Fighting with my wife

If we are fortunate, most of our lives consist of evolution. If you are a Syrian refugee or child pop star, this may not be true, but most of us deal with the everyday annoyances of time, money and relationships as they come along. This may improve us or turn us into hollow husks, whatever.

Every now and then, though, we have a revolution. This may be a good or bad revolution. I was going to list some of each, getting married or divorced; getting or losing a job; then I realised that any of those could be good or bad.

I would like to talk about a specific kind of revolution - fights with my wife.

Those of you who know my beautiful, caring and all round wonderful wife would doubt that any man could ever fight with such a blessed creature. I am sad to report that this does happen on occasion.

By fight I do not mean argue, or display signs of irritation. That happens and it is part of the evolution. Every now and again we fight. The causes are varied, it could be a something someone has said or failed to say; some disagreement about how something was handled; or just general boredom because we haven't had a fight for a few months.

There are some ground rules to a fight that we have refined over the years:

• Not in public.
• Not in front of the kids (Not the bloody parts anyway).
• Not while drinking. Bar-room brawling has no place for us.
• No character assassination (character commentary is fine though).

The fight itself has four steps:

1. One of us will say A flippantly.
2. The other will respond aggressively and say B.
3. Soon C-Z and more has also been said.
4. Then one of us - usually me, I'm a sulker - will saunter off nonchalantly.

Some sniping may occur after this, but only light sniping. Flesh wounds. Something to make the other realise they are in no-man's land. And dawn is coming.

This is usually followed by a day or so of silence. Not an armistice exactly, more a regrouping of the forces.

Then comes the peace. This is normally the calm reasoned discussion that real adults are supposed to have in the first place.

And then... a funny thing happens. One of us, or maybe both, will change. "Yes, you have a point. And not just that arrow-point aimed at my jugular."
Yes, I am too involved in my internal world.
No, it's not useful when I keep avoiding talking about [...].
Yes, we do have to sort our finances out.
No, I don't have to give you a solution to every problem, sometimes a hug or commiseration will do.

Those changes, year by year, have made our relationship stronger. We have not slain all our monsters. We are not the perfect couple. But every fight makes us that little bit better, together.