TL;dr – We’ve had a couple of fights in our relationship, including a recent big one, but have been able to talk through them all and make up. Is it healthy that we’ve been able to do this or is it a bad omen that we’ve had these fights in the first place?
Let me preface this by saying that neither of us (34M and 31F) has had much serious relationship experience prior to getting together and she comes from a different country so there were some inherent cultural differences we had to navigate from the get go.
In any case, we’ve been together for over a year now and recently moved in together after some time doing long distance. We’ve talked about big things like marriage, kids, religion, where we want to live in the future, etc and we’re mostly on the same page about those things. We’ve had a couple fights in our relationship prior to this recent big one and they’ve all come down to some form of miscommunication. For example, we took our first “major” vacation (like a weeklong trip on the other side of the country with hotel, etc) as a couple a couple of months ago. It was not great. A big part of that came down to planning. I had been to the city before so she deferred the whole itinerary to me b/c she was busy with her application to grad school. I was in the middle of changing jobs, but I did what I could. Every time I asked her if she wanted to do or see something, she would reply back like “whatever you think.” So fast forward to the trip and she’s unhappy b/c we didn’t see this show or didn’t see that attraction. On the flip side, she suggested we go to this trendy restaurant, but I said I wasn’t in the mood b/c of the wait times and price. We had a fight about all of this but talked thru it when we got home and agreed we’d be more collaborative in the future instead of dumping all the planning on one of us.
Now, fast forward to this most recent big fight. She had been distant for a couple of days but when I asked, she said everything was fine. Finally though, she unleashed everything. She said since we moved in together, it felt like things had changed. It didn’t help that our schedules were opposite each other so we really only see each other for like an hour a day except for the one or two overlapping free days we have a week. She brought up that she felt I wasn’t doing enough chores, but every time I tried to help, she’d shoo me away or tell me i wasnt do it right (I still do some, but usually when she’s not there). She also said I was always on my phone and every time she tried to engage me with like a new show or something I wasn’t paying attention [I will admit to that – we like some common shows, but her favorite genre is different from mine so I’ll zone out at times]. On my end, I told her that she just stopped trying to take the time to tell me how she would like things done and she would be more abrupt instead of patient. It all amounted to her feeling like we had grown apart and she didn’t feel like she could continue on, bringing up some of the other fights we had as “proof.” And for like 60 minutes, we had basically broken up as we started to try and figure out what to do with like our lease, moving out, etc. But while we were talking about all that, a lot of the good memories came back and we talked about how we could change. She then admitted that she’s felt lost ever since she found out she got rejected from her dream grad school a couple weeks earlier and that frustration boiled over into our relationship and she didnt mean anything that she said before. At that point she decided she wanted to reinvest in the relationship and start fresh.
Although things are good again, I can’t help but wonder if this is healthy (since i dont have much experience with it)? Like are we better now that we were able to talk through this or is the fact that we even had this fight a bad omen? Any anecdotes or advice would be appreciated.
6 comments
Very normal. You’re two different people who had different upbringings and different experiences. The way you think through/approach things won’t always be the same, and you’re gonna butt heads sometimes.
The most important thing is that, when you *do* have arguments, you both identify what caused it and how to avoid it in the future.
My wife and I’s first vacation as an engaged couple was pretty rough. I wing a lot of my planning & that stresses her out *specifically* for vacations, but not really in other instances. We learned from that experience though and I plan our vacations much better now, & she meets me halfway and allows some spontaneous time in the schedule
Yes? Facing and managing a conflict to a resolution is what good communication is.
People that say they don’t fight are usually just people that don’t speak up and just stew in silent resentment or are people pleasers that will suffer anything not to make waves. Not a healthy approach.
Fights are always bad, but they are not necessarily a big problem. The reason fights are bad is because you should go straight to the talking about the issue and working through it phase. That phase is vital. But having a fight and then talking it through and resolving it can be okay. A relationship can work that way so long as the fights don’t happen too often, and just now and then one or both of you fails to start with the talking through it phase. Skipping the talking through it phase, either because you don’t get to it after a fight or because yo don’t fight or discuss problems is extremely toxic and you cannot have a good relationship that way.
What both of your fights have in common is that she doesn’t tell you about her true issues until she is already angry about them. She needs to learn and practice bringing up an issue as soon as she is aware it is an issue for her, even if it seems too small to matter. She needs to bring it up when it is something she can simply tell you and talk about. She needs to be able to tell you what she wants and does not want, and then you two need to be able to discuss it and work out something that works for both of you. She is holding things in and then exploding. And that is a common flaw many people have – one I used to have and had to work through myself – but a flaw that will absolutely damage the relationship. So, I would talk to her about that core issue and see if she is willing to work on it. You say she doesn’t have much relationship experience, so she may be using bad advice like “don’t sweat the small stuff” to think she should bottle stuff up. Don’t sweat the small stuff isn’t terrible advice, but it’s very easy to misapply. Anything that is going to grate on your nerves is not small stuff. It adds up. And exploding at someone with no warning over something they had no way to know was an issue is obviously not ideal.
All relationships require continuous work. Big fights bring issues to the surface, but they don’t solve them, even after you’ve “talked it through.” The “solutions” are the work that you both do afterwards to strengthen the relationship. You didn’t break up for an hour because your girlfriend didn’t get into one grad school. You broke up for an hour because there were a million little things that had been bothering her and she hadn’t communicated with you about any of them. (Between the two fights, it seems like your girlfriend struggles sometimes to identify and communicate what she wants.) If I were you, I’d go back and revisit the concerns that you each expressed, and decide which you want to make an effort to work on. The division of household labor is a big deal. You need to decide what there is to do, who does what, and what your joint standards are. Create an agreement that keeps her from getting frustrated and keeps you from having to hide your work from her. When you say that your girlfriend stopped “teaching,” what was she teaching you about? A teacher-student dynamic in a romantic relationship is not great — I’d look more closely at what that’s about.
All of this is to say, a relationship isn’t good or bad based on two fights, unless the fights reveal dynamics that are abuse or otherwise intolerable. Conflicts come up in relationships all the time, it’s all about how you manage them.
It’s not healthy and it shows that you both have problems communicating. She let things go for so long until she was ready to explode. Why did she wait? Things were bothering her in the relationship, she should have sat you down and discussed it a long time ago. It also sounds like you did the same thing. Why did you wait?
You both should just schedule a regular time for the two of you sit down and discuss relationship issues. The goal should be about understanding. You want her to understand you and vice versa and that can only work if you are both calm, willing to listen and explain how you feel. After you both understand an issue, then you can look into fixing it and for many things “fixing it” will be finding a compromise that makes you both happy.
Why does she need to ‘teach’ you how to clean? Watch one of the millions of cleaning videos on YouTube. You are a grown man. Make a chore list if the division of labor is skewed.