Pick a Fight With Your Beloved--It Might Help

I confess, dear reader, that I have picked fights with my beloved husband. I have picked fights over a few empty beer cans lined up like sentries on our kitchen counter, steps from the recycling container.

I have picked fights over his trail of sandwich makings left out in the kitchen for the flies to feast upon.

I have picked fights when our dinner, timed to perfection, is thrown off-kilter because he didn’t ignite the gas grill when I asked the first time. You get the idea.

It’s usually the small stuff that incites a quibble, some niggling detail of life that gets thoroughly under the skin, or so it seems to the person instigating the tiff. But picking a fight over something inconsequential has its purpose in the world of couplehood.

Indeed, picking a fight often acts to obfuscate a more serious underlying issue in a relationship, said Michele Baldwin, a Chicago-based marriage and family therapist who teaches couples classes with her psychiatrist husband.

“People don’t know how to talk about the big issues, like their feelings about a partner working too much or a partner not feeling valued enough ... so people pick on something that is a minor thing to discharge tension,” said Baldwin, who recalls that early in her marriage she used to get “hysterical” to get her husband’s attention.

Ironically, a partner who picks a fight is often motivated by good intentions, said clinical psychologist Blaine Fowers, author of “Beyond the Myth of Marital Happiness” (Jossey-Bass, 2000).

Picking a fight may be an attempt to communicate a dislike or resolve a conflict, to get an emotional reaction from an emotionally distant mate or to get a partner to pay attention.

“I would say that 99% of the time there is a good reason that we pick a fight,” said Fowers, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Miami.

“It isn’t that it is good to pick a fight with your partner, but the underlying question is, ‘What do I really want that is leading me to pick this fight?’ Most of the time what we want is a good thing. We just go about it the wrong way.”

Jody and Kevin Rudy of West Los Angeles have been married for 11 years. Jody, 38, said that she picks fights with her husband to resolve a conflict or in an attempt to get him to pay attention to her or their children, Willy, 8, and Emma, 5.

“The big one I pick is when he comes home from working all day and we haven’t seen him, and there is a big hockey game on--and they are all big games to him--and he sits with a beer watching it, ignoring everyone,” Jody said. “Willy will say, ‘Dad, look what I made....Look what I did,’ and he will say, ‘Not now, Willy, five minutes and 26 seconds.’ So I start a fight. I say, ‘What is more important in your life? Hockey or your children?’”

Jody said that sometimes the fight forces a conversation that might not have happened otherwise with a husband she describes as a mellow, nonconfrontational guy.

“There are better ways to communicate, but when you are at your wits’ end, you reach for anything, and picking a fight can be the best defense,” she says.

Picking a fight is one way to get an unemotional partner to emote, and likewise, it can create distance for a partner who feels crowded or smothered, Fowers said. But in the long run, picking a fight can backfire and be emotionally defeating.

“If the purpose of a fight is to resolve something that is bothering you, then you may never get there, and if you do, you are both likely to be angry, which makes a positive resolution elusive,” Fowers said.

The best thing a fight-picker can do is “reflect later--when no longer angry--about what it is he or she wants from the relationship that is not there,” Fowers said. “What people want to get away from is blaming language, such as ‘You failed me.’ You want to say, ‘There is something I want with you rather than from you.’”

This would be what John Gottman, a University of Seattle psychologist, calls the conversation the couple never had but needs to have. “After you have a fight, you are not done because you have to talk about it,” said Gottman, a leading researcher on the effects of conflict on couples and co-founder of the Gottman Institute, which offers therapy and educational materials to couples, therapists and families. “You can do this with any fight.”

Gottman offered the example of a new mother who had given up a successful graphic arts business to stay at home with her baby.

Her husband, a successful executive, was taking care of the baby one morning when she came downstairs to find the baby crawling around the kitchen, where a drawer had been left open. She told her husband to come and close the drawer. He said, “No, you’re right there. You do it.” She proceeded to open all the drawers in the kitchen. He came in and slammed all the drawers shut. Peeved, she took the baby and went upstairs.

“This woman needed to tell her husband that she feels he doesn’t respect or appreciate what she does at home,” said Gottman, author of “The Relationship Cure” (Crown, 2001). “He needed to say, ‘Here is a good way to influence me if you want me to do something.’ They had that conversation in the therapist’s office.”

The reason the couple didn’t have such a conversation at home, Gottman said, is that neither partner grew up with positive parental models of conflict resolution.

Another theory of what predisposes one to a state of marital truculence is general negativity.

“Every couple is in one of two states, according to psychologist Robert Weiss,” said Gottman. “Weiss said that a person can be in ‘negative sentiment override,’ and the negativity overrides everything and anything. Even a comment like ‘Where is the mail?’ can spark a fight. Positive sentiment override is the reverse.”

The couples who are least likely to pick fights are those who respond to each other’s attempts to connect, which could be a touch of the hand, an attempt at conversation or a request to spend more time together. “When a partner is not emotionally available, a fight is much more likely because it will get their attention,” says Gottman, whose research suggests that such couples draw from a reservoir of goodwill so that when there is a fight, it is less hurtful and resolution is easier.

Among the ripe times for picking a fight are periods when a couple is reunited after a separation or before a partner goes away.

“Someone dealing with separation or return who notices that she or her partner always pick a fight might want to make a playful thing out of it, as in ‘OK, let’s have our fight,’” Fowers suggested. “One person may get stuck with a lot of chores, and one may be doing a job he doesn’t really want to do for the income.”

As for myself, I shall begin rehearsing the conversation I never had with my husband. It will be about how I feel unappreciated as the domestic goddess in his life.

I will tell him that one way he could show his respect, love and appreciation for my fabulousness would be to put his empty beer cans not near the recycling bin, but in the recycling bin. After which, in a spirit of goodwill, I will fetch him a cold one on the spot.

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Birds & Bees, a column about relationships and sexuality, runs Monday. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached at kathykeller@adelphia .net.