Good Marriages Have Good Fights
On a recent vacation in Maine, a very pleasant woman approached my wife and me as we sat on a park bench. “Do you mind if I ask how long you’ve been married,” she said. “You look so adorable.” I suppose that after 58 years together we’ve reached that stage – and age – where someone might consider us “adorable.” We appreciated the compliment and were amused by the sentiment.
We do have a wonderful marriage. Yet we had to earn it. That meant learning how to fight with each other. Those lessons of course came with time and the willingness to work at it. So if our passerby had inquired further about our marriage, here are some things about fighting we could have shared.
Fights in marriage are inevitable. We’ve had lots of them (and would not have looked “adorable” in those moments). People bring into marriage different experiences, personalities, values, needs and hopes. Conflict is bound to happen and suppressing differences is not a prescription for happiness. Avoiding fights leads to blame. Blame builds resentment and leaves partners feeling misunderstood, unappreciated or ignored. At worst, avoidance creates a profound silence in which voices and hearts shutter themselves. Avoidance can lead to disillusionment and divorce or worse than divorce, the reality of years spent living a lie of “happily ever after.”
Fights we’ve found help you see what you must learn to live and love together. They reveal what matters most to the one you love and invite you to find how you could have missed the importance of that. If you’re willing to pay attention, fights reveal your weaknesses in relationships and what you can do about them. Fights give you the valuable opportunity to show that you know how to listen deeply to another person and that you can surrender what seemed so important so as to improve another’s life (and love for you). Fights show you a path to compromise, which is far better than winning (or losing).
We’ve all heard that fights run the risk of ruining a marriage, but that’s most likely if you don’t learn when and when not to fight. If a disagreement doesn’t matter very much, don’t fight over it. Just give in, especially when it matters more to her/him than it does to you.. My mother-in-law always asked the question about something that seemed so important you can’t let it go: “will this really matter in five years?” Usually, the answer is “no,” with the caveat that it often won’t even matter tomorrow.
We learned how to fight fairly. Don’t interrupt while your partner speaks. You only learn what matters to someone else when you’re listening. It’s very hard to learn while you’re talking. Listen not just to words but for feelings behind the words. Acknowledge what you’ve heard before making your own thoughts known (that’s a good way of building trust and making sure you really understood someone). Avoid blame and be willing to forgive. Marriages can survive partners who’ll never forget a hurt, but they’re not likely to survive partners who can’t forgive one. Look for the best solution – not for you but for the relationship. In other words, put the marriage above your desire to prevail.
We’ve also found that some arguments have no clear solution. The goal of a good marriage is not to resolve all differences. Acknowledging that not everything can be fixed or even needs to be fixed is OK. What you’re fighting about in the moment is seldom the real deal-breaker that in the heat of that moment you think it is. Appreciate also what economists call “satisificing” – finding not the perfect solution but one that is satisfying enough.
Finally, know how to interrupt an argument that’s escalating. The longer the argument the more emotions overtake reason. That’s a path to a “marriage war” no one wins. Marriage fights often need “time-outs.” You can just agree that “let’s take a break and continue this later.” That gives each of you the chance to cool down, calm down and reflect. Another technique is just to stop shouting and start hugging. That doesn’t mean that you’ve solved the argument but it does convey that being loving is more important than being livid. Sometimes, we just laugh or smile, a signal we know the argument has probably reached the “this is really silly” stage. Marriage without a sense of humor loses one of the best ways to surmount roadblocks. As comedian and pianist Victor Borge once said, “laughter is the shortest difference between two people.”
I enjoy romantic movies. They end with the predictable and emotionally satisfying kiss and an engagement or wedding. Yet they seldom show what happens next, and what happens next inevitably includes arguments. They’re a very important part of love stories too. The bloom of beginning love can start a marriage, but it takes more to sustain one. It takes a willingness to argue, the skills to argue well and the realization that doing both cements the bond that allows someone approaching you at a park bench years later to say you look adorable together – and be correct even if below that surface it took some striving to get there.
Photo Credit: susan-lu4esm -pixabay.com
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