Weddingbee

I listened to an episode of This American Life (www.thisamericanlife.com) recently where Ira Glass spoke with a man who actually runs a research facility where he studies married couples and their behavior. He’s been doing it so long, he says he can predict the success or failure of a marriage after spending only a few minutes with a couple.

What he found was that the frequency of fights (or existence of fights) does not necessarily indicate a problem in a relationship–it is *how* a couple fights. If, in their fighting, a couple is regularly insulting each other, saying things specifically to be hurtful or demean one another or “digging” at each other simply to get a response, that’s not a good sign. We’ve all been in these fights at one time or another–where afterwards you sort of feel like “what the hell were we even fighting about?” The problems were with the couples that “fight dirty.”

He went on to say that never fighting (which is normally considered a really good sign) is not necessarily so because oftentimes these are examples of couples who have become completely indifferent to each other and don’t even want to be bothered with talking things out or working them out. This is, of course, not a cut and dry formula, but it was interesting to hear him give examples (and actually play clips of couples fights–both good and bad).

The show was called “The Sanctity of Marriage” and originally aired on 3/26/04 in case anyone wants to listen–it was really interesting (just go to link above and do a search. You can dowload audio and listen on your computer).

i actually broke up with a guy because he always avoided fights; whenever i got upset, he would always say “it’s just not worth fighting about.”

i !finally! realized that the problem was that he was generally dimissive of my feelings, and that was indicative of other issues: not listening to me, not caring if i was upset, etc.

it took me a looong time to get there because i thought i really loved him, but it was worth it: i needed — and deserved — someone who loves me back. and someone who loves me enough to fight for it!

That’s an interesting point because I have a friend who says she and her SO bicker all the time but doesn’t consider that fighting.

What do you define as a fight?

My SO and I “fight” everyday. As long as you term a “fight” as a disagreement over some issue/object. This is our definition. We’ve never had one of those yelling/screaming fights.

It really just depends on how you define “fight”.