Arguing with Someone You Love
Fears ascertained, confirmed, then swept away and assuaged; ebbs and flows like the sea. He knows your weak point, your vanity. You know his; his pride. The seven deadly ones are getting their use tonight. Words – so many of them – enough spoken or sobbed or screamed or hoarsely whispered to fill a book. The maneuvering; the odd, clumsy dancing around each other; you are two weary Generals familiar with each others’ tactics. He evades; ignores; refuses to respond; you wheedle, repeat yourself, start shouting, then wind up saying so much you talk yourself in circles. You become so emotional you exhaust yourself; the only emotion he expresses is annoyance. You collapse in your underwear on the bedroom carpet, barefoot, cross-legged, swollen-faced. He stares coldly from a distance, arms folded, unimpressed by histrionics, no matter how passionately felt. Stalemate. Both too stubborn to back down; it’s too late now, anyway. Something he said niggles at you; you reiterate it. Reiterate is your go-to word during arguments, it’s all you do. You’re practically a walking Thesaurus, you can say the same thing in so many different ways. Childish behavior from both now; a refusal to do one or more of the above:
- Get into the same bed
- Turn off the lamp
- Stop “accidentally” pulling the covers off
Eventually both are nearly ready to succumb to exhaustion, every bone aching; neither of you are even sure what you were arguing about anymore. A jumble of angry accusations and a silent refusal to apologize comprises the last vague thought as consciousness slips away. The morning is awkward; you both get dressed quickly and quietly. You watch him slide into his jeans and feel a pang of regret curl in your chest. Or if you’re feeling especially stubborn, you might still feel like hating each other. You’ll turn your face away and try to imagine your lives taking separate directions, in other places with different people. The new scenery might even seem briefly exciting to you, your own familiarity long taken for granted. But always you find some twinge in the back of your thoughts, wondering how deeply and gravely both your lives would change with each others’ absences. It would be an absence weighted heavily enough to feel like a death; life so similarly, irrevocably changed. The vast expanse of a newly empty bed; the void of conversation in the living room; the crumpled look on your parents’ faces; the gut-wrenching hatred imagining new lovers, that hot, sickening swoop of jealousy in your stomach. Being paralyzed with the inability to go anywhere; to listen to or watch anything. There would be no reprieve; no part of your life which didn’t make you feel like floundering and drowning.
And suddenly a few wayward imaginings of an angry mind will frighten you. The argument will suddenly feel petty, the words spoken will shrink in relation to your current thoughts. You end up mumbling delayed apologies, careening clumsily and wearily into a familiar embrace with hands like heat-seeking missiles; eventually sailing back into the warm safety of the tangled sheets to feel like new again.
When the next morning arrives, you may awake disheveled and tender, no longer dreadfully aware of your codependency but cheerfully surrendered to it. You might listen to rain bounce off the windowpanes and hit the eaves of the house. You might think to yourself about the future; how when the alarm wails you out of bed every grey morning, you will look at him just as he is now, his hair sticking up on his head like some amusingly misbegotten halo, and feel ever so slightly heartsick for having to leave him. So many trifling slights of yours or his inevitably can become deep and villainous wrongs in the cradle of your overactive minds. Next time, though, you’ll try to remember how inconsequential a place it likely holds in your reality; the padded, insular world you both occupy with half-sighs and exchanged glances. The moments of hissing provocation and bloody-mindedness seem to settle into a melancholy gratefulness for your existence, your togetherness; and as your eyes trace the slope of a shoulder and a tuft of hair through the expanse of blankets, the warmth that spreads through you like a sickness is, quite simply, enough.
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