Thread: Fighting?
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Old 08-19-2005, 03:17 PM   #1
SouthOfNoNorth
Colloquialist
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Pittsburgh, Pa
Posts: 77
Fighting?

o.k. i've been a lurker way too long, i've been getting a lot out of reading everyone's posts for quite some time now without giving anything back. so here it goes:

i'm sure i'll be opening a can of worms here, and i haven't been visiting the boards long enough to know everyone's relationship history, but i'll just ask.

how often do you and your significant other fight? how bad is it when you do fight? yelling and screaming, temper tantrums, breaking things, storming out? ever get physical (not necessarily beating each other)?

my girlfriend and i have been in a relationship for 5 years now. it started when we were pretty young (she was 20 and i was 23), so there has been a lot of personality growth/change during the course of our relationship. there was, of course, that first year of "bliss" that everyone experiences when you enter into a new relationship. after that, i'd say we have intermittent periods of bliss punctuated by periods of fighting, sometimes bad. she has a temper/trust problem and i have a host of issues of my own, sometimes these fights have gotten bad - never beating on each other, mind you, this isn't an afterschool special (although we have both "grabbed" one another) - but we have both ruined pieces of our/each others property, said terrible things we both did and didn't mean, considered leaving one another. basically the whole gamut, within "reason".

the last episode of this has been recent. she's been going through a bout of serious depression and i sometimes handle it well and am supportive and sometimes am not. depression sometimes leads itself to certain deep selfish tendencies, and it's hard to deal with this sometimes. even causes you to become very selfish yourself. so, of course, this has led to some serious fights as of late.

we've "improved" our fighting over the years, managed to set some guidelines (which don't always work) and learn the art of making up and whatnot. i guess my ultimate question is, is this kind of behaviour normal for a long term relationship? this is by far the longest that i've had. is it something that all/most couples go through, or maybe a sign that two people who love and care for each other an extreme amount but aren't compatible happen to be in a relationship?

i have friends who are couples and they seem to range from both extremes, from something similar to us to the annoyingly "perfect" ones. on the whole i see fights, but i'm not sure if they get as bad as ours do sometimes, although i'm sure it's something people don't want to talk about. what say you cellar dwellars? how fiery do your relationships get?
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