Anatomy of an Argument

My husband and I have not gotten into a huge fight in a long time. But this past Saturday we got into a big one, and it was mostly my fault. Okay, truth be told: it was 100 percent my fault.

It was so much my fault that I feel the need to defend myself in advance by stating that I wasn’t my best self this Saturday for many reasons. One, I was on a cruise ship. I’m an active person who hates crowds. If you confine me to a small space that is populated by lots of other people and prevent me from getting much of any exercise, then grumpiness and stupidity tends to set in. That’s why I’m usually not the type of person one would find on a cruise ship. But Freelance Success, a writing organization that I belong to, held its yearly conference on the boat, so I was there, in part, to network.

Second, I went into the trip with a cold, one that persisted the entire time and caused me to lose my voice along with many of my brain cells. Third, I was spacey, the kind of spacey that results from being stressed out for too many weeks in a row. Case in point: I told my husband to drive us to the Allentown airport to catch our flight to Miami when our plane was really leaving from Philadelphia. That should have been a fight waiting to happen, but somehow we got through that experience without a harsh word.

As far as I’m concerned, I should not be liable for any of my ill-conceived actions.

Just felt the need to put that out there.

Anyway, here’s how the fight went down. Saturday night I told my husband that I was not feeling all that spunky. I suggested that I should hang out with our daughter in our cabin after dinner so he could go have a good time on the ship somewhere. Perhaps he might catch the Hairy Chest Contest or try some karaoke. I went on to suggest that I would like the following night to myself, to catch up with my freelance friends. It was a deal.

Our daughter got extra crispy during dinner, so my husband offered to take her back to the room so I could finish up and chat with my freelance friends. I kissed them and said, “See you in a bit.”

Dinner ended. My freelance friends suggested having a drink somewhere on the boat. At this point, I was feeling better. I was even feeling chatty. I’m rarely chatty. I decided to make the most of it and to have one drink while the chattiness lasted. I momentarily thought that I probably should tell my husband about my change of plans, but this thought did not come on too strongly. My friends wandered around the boat a bit, trying to find a suitable location for said drink. We eventually ended up on the pool deck.

I ordered my drink. Then I thought about walking down the 10 flights of stairs to our cabin so I could tell my husband that I was having a drink on the pool deck. But it seemed silly to walk that far just to tell him that I was having one drink. By the time I walked down to my room and then back up to the pool, my friends might be gone and I’d have to drink my margarita alone. I wanted to call him—as I would have done at home. Alas, my phone didn’t work because I’d forgotten to pack my charger (not to mention that we were out of the network, so calling him would have probably cost me $30 or more dollars a minute).

But it was okay. I wasn’t going to be long. He’d understand. After all, we came here so I could network. If the situation had been reversed, I would have understood. In fact, I think the situation had been reversed many times in the past—and I had been very understanding. He would be very understanding, too, I thought.

Two hours later, I was back at the cabin. My husband opened the door, towered over me, and shouted, “Where have you been?!”

I’m not all too sure about what he said after that. All I know is that I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking” about a hundred times and he said, “I thought you were dead” about 200 times. He even went as far to say that he was about to call the boat medics to see if I’d had a medical emergency.

He then left to have a beer and calm down, in the process very melodramatically patting his heart, sighing and saying that he’d almost had a heart attack from the worry of it all.

Once he was gone, my brain went to the “he is evil” place.

“Like he was really worried about me,” I thought. “He’s just frustrated because he was bored and I was out having a good time. It really irritates me that he thinks I’m stupid enough to fall for the ‘I was worried about you’ thing. Why can’t he just tell the truth? I mean, fine. I screwed up. He has a right to be mad. But calling the medics? That would be overly melodramatic even in a soap opera.”

Soon I was questioning my marriage. “He’s so dishonest. How can I trust someone who says things like that? Do I really know him at all? Really, do I?”

It occurred to me that he might stay out all night long, just to prove a point in a passive aggressive way. He might even make a pass at one of my freelance friends. Or worse, he might not ever come back to the room at all.  What if he disembarked the boat, shacked up with some woman in the Bahamas, withdrew all of our funds from our checking account, and was never seen or heard from again?

Briefly, I thought, “No, he would never do something like that.”

Then I thought, “I don’t know him at all. I don’t know what he’s capable of.”

I reminded myself that this is how big fights progress. The negative thinking side of the brain takes charge—telling me all of reasons why I shouldn’t be married to my husband. The more rational, positive thinking side of my brain shuts down. What’s left is a constant stream of absolutely ridiculous and one-sided thoughts—like the one about him leaving me (and his beloved child) to hide out in the Bahamas for the rest of his life.

Thing is, even though I know this, it’s not always easy to break out of this mindset in the moment—especially when one has just had a margarita and is still suffering from the spaciness induced by stress and a cold. As I tried to tell myself that my husband was not the kind of person who would just up and leave, the negative side of my brain kept on telling me stuff like, “What do you know about him? He’s always been so secretive. Many women are blindsided when they find out that their husbands are cheaters or serial killers. You have no idea what he’s capable of.”

Now he wasn’t just shacking up with a Bahama Mama and robbing me blind, he was also killing people and eating them for breakfast.

I figured I’d better get busy planning my upcoming life without him. I thought about how I would break the news to his family, what I would tell our friends, and how I was going to get the life insurance company to pay out his policy even though he wasn’t really dead. (Don’t ask).

Just when I thought I was incapable of feeling an ounce of love for a man who would suddenly up and ditch me over such a minor infraction, I heard his card in the door. Warmth flooded my chest and tears came to my eyes as I thought, “He came back! He still loves me after all!”

As he settled into bed next to me, I asked, “Are you still mad at me?”

He said warmly and convincingly, “I was never mad. I was just worried about you.”

I sniffled.

He went on to tell me that, while I’d been gone, a “medical emergency” had been broadcast over the ship’s PA system. He’d opened the door to see stewards running every which way. Back in the room, he’d noticed my epi pen on the counter. He’d worried that tree nuts had been hiding in something I’d had for dinner and that I’d passed out and died from anaphylactic shock.

Tears slid down my cheeks as I realized that he wasn’t being melodramatic. He really had been worried about me. It’s true. There were things I did not know about my husband. One of them was this: he’s just as capable of catastrophic thinking as I am. Another is that he really does worry about me. That’s charming.

“I thought you were going to divorce me,” I said.

“Oh come here,” he said, pulling me closer.

And that was that.

I’m guessing I am not the only married person who exaggerates the negative when marital tension is high. Most of us probably do it to some degree. You might not worry that your spouse is going to run off and live on an island without you, but you probably have your own scenario that plays in your head.

Such negative thinking prevents you from seeing your marriage and your partner clearly. For instance, when I was mired in the worst of it, I could not allow myself to see my husband as the caring, loving person that he is. In order to protect myself from the fear and the pain, I forced myself to turn him into someone I could easily hate—even though he wasn’t that person in real life.

Think about this the next time you find yourself mentally railing against your spouse. Ask yourself whether you are blocking out your spouse’s good qualities. Ask yourself if you are really seeing the situation, your spouse, and your marriage clearly. Chances are, you might be exaggerating the negative. The sooner you can bring yourself back to reality, the sooner you can end the fight and move on.

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