Inspired by this thread, I was wondering what were the most important types of things people and their SOs/spouses disagreed on, how you dealt with it, and how - if at all - it affected your relationship.
My wife and I are both quite opinionated, so it is undoubtedly a good thing that we agree very closely on just about all of what I consider the most important things. We are both nontheistic, social liberals, personally economically conservative. I’m not sure how I could live with someone with whom I strongly disagreed on something like religion, abortion, free speech, the Iraq War, the importance of education, etc. But I know people do, so I’m curious how you do it.
This is not to say everything about our marriage is all sweetness and light. We disagree on a whole bunch of little things - at times to a point that we’ve seriously discussed splitting up. But I’m regularly stricken by how much we agree on what I consider the important things.
How significant does an issue have to be before disagreement on that issue intereferes with your relationship?
Also, maybe note how long you have been together, and how strong you consider your relationship.
We’ve been married 24 years, and have 3 kids aged 18-21.
We argue about sex more than anything. How he doesn’t get it enough in his opinion, and my desire to have more romantic adventures.
Also some cultural differences. He expects his American girlfriend to be a Mexican housewife. I don’t cook enough or clean properly.
We’ve been together six years and only once did I consider breaking up, but that wasn’t due to disagreements. Our arguments are usually smartmouth comments, a silent treatment, then a make-up talk. The whole thing blows over fairly easily now that he’s not drinking. Alcohol made things much much worse.
Most of what we disagree on has to do with our son. I think we agree on the important stuff, but it’s the actual implementation of said important stuff that becomes an issue. Some of it is cultural, some of it is differing sensibilities and some of it is information.
For example, when our son was a baby, my husband had an idea of how much he should be eating. So he would try to force feed our son even when he wasn’t hungry. We resolved it by me providing him with some literature on kids’ nutrition and also by speaking together with the pediatrician since we used to go to his yearly appointments together.
Another example is discipline. My husband is very stern and has a short fuse. I don’t. Sometimes I think my husband goes too far too fast (he would never hit him, but I occasionally don’t think he gives him enough of an opportunity to respond to a request or command). Those issues are generally addressed later, out of our son’s earshot and when everyone is calmer.
Regardless of the issue, unless it’s something that’s escalating really quickly and seems to be getting out of hand, I try to shut up about it until we’re in private. I don’t want to undermine my husband’s authority any more than I want him to undermine mine.
The only other thing I can think of that comes up a lot is household division of labor. Both of us work full time. Both of us occasionally consult on the side. Yet I still do all the cooking, most of the cleaning and the bulk of the childcare. It can get really overwhelming, especially now that I’m well into my eighth month of pregnancy. In my husband’s defense, he doesn’t know how to cook and is often stymied when it comes to cleaning, too (or at least he says he is), so part of the onus is on me to provide some direction. But I get frustrated doing that because I occasionally have to give so much detail that it’d be faster to do it myself. Plus, I’ve been doing it so long that for me, it’s common sense and sometimes I get impatient because it just doesn’t occur to me that someone could not know what cleaner to use on the sink or where to begin cleaning a room.
Well, we’ve only been together a few months, and aren’t living together or anything like that (are in fact currently about 1,500 miles apart). So, there hasn’t been a lot of time or opportunity to figure out all the little things that we might disagree on. But, she’s a vegetarian and I’m not. Which is sort of big as I find myself contemplating what it might mean to live with a vegetarian and how my habits might have to change (not that we’re planning anything, just daydreaming a bit).
I wouldn’t call it a “disagreement” but the biggest fight type interactions we have are me bringing him back to reality when he starts unreasonably freaking out over work, and him bringing me back to reality when I start unreasonably freaking out over money.
As far as other stuff, we mostly agree on nearly everything you would consider a “major issue,” like politics, how to treat people, house work, family, and religion. Oh, there is one thing: we’re more morally flexible in different ways. He’s less honest and more tactful, I’m less tactful and more honest. Gets us into trouble sometimes, when he thinks I’m being a jerk and I think he’s being less than truthful.
We’ve been married for three and a half years, cohabitating for 7, together for almost 11. I think our relationship is perfectly happy 95% of the time.
The Other Shoe and I have been together ::counts on fingers:: 8 years and are cohabitating but not married, and this part sums us up pretty well.
All the big things we’re completely in synch. About the only issue where we don’t have near-perfect agreement is on gun control, but neither one of us holds a fanatical position, either, so it’s not that much of a problem.
Honestly, this is our most common argument, and sadly, we have it more often than I care to admit:
X: (sigh)
Y: What’s wrong?
X: Nothing.
… time passes …
X: (sigh)
Y: What’s wrong?
X: Nuh-thing! Jeez.
Y: Well, don’t snap at me, ferchrissakes.
X: I didn’t fucking snap at you!!!
Y: Quit swearing at me!
It devolves from there. We trade off who plays which role. Utterly annoying, but there it is.
Our biggest disagreement is religion. He is atheist. I am a practicing Baha’i. We deal with it by agreeing to be respectful of one another’s viewpoints. We do have theistic discussions sometimes, but we never allow them to devolve into personal attacks. Usually they start when he asks me the Baha’i perspective on a certain situation, etc. It helps that he pretty much likes all the Baha’is he’s ever met.
We argue about the kids mostly. We don’t have kids together, but one of his and both of mine live with us. The major problem as I see it is that he’s an authoritarian parent, and I’m…whatever the good one is, not permissive…authoritative? Anyway, he’s stern and the kids irritate him a lot, I’m easy-going and tend to handle problems by having conversations with the kids. I think he makes problems worse by being so quick with the reprimand, and he thinks I’m not doing anything about the problem. This is compounded by my kids always being the ones in trouble, because they’re younger and always around. His son spends every possible moment out of the house.
Now that I’ve painted him as a real bastard, I’ll say I think he’s a good man and we have a good marriage. We’ve been married about three and a half years, so we still have quite a ways to go…I wonder what we’ll fight about when the kids move out?
Damn, I hear ya! Here’s our version: What’s bothering you? Nothing, other than you asking me what’s bothering me!
or We never resolved x. I had forgotten about x until you just brought it up again.
Since our youngest went off to college, we’ve been learning new ways to interact/communicate. One thing we’ve started doing is when either of us realizes we are in a pissy mood about anything or nothing, we simply say as much, and the other knows to kinda give the other a wider berth til it passes.
No special problems until the end. Then she would complain that I was too inquisitive about where she was going and I would complain that she was driving home drunk.
My long-term girlfriend and I generally disagree on whether family or career is more important. I advocate that my parents didn’t pay my way through college just so I could waste my degree. If a well paying job comes along that’s a few states away, I should take it, and I expect her to do the same. I mean, what kind of parent would want their child to throw away their financial future?
She however advocates that family is very important in her life, and she’d be perfectly happy working a minimum wage job and just scraping by as long as she can drive over and see her parents on a whim.
It’s infuriating. Our savings accounts aren’t getting any larger and neither of us is ever going to have health care if we stay here in our current low-wage positions. I mean sheesh, call them on skype with a webcam hooked up if you want to see your mother so bad. Aww, now I’m all angry again.
We disagree on how to disagree. I’m brought up to be very diplomatic and circumspect; he instinctively reads this as evasive or passive-agressive. He’s brought up to be frank and outspoken; I automatically read this as rude and abrasive. Both think the other’s way of handling conflicts is so much worse than our own.
We’re learning not to go with our first knee-jerk reactions, but it’s taking a lot of time and patience. It’s an enlightening experience.
He comes from a family of talkers. I come from a family of non-talkers. Not in a bad way - they communicate as well as most families - but there’s not a lot of extraneous chatter going on in my parent’s house. His mother can start talking and you can’t get a word in edgewise for 30 minutes (that’s not an exaggeration).
I’d say at this point, 90% of the fights we have is because he says something that in my household wouldn’t get an answer (“It’s raining out”, stuff like that) and I forget that I’m no longer in my household and I’m supposed to make small talk at that point, and I don’t say anything. He perceives this as rude and snaps at me. I then get mad at being snapped at. At this point we either realize that this is the same damn fight we’ve had approximately one gazillion times and that neither of us meant to be rude and that we don’t have to have this fight again, or we don’t, and it disintegrates into a crazy stupid fight that leaves us both miserable.
Most of the time now we realize it’s just Our Favorite Fight, and we avoid it, but about once a year it really happens.
Someday we’ll be smart enough to not do this.
I’d really like to know if there are any couples out there who fight about issues that make any sense at all, because I don’t think I’ve ever had a fight over anything that’s really fight-worthy. Except at the time, when it’s the most fookin’ important issue in the world.
Climate Control. Mrs. Homie believes that the calendar should dictate how we heat/cool our house moreso than the actual, you know, temperature outside. If I’m hot, I’ll turn on the A/C, whether it’s July or January. Mrs. Homie goes into absolute fits about this. In her world, normal people don’t turn on their air conditioners in [any month between October and April]. If I’m cold, I turn on the heat. In Mrs. Homie’s world, normal people don’t turn on their heaters in [any month between May and September]. :smack:
Music. Buying a satellite radio has turned me into a pretentious snot when it comes to music. I can’t stand 98% of most commercial music. Mrs. Homie, OTOH, thinks Beyonce and Miley and such are THE SHIZZ. Whenever we’re in the car, she’ll whine and moan like a 3-year-old if we have to listen to jazz for more than a few seconds. :smack:
That’s because jazz is an abomination to god and man.
My husband and I had the climate control disagreement, exacerbated by the fact that he likes it cold, yet is responsible for the oil bill, and I like it warm, yet am responsible for the electric bill.
We ended up looking up what average people’s settings were online and setting our thermostat accordingly.
Yeah, we have spats about these too. I am the iron fist of climate control, and enforce whatever is cheapest.
She however is the iron fist of car radio. If we are in her car, im not allowed to touch the radio, since its her car and she is driving. If we are in my car, im not allowed to touch the radio, since she has her hands free and can adjust it at will.:smack:
