How Do You Fight Fair?
Fighting fair: when is it time to let go of an argument?
My husband and I fought for three hours one Thanksgiving over the difference between a possum and a opossum. He said there was none and I said there was and what was dead on his mom's driveway was an opossum. We would have gone all day if my brother-in-law hadn't settled it with Wikipedia. Answer: Possums are on the Eastern hemisphere and opossums are on the Western hemisphere. For the record, that means I won.
According to an essay on Parenthood.com my husband and I should have probably conceded before a third-party had to get involved. The article explains that couples need to evaluate what they are fighting about before they engage in an all out battle, which I imagine means you can fight over words in Scrabble but not in Boggle.
"I want my relationship to work more than I want to be right. This time around, the big picture is clear. I love my husband. I don't want to hurt him. We're compatible, and it feels awful when we don't get along. I want our marriage to thrive, and I want to grow - which means learning how to lose on occasion. At this precipice, I'm learning to take a deep breath and peer at things from my partner's perspective. I know he's as sure of being right as I am, which makes me curious about where he's coming from. I trust him and our relationship enough to accept that the truth probably lies somewhere in the unfamiliar middle."
"It also doesn't hurt to learn the words that can deescalate any argument."
I think those sound like the words of a quitter.
Clearly my husband and I need to decide when to argue and when to let it go, and when to just box it out in Mike Tyson's Punch Out for the Wii.
Discussion
It seems your husband and you are used to it anyway, so it's probably not a big issue that voices raise when you two argue, in general.
However I see two potential problems to it:
- In the case that one of you is already in a really bad mood for some reason outside of the couple, while the other one is not aware of it, getting into a strong argument with yelling might degenerate in an unexpected way,
- To make yelling a usual pattern in your fights sort of puts all fights at the same level. Then what would happen when the matter at hand is particularly upsetting, important and critical? Yelling won’t suffice to mark how angry you are, therefore you’ll need to resort to other means of voicing it and that’s when things might get really bad, like saying things that really hurt in an irreversible way, or getting physical like in slamming doors, breaking plates or whatever.
Personally, I have very little tolerance for people who yell. Be honest: all other things being equal, do you prefer working with a boss who typically yells and interacts aggressively or a boss who behaves and speaks calmly, albeit firmly? If you prefer the first one, I would be tempted to say you have a very pronounced masochistic/submissive tendency. It beats me that people would consider a behavior that they dislike at work as okay at home.
Moreover, yelling is not really an efficient way of transmitting a message: the receptor hears that you’re yelling more than they hear what you’re saying. The communicated content becomes the emotion instead of the message.
By the way, about your husband’s reaction, yelling IS the ultimate manipulation, actually.
