The Upside of Fighting — Part One
Fighting with your partner is the pits! Being at odds can bring up feelings of extreme discomfort, fear, and pain. But it’s also part of the partnership jam. Sometimes we just don’t see eye to eye with our partners and sometimes we hurt each other’s feelings. We forget to do something we said we’d do. We take each other for granted. We say hurtful things. We aren’t sensitive to our partners’ needs. We forget to say thank you and please. We don’t clean up after ourselves. We don’t clean up after anyone. We try and we try and we try to be kind and loving to each other, and sometimes we just fall short of anything resembling loving and kind. This is humanness. This is partnership. And everything is perfectly imperfect in all this mess.
Here’s why. Because falling short, fucking up, making mistakes and owning up to them, and forgiving and being forgiven are the stuff that makes partnerships strong. It’s the messy mess that gives us a sense of trust, security, and intimacy. And we can’t always get all that strength without the mess.
My new respect and love for the mess of relationships was inspired by a presentation at a professional conference I went to recently. The presentation was on attachment, and the presenter began by showing a video of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing in perfect unison. They were completely attuned to each other’s movements. She moved and he moved in perfect alignment, and the presenter asked something along the lines of “Does all this total mirroring mean they are securely attached to each other?” Being securely attached to each other means, in short, that both people know, trust, and understand each other and have an overall sense of safety in the relationship. The relationship is home. Psychologist John Bowlby called this a “secure base” from which both people can explore themselves and explore the world around them, while knowing that they are fully supported by the relationship.
Sounds pretty great, huh? And it is. But getting there and being there can involve a lot of mess.
Back to the conference. After the Fred and Ginger video, the presenter shifted to a video of a mother and her baby playing. The baby was about 9 months old, and the mother was tickling the baby. She was bringing her laughing face into the baby’s belly, and the baby met her laughter with her own as soon as her momma shook her head in the baby’s belly. After the belly laughter, the mom pulled her head back and looked at the baby, and they both smiled at each other. It was such a sweet exchange! This exchange continued back and forth until the baby, feeling very excited, grabbed her mother’s hair and held on. The baby’s face was full of joy as she laughed and held her mother’s hair. The mother began to try to get herself free and encouraged her baby to let go, but to no avail. The baby kept holding and laughing and holding and laughing in total bliss and completely ignorant of the pain she was causing her mother. Finally the mother got free and pulled back with frustration and anger. She was physically hurt by all the hair pulling, and anger was her automatic response to that pain. The baby got scared of her mom’s angry face and put up her hands in fear. The mother recovered her composure and made a bid to pick up their play, but the baby did not play back and kept a stone face. The mother tried again to get her baby to play, but again the baby didn’t follow. Again, the mother tried making her face all smiley and really beckoned her baby to play, signaling with her warm face and soft gestures that all was good and safe. With that, the baby smiled back and the back and the forth of their play resumed. All was good in their world again.
I was touched by this rather everyday parenting moment and saw it as better evidence than the perfectly synced Ginger and Fred dance of secure attachment. I thought about my own marriage and all the anger and hurt — the hair-pulled moments — and all the work we have both done to find our way back to each other. Like the mother making bid after bid to make amends, we have continued to reach out over the course of our 12 years together. All the moments of rupture and repair in our marriage add up to a relationship that feels like home. We both have limits, our heads hurt if our hair is pulled, and sometimes we frighten each other with our reactions. That’s the rupture. But then the repair comes through all the many ways we try to soothe each other and make bids to reengage after fights or betrayals small and not so small. That dance of rupture and repair is the messy mess that makes us securely attached to each other, and without it, our marriage wouldn’t have the fortification it has.
This is the upside of fighting. We get to be human and make mistakes and have misunderstandings. And that’s not an end to anything. It’s a beginning, a deepening of partnership. The rupture is the invitation to dance our way back to each other. And we must find our way back to each other. We must commit to being that mother in the video, trying and failing and trying and failing to find our way back into play with our partners. And we must keep an open heart, like the baby, and share our dislike and pain so that we can find a way to forgive, to begin playing together again. We must be willing to be vulnerable in our realness when we mess up, as well as vulnerable in our willingness to try — and risk failing — to repair our hurts to each other. And finally, true forgiveness requires us to be incredibly vulnerable, as well. This imperfectly perfect practice — which includes both rupture and repair — is what can make our partnerships sacred places of refuge in an ever-shape-shifting world.
I’ll continue this theme and provide specific tools for better repair in your partnership in Part 2.
