Fight Nice
How you deal with conflict with your partner matters.
I ran into a former coworker recently who told me she and her boyfriend were getting married. They’d been together for a year-and-a-half and “We’ve never gotten in a fight!” she said proudly.
“Oh. Well I hope you do before the wedding,” I replied, only half-joking.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because you’ll argue at some point. You’ll come home from work exhausted and disagree about something and that disagreement will turn into a fight.”
My co-worker blinked at me, unconvinced, and maybe a tiny bit annoyed.
“You should know how the two of you fight.”
Of course getting along most of the time is preferable. But never arguing isn’t realistic for most couples; what’s more important is how you deal with conflict. Because if you don’t deal with conflict well it can tear you down, destroying all that is good. I’ve been divorced and have been remarried now for more than 12 years, so I’ve done conflict wrong plenty of times. I’ve also seen it destroy other couples.
One friend of mine met her dream guy only to watch it unravel five years later. When they fought it was a how-to manual of what not to do: screaming, bringing up past upsets as present ammo, name-calling…
