About what/how do you and your partner fight?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Inspired by this thread. Reading it I got a little worried about my relationship with my husband :slight_smile: My husband and I are one of those couples that rarely fights (I can count on one hand the number of times one of us has yelled at the other) though we get frustrated/angry with each other on occasion, do argue on occasion and discuss/negotiate differences on even more occasions. (It does help that we think pretty similarly about a lot of things, so we haven’t fought about, e.g., money.)

After ten years of being together (five years married) I think our strategies have boiled down roughly to the following:

  1. Going away for a bit and trying to look at it from the other person’s point of view before re-addressing the topic. Particularly useful when upset for reasons external to the topic at hand (for example, before we were married my mom was extra critical of mr. hunter – she’s backed off now that we’re married – and sometimes after talking to her I’d be much more likely to snap at him). I used to get upset at mr. hunter for taking so long to do things, but now I take a deep breath and think about all the things he does do for me on a regular basis.

  2. When one of us has a sensible argument and the other does not, the sensible argument wins. Or, rather, it’s not even an issue. mr. hunter likes the good knives to be washed immediately so there’s no chance they will rust or get crusty crud on them, so that’s what I do when I use them even though I never did this before meeting him (I had no good knives before then). (He’s had to put up with my forgetting to do this sometimes, which is sometimes frustrating for him, but that’s a separate issue). This probably takes care of 90% of the issues on which we have a difference of opinion – usually one of us has thought it out and the other one simply never has, and when confronted with a logical reason accepts that the other one has a point.

  3. If that doesn’t work… whichever partner feels more strongly/is willing to put in more effort wins. We go to different churches and had quite a lot of discussion about where the Little One would be brought up. In the end it boiled down to my being willing to cart her to my church every Sunday, and mr. hunter maybe making it every other Sunday to his church.

  4. If that doesn’t work… negotiation so we’re both happy. This is how we dispensed with the dreaded Toilet Seat argument. He feels that not putting it down is efficient. I argue that it’s basic civilized behavior, which is not always efficient. Neither of us is prepared to budge :slight_smile: However, we were able to negotiate this one: whoever cleans the toilets gets to decide. (Usually mr. hunter.)

What are your strategies? What sorts of things do you fight/argue about? Do you need yelling/sniping fights every once in a while to clear the air?

2

We don’t yell, but we have heated discussions that can go on for hours. There might be some silent treatment in there too, if life interrupts before we can finish up the discussion.

The only thing we’ve really fought about are kid-related issues. Sadly, those are unresolved and ongoing.

3

Usually we suffer in silence rather than argue. That could be called “giving each other the silent treatment” or it could be just accepting each other for what we are, depending on how charitable you are feeling. We’ve made it for over 20 years with this method, imperfectly sometimes.

These days we have discussions where we raise issues and talk them out. For example: “I want to talk about kid #1 and his job problems.”

Almost all of our fights have to do with the kids and what we need to do or not do to help them. Generally we are in agreement though.

Your are joking, of course, right? If my wife and I argued about this kind of stuff I never would have married her, seriously. I would go insane.

4

We argue about…

  1. Household duties - who does them, when, how frequently

  2. Childrearing issues - how hard to push our son academically, discipline strategies, etc.

As for strategies on handling, we don’t have any “official” strategies, but my husband is allowed to tell me if I’m making an argument all about me because that helps me put things in perspective. And I’m allowed to tell him if I think he’s setting unreasonable expectations because that’s one of the drivers behind our arguments related to childrearing.

We rarely yell (I think we’ve gotten into a shouting match twice) and I’ve been so mad I’ve walked out during the conversation maybe three or four times. Other than that, they’re usually very, very long “discussions” that involve us disagreeing with each other and venting at each other.

What’s extremely frustrating about our arguments is that I cry. I don’t want to, I don’t mean to. It’s like my eyeballs leak involuntarily. My tone of voice is still normal and calm and even, but I just happen to be talking with tears running down my face. And my husband has difficulty getting past that. I can understand that. Similarly, he vents much more than I do in arguments and it comes off as extremely critical, so I often get on the defensive.

We’re both working on our arguing styles, with some small successes. It’s taking a while, but we have all the time in the world.

5

Our fights are typically about housework/housecleaning/clutter/too much crap, or about unduly favoring one side of the family (hers) over the other (mine).

It took us a long time to get to the point where she’ll argue back; for whatever reason, she perceived the mere presence of a fight or conflict as a serious relationship problem for a long time, so in her mind, one or the other of us was supposed to knuckle under to avoid fighting. I, on the other hand, came from a family where we didn’t really suppress conflict. We rarely fought as such, but we’d get our opinions, wants and grievances out in the open, argue some, then get down to brass tacks and negotiate a solution.

We basically follow my family’s approach now between the two of us, and she’s appropriated it for her family dealings, although it does cause her some friction with her parents and sibling, because they’re not used to her being quite so assertive or willing to argue/fight.

6

Sometimes guns, sometimes knives.

Really, we don’t fight much. We used to yell and scream and stomp around, and that lasted for some years.

Then we learned where the lines were. After that, a fight would only occur if one crossed a line. And that lasted for some years.

These days it is even acceptable to cross the lines a little bit, and the other will let it go so long as the offending party doesn’t persist. We also recognize that occasionally one person (usually me) is simply being a jerk because of a crappy mood, and just ignore said mood it until it goes away.

Most of our fights over the years have not been about substance, but have merely been reactions based on our individual insecurities. After 30 years together, we’re just not feeling all that insecure anymore.

7

Hmm. Our style is yelling/angry, sometimes mean words used followed by quiet reflective/cooldown time alone followed by reconciliation and acknowledging and attempting to understand the others’ point of view. Usually under an hour, maybe once/month. We both struggled with this initially - he was raised only by his mother so he never witnessed fighting or arguing and I was raised by two semi-crazy people who, while most definitely in love, feed off of the drama of fighting and saying horrible things to one another and later reconciling. It took him awhile to realize that there’s no such thing as a couple that never fights or disagrees and it took me awhile to learn to not feed off of the drama.

We often approach viewpoints differently but arrive at the same answer, which I find interesting and satisfying. We very very rarely see things entirely differently.Most often it’s one person going “hmm, well his/her way seems more logical. I’ll adopt that” after a bit of discussion. He will get selfish when he gets busy with school or work and I hate that. He’s working on it and improving while I pick up the slack more readily.

As far as chores go, we have a fairly even distribution. We will voice our disapproval if one person is slacking but fundamentally we are both extremely clean people - dusting/scrubbing bathrooms/vacuuming are all done weekly. I could not live with someone who was a pig. I don’t like that I’m responsible for all the cooking and have been for 2 years. Next week he’s agreed to learn to cook and cook several days a week all summer. I look forward to it. Once he’s out of school and we’re both working (with a house) we’ll probably have a cleaning person.

As far as to the future, we disagree on how many kids to have. I’d like 0-1 and he’d like 2. I worry he won’t be a good father because he had an absent father. I suspect we’ll have one child and I’ll watch to see if he’s enough of an emotional presence; if he is, I’ll feel better having two. My father was also very emotionally absent (though monetarily very present). The children was a hotbutton issue that my parents argued over; my mom was much more active than my dad yet only wanted 1 child while my dad wanted (and got) 3. I see many men want more children than their spouses but not willing to do the legwork to raise them. What alarms me is that we lack a good relationship with our fathers; mine is married to my mother still but we lack any bond and he speaks to his dad maybe 1-2 times/year on the phone.

My future MIL has been very supportive and has directly told me that she would raise our child (during working hours before preschool and after school let out). That puts my mind at ease a bit. I disagree with her on some things but overall she’s a very intelligent and very kind woman.

ETA: A very early hot-button issue for us was where to spend holidays. He developed and stuck very closely to alternating - his side gets Christmas, mine gets Thanksgiving and it switches each year. When one side would try and persuade us to nix it “just this year”, he would stand his ground where I would otherwise melt.

8

lindsaybluth, we also have an unresolved conflict about number of children, though the opposite of you. I really have always wanted at least 2 (so the Little One can have a sibling) and he is thinking no more than 1 (so we can do a better job on her). For the time being, since I’m not in a huge hurry to be pregnant again, we’re in the stage where we’re not talking about it and just seeing if one of us has an opinion shift (and, probably, to see what his sister’s experience with a second child is). I suspect it’ll boil down to which of us cares more, in the end – I really, really want another kid, so if he’s just ambivalent we’ll probably do it and he will learn to deal, but if he’s dead set against it then I’ll probably accept it, though it might take me a while to get over it.

I’m joking a little – isn’t the toilet seat the cliched man/woman argument? – and this is certainly the only household-ish issue I can think of that wasn’t settled basically immediately with about a sentence of discussion, so it’s not like we argue about this kind of stuff much usually. But yes, I’m serious that we settled this by saying “whoever cleans the toilet gets to decide whether the toilet seat is left up or not.”

In your household, do you leave the toilet seat up? If not, then there’s no issue. If you do, your wife has never complained about it? Even when people come to visit?

9

It sounds like you’re both on fair and honest footing with it though. How old is the little one now? Some people firmly say only a year or two between kids but some of the best relationships I’ve seen (and been a part of) are between siblings with big age gaps (4-10ish years).

My youngest brother goes to a private high school and (almost) all of the parents are in very successful careers at or near the top of their fields within the city. Lately I’ve noticed for the exceptions of my mom and one other mother, all the women with successful careers only had 1 child. 2-3 children means not working or working part time with little to no advancement. That worries me because we’re both career driven – of course the sampling size is probably only two dozen families rather than widespread as well.

10

What sorts of things do you fight/argue about?

99% of the time, just stupid petty stuff. Sometimes we’re just in a bitchy mood (usually related to hunger or fatigue) and sort of snipe at one another about things. I don’t know if I would call it fighting. Whining might be a better word. These encounters generally last about 15 seconds.

Our most epic stupid fight ever was about the meaning of Green Day’s American Idiot album. I don’t mean petty bickering, I mean a pulling-the-car-over no-holds-barred fight. We laugh in retrospect.

We went through a phase, before we married, where we argued about money a lot. It got bad enough that people started noticing how often we were fighting, and we went and saw a couple’s therapist. That was the lowest point in our relationship. Once we started seeing someone, things improved right away and I think we were so traumatized from that experience that we’ve been super vigilant about our fighting ever since.

Our last money fight was last year, when he was worried about money and I bought an octopus cookie jar. The cookie jar was $11, but it was the principle of the thing. That was about three hours of unpleasantness, but what came out of it was a complete and radical alteration of how we managed money, which works better for us than the way we did it before. When we have big arguments like that, they usually result in some kind of positive outcome, so it’s hard to regret them. (He now thinks he was overreacting - I think he had a right to be upset, but I still enjoy standing defiantly in front of my octopus cookie jar and declaring, ‘‘I regret nothing!’’)

Then there was the ‘‘I want a baby’’ fight last summer, that was probably our most long-term disagreement, as it took several weeks before we really got back to normal. And yes, there was fighting, but there was also, ‘‘Holy shit, I love you, we’re going to make it through this.’’ It wasn’t like weeks of insults and screaming. It just felt like all those emotions could come rushing back at the drop of a hat. Like we’d be having a perfectly normal day and everything would fall apart. It was an emotional time and I’m glad it’s over.

Do you need yelling/sniping fights every once in a while to clear the air?

No, we don’t need to fight. We just do sometimes.

What are your strategies?

Having a sense of humor helps. We joke about our past arguments and sometimes we make fun of our arguments while we’re having them. Usually when we’re all bent out of shape and bickering, one of us will say something emphatic, resolute, and absolutely insane. The best possible course of action is to mock the crazy person. It’s hard to keep a straight face when you and your partner both know you’re talking out of your ass and just looking for excuses to be pissy.

We had to talk about our fights and figure out how to improve them. One thing I do when I am royally pissed off is walk away. This is because I was raised in a household with explosive anger and when I feel like I’m at my breaking point, I need some distance. Just for a split second. Just a moment to move ten feet from one room to another can help me get some perspective and calm me down. Sr. Olives didn’t grok any of that at first, and he understandably read this as ‘‘LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE YOU BASTARD!’’ So I’d walk into another room, sit down and start crying, and he wouldn’t come in and then we’d both feel rejected.

I have a habit of assuming everybody can read my mind, but turns out he can’t. We talked about this, and it was a revelation for both of us. Now, when I walk away, he knows exactly what this means. He waits just a few seconds and then he comes to me and we resume our conversation more calmly and more supportively. Sometimes we’ll even walk ourselves through the behavior in our arguments. I’ll literally say, ‘‘I’m so angry I need a second! I’m not rejecting you!’’ Or, ‘‘I can totally see how right you are but it’s going to take me a minute to calm down!’’

In fact, the longer we’re together, the lazier we get about arguments.
‘‘What the hell is your problem?’’
‘‘I’m just sick and fucking tired of…’’
‘‘Well?’’
‘‘Meh. Let’s watch TV.’’

11

An old debate I know. In my house each person adjusts the toilet seat according to their needs. What could be more egalitarian? Our two boys learned at an early age not to pee with the seat down, so they have to think about and adjust to the ever changing toilet seat positions. If my wife had suggested there was one correct position we (all male) would have looked at her like she was crazy, tried to do it because we love her and then we would fail to achieve the desired 100%. These things just aren’t worth arguing about.

12

We fight about anything and everything. We use any tactics that don’t interfere with our TV watching schedule.

13

We don’t really argue. Either that, or our disagreements are so small that I don’t consider them arguments. Now I’m wondering what we’d do if we actually disagreed about something. I’d like to think that if something ever came up, we would talk about it rationally, but I’m not about to pick a fight just to find out. It helps that he’s one of the most patient people I’ve ever met, and we both assume that the other person is not trying to hurt us.

14
  1. Finances.
  2. Household chores.
  3. What to do with our weekends.

We don’t fight much, though.

15
  1. Money.
  2. Sense of humor - I can be a little sensitive, he can be overly snarky.
  3. Emotions.
    99% of our fights are simple little things that blow over quickly. The bigger ones, we really do sit down and discuss it, even if we are bitter and snipe-y. But we try not to snipe and try to discuss our feelings.
16

We’ve been married for 15 years; I’m still kind of shocked by that. We fight and we argue, and the two are not remotely the same thing. When we first moved in together, we decided to handle most conflict resolution by making deals, and mostly that works. About the important things, we take our time, and go through both our points of view; it’s fairly rare that what’s important to me is in direct conflict with what’s important to her.

What sorts of things do you fight about?

All sorts of crap. We’re both fairly high strung people, we can, and do, overreact to things. Words grate on both of us (for me the phrase “I’m trying to be”, for her anything with the word why in it). It’s all emotions, one of us getting hot over something trivial, and a basic apology isn’t enough to cool us down.

What are your strategies?

Fighting–I always try to maintain a facade of calm, if I lose that, I tend to lose the fight.

Do you need yelling/sniping fights every once in a while to clear the air?

Yes. Absolutely. We’re a bit high strung, and we can start carrying crap around if we don’t clear the air every so often. Hell, at this point I think we get in a series of fights before we have to deal with something big just so that we’ve got a bit of a cool space to work in.

17

We don’t live together (technically), share finances, or have children or pets together, so there’s not much to fight over!

I think we’re unusually compatible, and when it comes to him, I’m laid back to the point of not even noticing his little flaws and annoying habits, much less picking on him about them (with other people I’m extremely intolerant, and find it hard to contain my snark). He’s also incredibly easy-going about a lot of things. Of course we do have some disagreements over minor issues - as we’re both people with strong opinions on the way to do most everything. We get annoyed and a little bit snappish sometimes. But it just never goes to the point of real anger, yelling, and saying mean things. We have had plenty several serious discussions about emotions, life goals, personal differences, etc that were very intense, but didn’t involve anger, and I wouldn’t call them ‘fights’ or even ‘arguments’.

18

(The Little One is 16 months – we’ve got at least a year before my biological clock starts overwhelming the “do I really want to do this again?” part of my brain… but I am getting older.) I know what you’re saying here – if we have another kid I’ll probably work part-time and slow my career down a lot for that five years or so. That being said, I do know several career-driven couples with more than one child, but it did require substantial, trusted help with child care (grandparents or nanny, usually, supplemented by day care) in all cases. All the kids seem to be turning out really well… I do think there’s a benefit to kids seeing that it’s not just dad with the successful career.

olives, I remember your thread about having a kid and how stressful and upsetting a time it was for you. I really like that description of it being emotional but at the same time knowing that you were going to make it, whatever happened.

Heh. Yeah. We went through this too in the early days of our relationship… I’m so glad that’s over.

Well, that’s how we do it now that mr. hunter cleans the toilets :slight_smile: Part of the issue is that my mom haaaaaates it (and has, I suppose, brainwashed me to her point of view) – but my sister and I made it a 3-to-1 female-male ratio in our family, so there was a bit more of imposing our will on dad. (Who, when we moved to the new house, got his own bathroom, so now he can adjust the toilet seat whenever he wants or doesn’t want.)

It is also fascinating to me that a lot of the people who do generally fight are saying that they fight rabidly about the small things and try to be calmer when disagreeing on the big things. That sounds like a Very Good Thing.

19

What do we fight about? Nothing. We’ve been married 6 years and together about 11. I can’t think of anything we’ve literally fought about.

Our style is discussion leading to some kind resolution of the matter. Sometimes we negotiate an agreeable solution. Sometimes one of us cares more deeply than the other, so that one prevails. Sometimes both of us draw a line and simply agree to avoid the subject in the future.

We’ve never yelled or argued forcefully. I’m not much of a yeller, and he had enough of that kind of thing in his first marriage.

The two most frequent things we discuss are dealing with teenagers and planning for the future. More of the latter lately, as the kids are mostly grown now.