Friday Night’s Alright for Fighting

”Men are total assholes!” I declared the other day, arriving characteristically early, in my usual epic grandeur, at work.

My man and I aren’t exactly what one would describe as a docile couple. When all hell breaks loose, it really does break loose, and while it, fortunately, breaks loose a little less these days than, say, a year ago, the times it does, my entire building becomes aware of the fighting.

When we moved to our current home, the first thing we noticed when carrying the endless book boxes to the apartment was the sounds of a couple arguing in the next door apartment. Instead of becoming irritated over hearing the sounds of distress, I was totally relieved. Finally a building where we would not be the only ones going at it loudly!

 “I’ve been cleaning house this whole week, something every day so that after today I could just concentrate on my writing on my days off”, I began while getting a cup from the counter and pouring myself some coffee from the already brewed batch, and entered the huddle by the end of the counter, where we usually huddled during gossip hour. “Of course”, Roberts said, in total acquiescence and understanding – she was the one person in the whole world who totally understood about needing to have clean and hygienic surroundings. Adams and Weaver just nodded, not really with the OCD program at all, but letting me continue my story nonetheless.

“You know, laundry yesterday and the day before that, vacuuming the entire house yesterday, dusting today, because you know, the garbage every morning, energy, paper, biodegradable, cardboard packages, what have you, and this morning, in he comes with a giant bag of dirty laundry, spreading sand everywhere with his goddamn boots I might add, everything moist and disgusting, telling me he just found the bag from the back of his car! He had no idea when that pile of clothes had moved themselves inside the bag, sweaty and used and gross, so I’m thinking they must have sat inside since summer, from one of his trips to the cabin” I went on, in my most exasperated voice.

“’What am I, your fucking maid!?’ I yelled, ‘You have some nerve to bring that out of the car now! Do you know how long it’s been since you grabbed a vacuum cleaner in hand? Two months! Two months, man, and I vacuum every week. Also, while we’re at it, you haven’t done any laundry for just as long! I’ve got a job, too, you know, and I’m also trying to write, so do not give me any of your I’m so busy –bullshit! Do you think this is my job, to clean house for you? That I don’t have anything better to do?’ Men! Men just spread their crap all over, and women clean up after them! Nothing has changed since the dawn of time!”

“Hear, hear!”, my ladies all said in unison, and we clinked our coffee cups loudly.

“I mean, why does it not bother them?” I continued. “I don’t get it, either”, Weaver said, pouring double cream into a professional gourmet whip, “I sometimes try to just leave everything be, let the dirt start piling up, and then wait and see how long it takes for my husband to start cleaning up after himself, but the day never comes, and in the end I always have to do everything by myself anyway.”

“It’s like a couple of days ago in my house”, Adams replied, “I had just done two rounds of laundry, and the hamper was for once empty, and I was so happy when I went to bed. Then I woke up the next morning, and it was full again, to the rim. Four boys’ clothes, and that’s it. We have to have the machine running every day.”

Secretly I counted my blessings over Adams’ recount, and felt a sting of sympathy for her. At least I didn’t have four boys in the house. Just the one man was plenty of hassle. Adams had to take a call, and Weaver disappeared to her duties, so Roberts and I were left all to our obsessive-compulsive lonesome to continue our yapping.

“It isn’t like they are not trying”, she said, “my husband does his best, cleaning the kitchen after making dinner, but then I, you know, sneak back to do a bit of fine-tuning when he isn’t looking.” “I do know”, I replied. “Boy, do I ever. My man loves baking and making these elaborate dinners, which is wonderful, but then I go to the kitchen in the morning and find onion peels and even some of the onion in the utensils drawer. True story. Or I open the fridge and my hand is all sticky from the batter he hasn’t bothered to wipe from the handle. Or I step right into a pool of drippings from his moka pot. I mean hello?”

“Well, isn’t it kind of nice, though, of him to be making those dinners?” Hanks asked, having unsuspectingly walked in on us in the kitchen, to bring his lunch to the fridge. “Well, of course, it is, I mean shut up! You wanna be on my list, too?” I exclaimed. Hanks exited, smiling. Nothing ever got to him. Which is why we are friends, I think.

Of course, nine times out of ten the fight isn’t at all about what it would appear on the surface, just like it wasn’t about the laundry basket with us that time. Stuff comes up, the week is swallowed into nothingness because everybody is busy doing their respective things, and indeed things begin to fester. By the time the anger ball inside is big enough to pop it usually doesn’t take much provocation to explode into bits. Failure to take out the thrash. Accidentally bleaching a bunch of bath towels. Breaking your favorite coffee cup.

When the relationship is being measured in years instead of months, all you men can rest assured: the awkward and uncomfortable questions regarding the metaphysical aspects of it, such as Where is this going? and How do you feel about us? usually wither and die. Women want to know these things at the beginning of a relationship. It's just like in When Harry Met Sally, when Harry explains that he never takes someone to the airport at the beginning of a relationship because he never wants to have to answer a question about why he no longer takes her to the airport anymore, or maybe not exactly like this, but there is a relation to these questions. The big questions give eventually way to little things like Why the hell am I the only one here basting the ham and you are watching TV? The abstract is replaced by the concrete.

The real killer comes, when you sort of have these complaints about the relationship, or about him, and trying to pick the right time – which, by the way, is always the wrong time, no matter how hard one tries to time these things – you unconsciously begin already having the fight in your head, doing both parts, admit it, we all do it, and because you already know your beau enough to guess how he might respond, you become infuriated in advance by the gloomy prospect of the argument. When the actual time of fighting ensues, and he actually responds exactly how you had anticipated, well, those are the moments when one just feels like giving up.

But. Like with everything else, micromanaging the relationship usually ends in grim results. The other person gets so sick of being told what to do and what not, how to respond so that he is not accidentally declaring all women a pest of this earth, that he becomes withdrawn and angry and mean, even.

Letting him sometimes pick his own answers has proved extremely successful for us. Sometimes, without any hinting even, he brings me flowers, the big maybe of the modern relationship. I can’t even count the times I have heard women my age and ten years younger declare flowers obsolete as a romantic gesture; a modern woman has no use for the unfortunately short-lived flowers. But I love them, and watch any woman who gets a surprise bouquet from her lover. We may say we don’t care, but we do. Those little things we are so busy declaring foolish and frivolous are exactly the things we find the most attractive when our significant other makes those gestures.

It’s the silliness that sustains a couple. Like anyone who has ever been in a long term relationship well knows, sometimes the times are such that silliness is nowhere to be found, and trying to be silly is anything but natural or fun. But I think that is the measure of the relationship: being silly together, being able to be silly with a lover, finding again the silliness after tough times, and yes, fighting when fighting is due: letting it all out every once in a while.

I was talking with a friend the other day, who complained about how she and her husband had so little time to be alone together, and when they finally had a weekend just for themselves, without the kids, they ended up fighting the whole time. “But isn’t it great, in a way, to be at least able to fight, without having to worry the kids might hear you?” I asked. “I mean, if you did fight, then maybe a little fighting was overdue, and while no one wants to admit it, that, too, is time well spent, even if it isn’t the stuff from the movies; making a lovely meal and having cinematic sex afterwards. The fighting is important, too, I think.”

I went from a relationship where we were too polite to fight, and that fact was what actually blew us up, to a welterweight fighting relationship, where there was some good fighting involved, but perhaps not always about what was really bugging us but about the surface stuff, until the underneath stuff became too heavy to handle, to my current relationship, where any old thing can be an instrument of chaos and destruction. We have fought about sex, money and time management, the big three of I believe all relationships, but also biking, bike locks, frozen pizza – good or bad, Abel Ferrara, jealousy, doing laundry, how to properly clean the bathroom, packing groceries, where to put the grocery bags in the car, The Exorcist, Jaws, whether to make porridge out of milk or water, astronomy, when to throw out expired food, not checking the fridge before going shopping and buying all the same stuff that was already in there, Gilmore Girls, walking speed, how I once accidentally left his starter dough, his absolute pride, in an airless space too long so it grew mold, Donald Trump – and we are both on the same side on this one, the rules of fighting, whether it is okay to go to bed angry – me, no, him, yes, to cool off for the night, bathroom turns. Just off the top of my head.

In Gilmore Girls, there is a scene early on in the show, where the beaux of the moment, Dean and Max, are waiting for Rory and Lorelai at a park bench after dinner, and Dean tells Max some of the secrets he has learnt of how to best handle a Gilmore Girl. One of the things he mentions is what Max later refers to as the Late Night Cranky –rule, and it means that the girls are at their most irritable at night, before turning in, and that time isn’t the best moment to bring up serious issues, or start a fight, because trouble is stir-upable then more than other times.

 In my house, the Late Night Cranky –rule goes both ways. If only we both remembered to invoke it more. But we have come a long way since our first awkward starter kit fights as a new couple; we have the art of fighting down more, now, having finally learnt a little about how the other person handles things, and having learnt a little to hold some of the not so important stuff in, a thing that is extremely hard for me, but has proved a handy tool in not arguing about everything all the time. Perhaps my man is on to something with his going to bed angry –stance. If the thing is big enough to still bother me in the morning, I bring it up, but if I have forgotten all about it, it was just one of those things, a case of the Late Night Cranky.

The dirty laundry found from the trunk served as a handy excuse for me to start placing blame over more serious matters as well; the laundry was just a convenient starting point to begin unraveling the symbolic yarn ball of our relationship. We both had to go to work, though, so my misguided laundry anger was partly left unburdened, and thus I went to work still upset about the unresolved issue.

Did I know that it was I who was being the asshole here? Maybe. But I still relished in the support from the ladies at work, and the knowledge that the same exact record was playing at everybody’s house, not just ours. Still, I apologized good and proper that night, telling my man to save the screws he found from the kitchen floor because I believed they might belong to my head.

The next morning there was a rose on the kitchen table along with the screws. How in the world he had produced the flower out of nowhere, I never found out. It shall remain, just like the age old question of why we fight, one of those magical, unanswered things about relationships.

The title is taken straight out of episode thirteen in season six, with gratitude to Elton John from all of us.