I Promise to Love, Honer, Cherish, Scream, Yell, Storm Out and Maybe Cry

Wow, while I was writing the last post about my dad taking me down to a pier to basically insinuate he'd murder me, I got in a HUGE fight with my wife. I know I've said before on this blog that I believe that my wife and I possibly create turmoil, subconsciously, in order to stimulate our brains and add excitement to our lives, but this fight was big, even by our standards, and we set the bar pretty high. Have you ever watched the movie The War of The Roses? Like that without the physical violence. Oh yea. We're that badass.

My wife and I have, and do say ANYTHING during our fights; we scream and yell and explode even. It's crazy. I was once talking to a friend about how my wife and I duke it out and they asked, "You didn't say anything you'd regret, like threaten separation, did you?". That comment literally made me laugh out loud, OF COURSE we threatened separation and divorce and a bitter custody battle and doing everything in each other's power to make each other's life miserable. That's what happens when we fight, neither one of us ever backs down. We don't worry about saying shit we'd regret, we just say it, all of it, without a thought. When we're done with the fight, that all dissolves into the ether and we pretend it never happened. 

My wife does not let me win, she doesn't calm down and she knows how to push my buttons. She was raised by a single mother who, it could be said, never quite got over the divorce with my wife's dad. She taught my wife to never let a man own you, and even though I have never tried to own her, if I try to even win an argument, that's close enough to "own" and the response is all out warfare. She simply cannot give in, she'd "lose". 

In turn, I was raised without an actual mother, with a parade of women who constantly came and went and a dad who constantly told me I was the stupidest piece of shit he'd ever met, and would amount to nothing. I would be lucky to live long enough to even make to into jail and that just MAYBE the military would accept me, but he doubted it. As a result, I don't trust women to be honest and I will debate to the death when I feel my intelligence is being questioned. 

We are perfect for each other. Literally trained almost from birth to distrust the opposite sex and with insecurities the size of Lake Superior. Other couples talk about their issues, we have cage matches. Storming out of the house with packed bags? Check. Throwing wedding rings at each other? Check. Calling each other's parents names? Check. Explaining how you never actually loved the other person but now the joke's gone on too long and you're stuck? Check. Pointing out how the other one is mentally ill and suggesting medications to help? Check. Calling the lawyer's office in front of the other person but then hanging up? Check. NOTHING has ever been off limits.

I'd like to think that part of why we are prone to these types of fights is because we're both so absolutely certain with every fiber of our being that there is nothing that either one of us can say that would cause the other to actually leave, and we've been together for about 17 years, so obviously, we've both stuck around. I just don't KNOW that to be the case for sure. I'd also like to think that all's fair in love and war and that these types of totally raw battles are waged more often than it would appear within the households of friends and simply not discussed, but I also can't know that to be the case either. 

We've seen so many people we know divorce, some over things that my wife and I look at each other with that, "holy shit, THAT'S enough to get divorced over?" look. But we're still together. We don't hate each other, we love each other, I think we're just two horribly damaged people loving in a horribly damaged way. 

We're both in our 40's now, so our clashing attacks have been fewer and fewer, we simply don't have the energy or the stamina anymore, but given the right set of circumstances, say when I am emotionally charged and she says or does just the wrong thing that causes me to say just the wrong thing...fireworks can still happen. We've still got that spark (that leads to a fuse that leads to a 300 pound bomb). Isn't marriage grand? Her and I should teach a course at the Community College, "Holy Fuck You're Not Tough Enough For Marriage", it'll be great, I'm going to wear a blazer with elbow patches (god I love those).