Who Cares whose fault it is?

One of my favorite shows is, of course, Sex and the City, but one of the things I always marvelled at was how she was writing about the relationships she was in in her nationally syndicated column while very rarely expressing any feelings of how odd that must be for the person she was in the relationship with to be reading about it.

That is something that I often grapple with here at my little blog. Which is funny if you think about it, because tons of people are allegedly reading Carrie's column, while but a scant handful are trotting over to check out the blog. So, why not talk about whatever I want to talk about and screw the consequences?

Well, I have found that that's not always the best course of action. While the jury's out on whether or not he even reads this stuff regularly, (I don't ask unless there's something I particularly am interested in his opinion on and he almost never comments on anything that I have written) I know that in many cases discretion is indeed the better part of valor. For a few reasons, which I'm going to discuss now.

We are , in fact, fighting now. I can share this information because I really don't know why we're fighting, exactly. I'm being stupid, he's being stupid, it's just stupid. His teeth hurt, I can't hear and we were just getting on each other's nerves. And that's the thing. People who are in couples KNOW this. Know that these things happen and that sometimes (like this time) they get BLOWN up out of proportion and people (that would be me, in this case) say nasty things that they don't really mean and what was just a mild irritation turns into a war. It's dumb because we go to the battle knowing that one of us is going to give in and surrender. We're going to do that because we love each other and deep down we know that we're fighting over something stupid. And here is where discretion becomes the better part of valor -- by sharing these kind of things with everyone in the free world, all you are doing is inviting negative views of your partner. Negative views that you are going to wind up doing a lot of backpeddling to correct. And you can't even get TOO upset by these viewpoints, because you invited them in by sharing this particular vignette about your life.

There does get to be a fine line though. Because on the one hand you don't want to be sharing all of these minor ups and downs with the world but on the other if you (and by you I mean ME) keep all of these things to yourself, well... You just wind up getting resentful. Then things really do get blown out of proportion.

The key is, of course, good communication between you and your partner. You have problems, you work on them. Especially when they're stupid things.

And I'm here to tell you that that is not as easy as it sounds. I will admit that when we became engaged, I did think that things were going to instantly be easier and smoother. It was a rude awakening to realize that we still had some of the same stumbling blocks that we had before... They didn't just go away. I know that for me the difference NOW is that I try to view those things are more manageable than I previously viewed them. I try to think outside of the box for other solutions. I try to allow more time for things to blow over, for example, than was previously in my nature. (I'm not always terribly successful at this.) But I do try and largely it's because I realize that he would not have asked me to marry him if he thought that there were problems that we couldn't resolve. That he realized that we would have problems. Scott doesn't enter into major commitments lightly, trust me. So, I put faith in THAT.

That's not always easy. Commitment and relationships are not for the weak, trust me. There are plenty of times that it's all it's cracked up to be and those times are more frequent than the other times. But the other times, boy -- they can try your patience like nobody's business. It's hard for me to always act on it being about the give AND the take. Sometimes I have a hard time with one of those, and sometimes it's even hard with the taking. And I never thought that it would be like that.

As usual, I've walked all over the page without hitting on a real point. Other than this, which is kind of off the original point -- I think you're always going to have times that call to question how you ended up with the person you have ended up with, but I think that as long as you can always come up with a quick and immediate answer that goes beyond, "Well, I guess I just love him." then you're okay. I think you have to know why you love someone, even if it's for silly reasons, because it is that knowledge that makes the fights silly. And makes the staying together logical.

But, that's just my point of view.

HP