Is This Really Worth Fighting About?

The intensity of arguments change over time. In 1980, I wrote a book about marriage - Intimate Partners - in which the oldest couple interviewed was in their late forties. I got a lot of flak about that from older readers, who wrote to me and said, "Hey, what about us? We're still alive and kicking! Why exclude the marriages of older people?

I recognized the validity of that complaint, but for the next twenty years I never really returned to the subject of couples' relationships. When I finally decided to do so, and began talking with couples in their older adult years - including some of the pairs that I'd interviewed two decades earlier - I was in for some surprises! I was finding a lot of contentment and well-being in marriages that had been tense and stormy the first time around.

I was buffaloed. Much of my writing life has been devoted to identifying and solving problems - but the folks I was talking to were in an unexpectedly good place. It wasn't that they were without issues and differences - but they seemed to be on the same page when it came to resolving them.

Here's an example from my own long-married life. My husband and I were lunching with dear friends when the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict arose. The discussion became very heated very quickly when my husband raised his hand and said "I have a proposal. Let's stop this discussion now." The other couple laughed, and so did we, and we turned to other subjects, including political ones upon which we agree.

The interesting aftermath of this incident is that whenever my husband and I get into a heated discussion - and we just had one about where we should spend our next vacation - one or the other of us raises our hand and simply says the word "Palestine." We laugh, and we drop the subject right there. It's become our magic word for respecting the fact that each of has espoused a strong position - and it's really not worth fighting about.
It took us a long time - believe me - to get here.