Is anyone else skeptical when older people who have been married for a long time say that they have never fought with each other? This seems preposterous to me (although I confess that Brent does refer to me as the “Queen of Incredulity” because I am easily surprised and, as the nickname suggests, incredulous). I just can’t imagine how a relationship like this might work. What would it look like? How could neither spouse ever get mad at the other? To me, it seems more likely that one spouse kowtows to the other to keep the peace. I’m not really about that, truth be told. (Guess I won’t be called one of the children of God.) I’d rather duke it out, shed some tears, and maybe throw down a “dammit” or two for good measure.
For the first few years of our marriage, we tried to follow the old adage to “never let the sun go down on our wrath.” Sometimes an issue would arise and the first chance we’d have to talk about it would be at bedtime. So we’d start talking and sometimes it would get fairly heated. Inevitably, Brent would fall asleep. Oh, man, this made me so mad. I was incredulous that he could just fall asleep while we were fighting talking. So I would do a big “huffy breath” (this might only be funny if you’ve read Junie B. Jones books with your kids), grab the blanket-preferably the one that Brent was snoozing under-and storm off to the couch. Sometimes I would turn on the TV, sometimes I would read, but more often I would toss, turn, and fume. Meanwhile, Brent slept like a baby (although he might have been a bit cold since I had absconded with his blanket.) He usually (but not always) stumbled out an hour or three hours later, hair all amuss and sleep lines carved into his face, and asked me to come back to bed. I usually did, although not before I did another huffy breath or two. And then we’d both go to sleep.
Believers in the “don’t let the sun go down on your wrath” principle might assume that when we woke up, we would discover that the problem hadn’t gone away overnight and that we were still mad. But after trying it a few times, we learned that after a few hours of sleep, neither of us was mad anymore. The problem may have still been there, but it just didn’t look as bad in the light of day. It didn’t seem worth losing sleep over. Turns out, we like to let the sun go down on our wrath.
So we ditched that piece of advice. It wasn’t working for us. After about 12:30 a.m., Brent hits the wall. It’s just no use trying to talk to the man-no matter how annoyed I am that he left his sweaty gym socks on the living room floor again. And clearly, I’m hardly the model of maturity with my huffy breath, blanket-stealing, incredulous self. So our new (unstated) rule is that if we sleep on it for a few nights and we still need to talk about it, we do-but it’s gotta be before midnight.
What about you? Are you one of those couples who never argue? Do you persist despite the hour? Or do you let the moon melt your wrath like we do?
Are there other pieces of unsolicited marital advice you’ve gotten over the years that just don’t work for you?
Hahaha. Yeah, I’ve never quite believed the whole “we’ve never had an argument” thing. Maybe those couples define argument in such a limited way that it works for them to say that, but I just cannot imagine it.
My husband and I have tried the whole “talking about things before bed” approach like you, with pretty much the same results, except it’s not always much husband falling asleep. It’s usually the person who “didn’t have an issue” to begin with. If the fight started because I was bothered about something, I’ll likely be the one staying awake with hurt feelings. If it’s my husband, it’ll probably be him. I think we’ve gotten better at realizing that a lot of our problems (as you suggested) are magnified when we’re tired (or hungry) and that simply cooling down at times is all it takes to make things better.
With that being said, we had a big ol’ fight on Sunday as we headed to Church – so much so that we spent Sacrament meeting in the foyer, and didn’t partake anyway, since anything Christ-like wasn’t on our minds anyway. And then we had another big one on Monday, where I eventually just drove off for a couple of hours dumping the kids, dinner, and household on my husband to go enjoy life by myself for a little bit. It was the perfect reaction since it basically solved the issue that had been a problem on Sunday and Monday (I was basically upset at my husband for not pitching in sufficiently with all the things that needed to be done with kids and household). When I left him on Monday for a few hours, I came home and he was all apologetic, and I was calm and reasonable and forgiving and all was well. It helped though that my husband realized how hard it is to cook dinner when a toddler wants to “help” and a baby is screaming, and there are laundry piles that need to be taken care off, and you’re dead tired because you ran 16 miles that day and haven’t gotten much sleep etc. He was frustrated with me at first when I wasn’t more patient with him on Monday, because he had run 16 miles that day (we’re training for a marathon), but I had done that on Saturday and then was stuck with the kids all day immediately upon return from my run because my husband had something else going on all afternoon. When he came home in the evening, I had managed nonetheless to clean the whole house, have a dinner for the family ready, the kids ready for bed, and also had taken them swimming. Needless to say my husband’s request for patience on Monday wasn’t well received. But he got it, once I simply left him to his own devices.
Anyway, my husband is really wonderful, and kind and patient, and is very involved in the household, with the kids etc. He’s a great spouse. But sometimes we lose perspective (either one of us). Maybe there would have been a more mature way of resolving the issue my husband and I were facing, but I really think my annoyed take-off for a few hours was just a perfect aid. It in a very practical way made it crystal clear to my husband what was going on.
I have no clue how couples who never had clear disagreements managed their marriages. I can only imagine that they either had no opinions (ie. one spouse never cared about certain things where the other cared, and so agreement was extremely easy) or there was a lot of repression going on. For all I know, it’s all a bunch of BS in my book.
I think there are a few couples, perhaps, who “never raise their voices to each other or have fights” and are actually happy. Much more often, if couples who never clash have one super-submissive part who is not really being an individual but constantly sacrificing self for the other – and this will blow up someday. Others just aren’t honest. I think heated discussion is an integral part of a healthy, loving relationship. And I think that the advice to not sleep until you have resolved conflict is one of the worst ideas I ever heard. We also got this advice from a well-meaning older person (our sealer in the LDS temple) and tried to follow it, but I find that if you do table some issues until morning that several things happen – first, you realize that whatever was irking you the night before was not really even that important; second, you are able to better see where you, yourself, are wrong; and third (and perhaps most importantly), sleep restores sanity and reason – almost always. Trying to battle out important issues when you are dead tired is so counter-productive and usually ends up in more entrenchment, in my experience!
This – “Much more often, if couples who never clash have one super-submissive part who is not really being an individual but constantly sacrificing self for the other — and this will blow up someday.”
Should read – “Much more often, couples who never clash have one super-submissive partner who is not really being an individual but constantly sacrificing self for the other — and this will blow up someday.