Why You Should Have Some Dumb Fights
End the perfectionism in relationships
The fourth day still, all in a row. too sick too sick!
This is an essay for the “Red” section in my book about embracing experience.
People think that they will find perfect wife, perfect job, perfect relationship. Life will be perfect. But perfection is stagnant. Enneagram 1 is the “perfectionist” one and that integrates to 7, the letting loose one.
The truth is relationships are ever-changing because you are ever-changing and your partner is ever-changing, even when you think they are not. We’ve all seen those relationships that seem like the perfect couple for 3, 7, 14, 30 years and then one day, poof, one of the people in the relationships decides they want something different after all, or something in the complacency agreement rocks.
This is why some amount of fighting is better than no fighting, even though too much fighting is bad.
And so what to do.
I say, embrace the absurdist art traditions in your life a little bit. Perfect wife, perfect life, even perfect fighting styles.
Why not perfect your performance art also, if you are so devoted to being so perfect.
If you’re already in a perfect play of your own making, why not also make the play funny. Have some originality.
Next time you have a fight, try to think about the fight as stupid in some way. Imagine your wife is completely 100% right and you are not right at all. Imagine it is “my sensible wife is 100% right day” or the complete opposite, “my completely insane wife has taken me to party at the kukuhaus diskotek and is 100% wrong today, but she will hold me hostage at das klub today, I am at her complete mercy and will.” Let her torment you a little bit. Is it actually going to hurt that much?
(Imagine the proctologist bills — the costs for perfection.)
Make more jokes in the middle of the fight. Take an unusually long pause where you normally would not. Offer to make her a cup of tea. Ask her if flowers will make her happy, or take her to bed. What? You’re just brainstorming.
You can reverse the genders, I am doing it this way because it is more often men who are rigid in “how the fight is supposed to go” versus getting any outcome from the fight.
And that’s the funny part of it, isn’t it? You’re supposed to have the fight to “resolve” something but actually the thing you are resolving becomes less important than “doing the fight right.”
Have some right fights, if you want them so much. You deserve them. Have fun with them. Have some wrong fights too.
Pick some fights for no reason. Pick a fight about something you actually have minimal stake in and your partner will have zero stake in also.
If you are feeling pissy, say what’s really troubling you in a way that is most true.
“Why are you seeming pissy?”
“You didn’t make me a muffin the size of my head?”
“Wtf.”
“Yeah. Woman. Kitchen. Muffin. Head. Go.”
Perhaps your partner will be extremely mad at you. Perhaps she will laugh. But at least now you have some content to be working with. It is important to have variety in how you have fights because it can be hard for people to imagine how bad fights can really get, and how their existing fighting strategy contributes to that pit of hell that is possible.
Sometimes the fights get so bad and so illegible you really cannot talk to each other at all, and are actually on the brink of something really really terrible that you cannot interact with. I will not describe these terrible things here. If you don’t know about them, they will be hard to imagine, and you will learn about them when you talk to more people. If you know about them, I don’t need to describe them.
Remember also that children add their own randomness to things already. If you have them, you can embrace it. If you want them you can remember that whatever perfection you set up will be disturbed. If you don’t want them and don’t have them, you can remember that millennia of relationships evolved to include children instigating change.