Time and again...

I met my man who was a boy 16 years ago. We have been together since 12 years. Both of us fought over many things and moved on as either wisdom donned or we hit upon the solution. Now I see many young couples around me who are going through the teething years of getting together as partners. Though my journey seemed very unique because we are very different people and our situations and contexts were differnt blah blah it is interesting to see a pattern.

I know these are all bits and pieces of power struggle and so many other things like one needs to accept the other, is there love and respect, are people flexible enough, issues of gender sensitivity and patriarchy and so on. It is still interesting to see..

Scenario 1: Who likes to do what?

He told me that he is comfortable washing dirty dishes, clothes and anything under the sun, but he can not sweep the house because he does not like it. I said I dont mind doing anything as I know how to do them there is no particular task that I like for the sake of it, but I love cooking as it is very therepeutic. So what happened next? Though I wanted him to do the work of washing clothes, dishes and so on.. I started noticing that he does not do it so well and wastes lot of water. I felt the need to correct him and show him how it is done properly!! patriarchy seeped in to the extent where I felt the need to be the expert. It is not like he was trying to discover a new element and I am his guide, he would have figured out eventually the methods which are comfortable and so on as he is also above average intelligent guy. I set myself up to wash clothes, sweep the house and cook!! One fine day I realised that I am doing more or less everything and flew off the handle the moment he uttered 'can I help you?'... I ranted about how it is not helping me, it is what is needed for maintaining the household, I am not responsible alone, this wont do and what do you mean help me? Why cant this be shared equally and so on. Things became better after I ranted and we discusssed. So we started making weekend home maintenance task list. This list consisted of two columns tasks in one and who will do it in the other. So as soon as it was made (by me), he would take it first because I asked him to pick tasks first, he invariably ticked majority of them and in the evening we used to check and see that I ended up doing the majority!! Either it indicates that I am a control freak or as women we are conditioned to look at chores in a different way. So if I am cooking lunch, cleaning up the kitchen counters, dusting the shelves and dusting the elctronic items in the kitchen go hand in hand. While he would go and clean the commode though the task consists of scrubbing the bathroom floor, washing down the door, defogging the mirror and so on. That is how he understood it. Initially I got innocent compliments from him that while I clean the bathroom, some how it looks more cleaner and better!! The list and sharing of what is implicit in an explicit manner helped. Now we are equal partners wrt household needs. I see this fight happening in different degrees and different contexts around me.

Scenario 2: My friends, your friends and our friends:

I did not like many of his friends and he did not like many of mine. I felt his friends were stuck in boyhood and are deeply patriarchal, he thought my friends were pseudo intellectuals and pompous. So I went to his friends gatherings' with my nose up and he came to mine with his forehead knotted. We no longer have those deeply patriarchal or pompous ones in our lives. But this did cause some heartache in the first Act of our marriage. Now our friends are the ones who are great with both of us and we have our own individual circle of friends who are accepted lovingly by the other.

Scenario 3: If we love each other so much, how can we fight? How dare you not fight back? Am I investing more here than you? Why do you shut me off? Why do you yell at me?

Figuring out the fighting style that suits us so that things move forward and get closure than towards festering is an art which has to be learnt by each couple. There are no shortcuts to this process. We are active aggressor + passive aggressor combination on many days, it changes to one weepy hormonal entity + one bewildered soul on some days and one subtle manipulator + one subtle resistor or on some days and so on. All these styles keep on happening. Some styles have been retired by us over the years as they were mushrooming the issue at hand into something else. The first time my active aggressor yelled at him, he stood up, looked at me with deeply hurt expression and marched out of the house. He came back after an hour of walking and by then my anger had turned into panic. As soon as he came home, I hugged him and said sorry and he hugged back and said sorry. He whispered in my ears 'please dont yell at me' and that is the last time I yelled at him. When we feel like my aggressor supreme and his great resistor are getting ready to march in, we have taken a step back and have taken notebooks and writing to communicate what we are feeling. That has worked, along with many other things which we have found to be useful. We have also understood that it is better to share 'what I feel' than to say 'what you did'. I see couples struggling to understand their fighting and I witness the frustration and sadness when repetitively unyielding styles are used. Since there is no short cut here, it has to go on to give way to new harmony. I am also not saying that we no longer fight and have attained sainthood but we definitely know the difference between the issue and the person and how to go about it (majority of the times ahem). 

I am not an expert in relationships and I will not advise what one needs to do in theirs. All the relationship needs is love and trust in the process.