I once enlisted my grandmother –we’ll call her Mema, because that is what I call her – for relationship advice. I was a senior in high school and I was in what I thought to be a very serious relationship and it wasn’t going as smoothly as I had hoped. I needed a pair of eyes who had seen hard times in love and gotten through them. I needed someone who had some sort of insight into my possible long-term relationship. She told me two things. First, never go to bed angry. Second, do not under any circumstance smother your lover.
I will never forget this and it is my inability to forget this that causes me such anguish now. I think about these two ideas for relationship strengthening. I imagine myself being both of these supposed men at the same time. It is when I do this that I realize it is impossible to do these things. It is impossible to fight through something with your significant other and not smother them. To fight is to smother. Someone somewhere is probably thinking, “of course you can, both sides make compromises and then they let the anger go”. This person has obviously never been in a fight with their spouse.
Even when two married people look into each other’s eyes and say they’re sorry and they kiss and make up – and make up gratefully afterwards, they aren’t really saying sorry. What they are saying is I’m sorry I couldn’t out right win this battle. I will concede, if you will. A compromised is made but a battle is not won or lost, and there is no such thing as a draw in war. So then what the hell is it?
It’s none of these things and all of them at the same time. It is an ongoing struggle that, if taken far enough, will last a lifetime. This is what old couples mean when they say if you are not fighting then it’s not worth fighting for. It is because they are still fighting to this day and they have to rationalize it somehow. When you go home for Thanksgiving, and you watch your grandparents, they are in the middle of two things. They are either not talking to each other at all, or they are making little comments to each other with smiles on their faces. We smile about it longingly when we’re all out in the backyard back getting drunk saying, “Man, they still have that fire. No wonder they have been together so long”. We have failed to see it for what it really is. It is not the fire from their passion we are seeing, it’s the fire from their poison. It is a fifty year old inside joke gone wrong, that no one will understand except for them and it has been going on since the day they said I do.
The thought that two people should fight but then concede to one another is the same blind Christian bullshit that has poisoned marriage and this nation for years now. Two sides are never equal and life is not equilateral. Someone has to win. Even if you think everyone is losing, someone is winning. So while men everywhere are giving up their balls and substituting them for their wife’s purse and/or miniature poodle, I hope there is an equal if not increasing number of men giving the middle finger to the Feminist Reich. I mean have you seen the divorce rate in this country?
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