Fight!

Several years ago my brother and I were visiting the apartment that my Grandmother shared with her older sister. As the two women made us dinner they got into a heated argument about which one of them had worn a particular pink dress to a party at a neighbor's house. My Grandmother insisted that she had worn it but her sister just as vehemently felt that the dress had been hers.

After listening to this debate for ten minutes or so, my brother and I realized that the disagreement centered around a party that had, in fact, occurred in 1927.

I was reminded of this on Monday when my Dad, as he sometimes does, called to say, 

"You know, I thought of something you should write about on your blog."

He went on to tell me that (after almost 45 years of marriage) he had come to the following revelation:

"You know, when your Mom says that she thinks we had the salmon the last time we were at some restaurant and I think we had the trout, it's better to just agree rather than to fight about it."

Vector Art

This is, I feel strongly, an insight that my husband and I should probably take to heart, because we have this problem kind of a lot.

David and I are generally not huge fighters. Sure, we have the occasional

"You were supposed to show up and you forgot" 

humdinger or the  

"Mother's Day was yesterday" 

knock-down-drag-outs.

But mostly we get caught up in the more mundane "neither of us know and yet we disagree" arguments, especially when feeling overcome by day-to-day stresses.

The root of this lies in the fact that my husband and I both suffer from what my Mother calls "often in error but never in doubt" syndrome. Neither one of us will hesitate to defend a point on which we possess exactly zero knowledge, and it manifests in exactly the sort of spats that my Dad was warning against.

In the past month my husband and I have had major disagreements on the following subjects:

• That guy kind of looks/doesn't look like your brother.

• We always take the next street, not this one.

• Do they record "The Voice" auditions all in one day or over the course of several days?

• The name of that hotel we stayed in four years ago was called "The Bedford"/"The Medford".

• Was that woman we met that one time named 'Darlene' or 'Cheryl'?

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As I said, nothing particularly terrible resulted. But as my father's forty-plus years of marital exposure suggest, perhaps these conflicts could be avoided entirely if we both just opted to let a few more things slide.

So that's what I'm going to try to do.

....I mean except for about that thing with his brother because I'M TELLING YOU THAT GUY TOTALLY LOOKED LIKE HIM!!!