At some point in every relationship, you have to learn how to fight. The stereotype is that women talk about feelings and men talk about issues, but I don’t think that’s true. In a guy-girl pairing, that just means she’ll talk about the feelings she has about the issues, and he’ll talk about the issues he has resulting from his feelings, so ta-da, now everybody’s on a level playing field.
In our house, I’m the one who likes to discuss how I feel about things, because I think feelings are fascinating, and also because they’re handy when you’re totally in the wrong. If you can’t argue based on fact, you can always argue based on feeling. Because a feeling is never wrong. And I prefer never being wrong.
But discussing the minutiae of your relationship can be a bit like describing individual blades of grass — while each is a marvel of creation, no doubt worthy of close examination, you could exhaust yourself with the task for months without covering much ground. After you’ve settled into a life with someone, you tend to look at the whole yard and determine whether it’s time to do some serious work, or if you can wait ‘til the weekend. Or maybe the weekend after that.
