Like any I'm-right-you-are-wrong couple, K (My husband. That's what everyone does these days, isn't it? Shrinking words to letters. What will the letters become in a few years? blank spaces?)and I have had one-minute-long cute fights to week-long ugly rows. These joy-stealing thieves creep in right when you feel bizarrely grateful. Like a ominous sign of lurking danger. You'd think 'God, I love this guy.' And two minutes later, you wouldn't be surprised to see yourself blotchy-faced from crying or find you channeling the anger towards the unsuspecting kid.
What struck me as a strange thing is how we patch things up without even making a conscious effort. You don't apologize because you know you are the one who does that every single time. And surprise! He thinks so too. In our family, after a series of heated arguments, I'd either walk away crying or seethe with so much anger that I'd walk away crying. Tears soothe me. With every drop out, I'd feel a drop lighter inside. And I guess, we are all on same page here.
Inspired by relationship writers, I've tried to "fight right." I've tried to replay the day I met him or the day when I thought, after being gifted with a mushy card, 'arranged marriages aren't all that bad, after all.'Now that he is so much a part of my life, it is easy to take him for granted (yes yes, VICE VERSA). It's like a pricey blender we buy. We maintain it ultra carefully for a couple of weeks, wipe it the moment there is a speck of juice and unplug it delicately every time. Slowly, as the blender falls into our cooking routine, we don't really feel the need to appreciate it though we know it is indispensable part of our kitchen.
Spouse and blender have a lot of commonness. They are sharp-tongued yet indispensable. At our home, we don't have a 'we need to talk' time. Indian families consider it a serious setback when couples take time to assess their relationship. They work on trust and it, normally, works. When we fight bad, we avoid encountering each other for a couple of days. No matter how rude we are to each other on the day of the fight (or sometimes even on the day after that to slot in the unsaid things and complete the puzzle), we would not be rude to each other on subsequent days. Regret would run deep in each other's mind for disrupting the happy flow but we'd be too proud to show it. But before we know it, we'd talk about something as silly as Erin Burnett's annoying giggle on CNN.
They say fight spices up a marriage. I'm not sure about that. But fight certainly helps us know things that we don't know about our spouse. We learn what upsets them and we voice our regrets that otherwise would have been swallowed bitterly.
Does this how it work in other households too? What could other patch-up methods be?
Would love to hear them.
