Nathaniel

Shockey

Read Nathaniel's bio and previous columns here

October 1, 2007

Fight Night at the Marriage

I’ve been thinking a lot about why couples fight. Married couples, that is.

Apparently, the topics about which a husband and wife most frequently argue are money and sex. They’re the Big Two. After all, what could be more fundamental than a man telling his wife, “You spend too much money,” or “We ought to be having a lot more sex”? Or at least I guess these are the fundamentals, as far as everyone else says.

But I am not a man to accept fleeting rumors – mere murmurings among the general public – most of whom would be as likely to tell the truth about their own sexual or financial shortcomings as they would about their tendency to fervently pick their nose or trim their toenails with their teeth when no one else is around.

So I took an inductive approach by asking myself, “What do Katey and I fight about the most?” I would have asked her, too, but she was elsewhere and I was busy gnawing on my toenails.

The more I think about the nature and frequency of our fights, it crosses my mind that perhaps the only real consistency about our fights is the frequency itself. I don’t think we fight because of all our unresolved issues, differences of opinion, stubbornness or even our dueling male and female natures. Why do we fight? Just because. It’s what we do. It sustains us, or something.

For instance, just recently, one of Katey’s ex-boyfriends was in town and I inexplicably contained my desire to beat him in one-on-one basketball or Scrabble, or to prove I am funnier than he is – or maybe to just beat him up. I swallowed these completely natural urges and was able, for the most part, to appreciate the fact that he was actually a pretty nice guy, even if he used to date the woman who would eventually become mine.

So in this ridiculously awkward situation, we do wonderfully. But stick us in Blockbuster with only one movie to exchange and chances are we’ll get in a fight that will probably carry over to the following morning. I guess we had already met our monthly fight quota by the time the ex-who-I-should-naturally-loathe arrived in town.

We fight about what curtains to buy, or if we should just buy shades. And if we do, we fight about if we should get the bamboo kind or not, and if we get the bamboo kind, if we should get the espresso roman kind, or the spice roman kind, and if we should get one big shade that covers the whole 96 inches, or split it up into two or even three. Trust me, this is a recipe for disaster, or already was, I should say. And why? I honestly don’t care much at all about what flipping kind of curtains we have. But the truth is that I am, at the very least, entitled to a good, old-fashioned fight about it.

We have certainly encountered our fair share of fights concerning the Big Two, but we find new and interesting ways to argue about them. Heaven forbid our fights get boring!

We fight about anything and everything. We cover everything from the basics to the peripheral, from how much time I spend obsessing about the Phillies to why she doesn’t enjoy card games or board games the way I do. I tell her she does like them and that she’s just being stubborn, which apparently makes no sense, but this doesn’t mean we can’t have a good, nonsensical fight about it.

If there is anything to be learned from our hard-fought marriage, it might be the simple fact that people tend to refuse to give up an inch of ground on anything, because they don’t like others to make any decisions that might affect them, no matter how insignificantly or indirectly. This is a stupid habit. But we’ve survived.

So I guess our fighting is OK, which is good because we’re starting a whole new month with a whole new quota of its own.

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column # NS076. Request permission to publish here.