S and I had a really bad fight this evening, right before dinner. It was just a silly misunderstanding, when we got to the bottom of it, but the fight was pretty vicious. Lots of yelling, tears on my part, and exasperated sighs (that were so loud you could probably hear them upstairs). Then again, we don't really yell that loudly. We just raise our voices. But on the whole, this may have been the worst fight we've ever had. S just doesn't like to fight; he's not so fond of confrontation.
I don't know if it's good or bad that I'm turning him into a fighter. Good, at least in the sense that S is more able than ever before to voice what the problem is. At the beginning, he would just shut down, feeling like I was attacking him (which I kind of am, at that). He just doesn't like that (and I'm of course built for confrontation) and didn't know, at that point, what he was supposed to say or do. Over time, just out of sheer anger and frustration, he's learned to voice his side of the fight, and tell me why what happened bothered him, or what I did that bothered him. I'm happy about that. Because I can't modify a behavior if I don't know it's a problem. (And sometimes we fight because I can't modify a problem I know about.)
Usually, I cry because I end up feeling horribly bad that I've fought with S. He's such a genuinely nice man that it's really hard to know that I've been mean to him. And he's also very good about letting go of a fight, far better than I am. Sometimes I think that I feel far worse than he feels after a fight, though I know that can't be true. We both end up feeling wretched after fighting, because it seems that sometimes we tiptoe around each other afterward. We always end up a little better off, too, because we know just a little bit more about what ticks us off.
I think in general, we fight so little that fights that other people would consider minor, we consider major. I also sometimes feel relieved after a fight, because sometimes, the fight is the result of me or him holding something back that obviously needs to be said. And it's a relief, getting something like that off your chest. Maybe for S and I, a little fighting isn't necessarily the end of the world (even though I sometimes feel like it is).
And the fight? It was about when he came into the kitchen to help me with dinner. And it's THAT week. If you catch my drift.
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