, he is welcome to clean it up, and also and this is one of my favorite lines, “I don’t want to hear everything you are thinking.” The past few years, we have reached a treaty, he and I. I do the main stays, the dishes and the laundry. I crank Kesha to the hilt and clean the bathrooms, but besides that, he can take over what bothers him and he does. Also those other two humans that live here, listen to our wrath quite a bit and tend to help out.

Our next fighting topic and this may be weird as hell is hanging out with some people. My husband and I are both fairly quiet people, introverts, sometimes we are awkward to the hilt, but he loves to be social. He is a social being. I think he would still be quite content to walk down his old stomping grounds in the dorm rooms at Orono and knock on the doors saying hello to people. I am an odd duck in that I love people so fiercely, but sometimes want nothing to do with them. I have wonderful friends in my life, where the conversation flows freely and the back and forth energy is fantastic, but I have also met people where we converse and it is like talking in slow motion, painful, with captions that read get me out of this situation. I am not fake, I hate inauthenticity, I loathe imitation, so I only want friendship when it is natural, when I can be myself and vulnerable, otherwise I find the whole exchange draining and not worth my time at all. Oftentimes, we battle about doing A, B and C because I am not feeling peopley as he calls it. When I tell him he should still go and have a good time, he tells me that it is always better when I come, that I am the warm one, who can read people well and knows senseless trivia. I’m still on the fence whether or not this is true.

Our last fighting topic and this leads to some good screaming matches is about sports. We just philosophically believe differently about sports. We share the same ultimate goals. We want our kids to work hard, be respectful, conquer goals, work as a team, go the Olympics. HA! But he grew up playing basketball and football. I was a swimmer, a gymnast, I dabbled in track, the French Club. It was me against me in sports. No one ever sat on bleachers hoping I would be called off the bench to play. When I was slower at swim meets, my teammates made up the difference and no one analyzed it for bad form on video replay. My husband with his RBF and his good work ethic, played basketball until he was a freshman in high school and then when he realized the politics of it and that he was only going to ride the bench, went straight to working 40 hours a week and flipping off the man (whoever that was). In this way, we fight while we watch games together. I say things like “way to go so so” and this could be any kiddo that you might insert in here. I yell for them all, while Joe mutters the entire game about how they are not working hard enough. We then fight about him muttering and me just being happy they walked in a straight line. I notice the politics of any given sport, but I also just want to take stock that the sport feels good to THEM. I want it to fill their cup. I DO KNOW my kids are not the most natural on any given court, field etc. butttt they both have a ton of grit, motivation and desire and I think overlooking this is a shame. If I were a coach, I would rather have a hard worker, than a talented ego punk any day of the week and so sometimes we reach an impasse he and I, sometimes we don’t sit together on the bleachers, sometimes I momma bear so hard, I talk to the coach before he even knows that I have. But we both parent hard and love our kids immensely, so I think we are bound to drink a sports rageful smoothie once in a while.

The biggest tips I have for fighting well are to talk it out while walking. I have done case studies on my street of de- escalating many an issue while walking. I think you can’t get as loud while you are in a walking motion and in close proximity. I also think text fighting is for the birds. We have fought more texting than in any face-to-face argument, so lately when we feel it coming. We just say let’s table this until we can talk in person. Our biggest secret to fighting well I think, is just not trying to change the other person. I am A LOT. Let’s face it. My husband is patient and kind, but also deeply annoyed at times by my quirks and routines and at times anxiety. He doesn’t try to create an alternate route for me at this point in our marriage and I don’t for him. We just steer in the same direction for the things that really matter. How is your fighting dear reader? Do you have tips to add to mine or think all my advice is a bunch of bologna? Please comment below.