On Fighting

You can learn a lot from watching the animals, especially those closest to you.

I often watch my slightly cross-eyed Siamese mutt chase my housemate's slightly overweight black feline, Bliss, around the house as she periodically turns to hiss at him, and eventually, swat at him, and then, in a fit of desperation, growl at him.  He either thinks she's kidding or, like me, has difficulty discerning or sometimes respecting boundaries because he gets right up in her thundering aura, right up in her sharp, green-eyed glare, and soon they are rolling around on the floor in a ball of black and white and buff, Fin's teeth grabbing what his impotent, declawed paws cannot, Bliss's nails glancing off my metrosexual cat's pristine coat.  At this point, I stand and yell at them.  Neither my housemate nor I needs a vet bill just because our cats got high on a catnip-filled pillow and couldn't control themselves.

When I walk into the living room less than an hour later, I find Fin blissfully licking Bliss's head like he's forgotten her fierce mountain lion roar and angry talons.  Bliss, for her part, lies on the carpet like an innocent black lamb and lets Fin put his tongue all over her.  Is this the equivalent of makeup sex?

You can also learn a lot from watching kids.  (I know that's an awkward transition from a rhetorical question about sex, but stop allowing yourself to be distracted; I have important things to say here.)

Have you ever seen kids fight?  Of course you have.  You were once a kid, and so you haven't just seen them fighting, you've been a participant.

I grew up with a fraternal twin sister who was a head taller than I was (okay, AM) and a little brother who was my size so that when strangers stopped us to tell our mom how adorable we all were and to ask our ages, which would lead our mom to explaining she had twins, these people guessed that either my brother and sister were twins because they both had brown hair or that my brother and me were twins because my sister dwarfed us.  What our sizes meant in the realm of sibling warfare was that when either one of them pissed me off, I couldn't rely on my physical strength to win the fight.  My brother, though smaller than my sister, was stronger than I was and was also a boy, so naturally he seemed more dangerous, and my sister was definitely stronger than I was.  When I explained this predicament to my mother one day when I was eight or nine years old, she laughed and told me to moon them.

"Moon?" I'd asked, confused but eager to acquire this potential weapon.

"When they say something you don't like," she explained, "pull down your pants and show them your butt."

I didn't understand how my bare bottom could beat my brother's terrifying, skin-twisting pinches or my sister's ability to sit on me until I cried, but I had nothing else in my arsenal.  So the next time they pissed me off, I dropped my drawers and waved my ass triumphantly, like I had just stuck the American flag on the moon.

Incredibly, this worked.  They were so taken aback, so dumbfounded, and dare I say it, thoroughly rebuffed, that they dropped their words and fists and stared in horror before screaming, "Mom!  Mom!!!  Carol just showed us her butt!"

Unfortunately, my new weapon's novelty wore off soon after my brother and sister began reciprocally dropping their drawers whenever we had a fight.  We exhibited so many moons, we could have opened our own planetarium.  But you know how it is; eventually, you take the moon for granted, and the weather cools down, and you grow a bit self-conscious, and you stop wanting to expose yourself to your brother and sister.  So, gradually, without discussing it, we stopped mooning each other.

After I stopped taking my clothes off to thwart my biological nemeses, I was still scrawny as ever and still under attack, so I started playing dirty.  I pulled my sister's long, brown hair.  I sunk my teeth so deep into my brother's arm forensics specialists could have made molds from the indents in his flesh.  I pinched the softest skin I could find.  I dug my nails in.  I flicked the delicate curves of an ear with machine gun speed.  I threw shoes.  I kicked my sister meaningfully in the crotch so that I could feel the unyielding wall of her pubic bones against the laces of my sneaker.

To be honest, I don't remember how most of these fights resolved.  I know some of them ended on the side of a road with my dad's hazard lights blinking and a stick rising and falling on a couple of land-locked moons.  Some of them ended in time outs and groundings.  But the fights that our parents didn't see--I'm not sure about those.  I can report, however, that none of us ever broke a bone or lost a pint of blood or an eye or more than a few fingernails' scoops of skin in one of our duals.  And I can tell you that we have more resilient, more open, happier relationships with each other than many other people have with their siblings.  And now when we fight, no one has to reveal an asshole or receive a bruise.  We just say, "Shut your hole!" and everything is solved.

I'm wondering why this is.  How can I tell my sister to "shut up" or to "quitchyerbitchin'" and then two minutes later sit beside her on a train, both of us sharing our lives and laughing like she didn't just deliberately antagonize me and I didn't just say a few unsavory things to her?  How do we let stuff go so easily?

I've been pondering this transition from crotch-kicking to mostly-civilized-sparring because I want conflict with a significant other to go as smoothly as a quick barb--"Shut your hole, Carol!"--and witty rebuttal--"Not until you do!!!!" that ends a minute later with no hard feelings.

I've read that couples should practice conflict resolution techniques to strengthen their relationship.  They should learn the art of "compromise," of "give and take."  They need to "negotiate" and focus on "common ground" and on building "win-win" situations.  They need "I-statements" and time to "cool off" and feelings and objectivity at the same time.  They need ground rules and respect for self and other and a firm feeling that they are a "team" rather than enemies.

As you and I both know, this is all bullshit.

Conflict resolution, in the way that therapists talk about it, is a myth.  Compromise is a short way of saying "lose-lose," and deep down, or maybe only as deep as our subcutaneous layers of fat, we all know that "win-win" is a fantasy, like low-fat ice cream or diet soda that doesn't give you cancer.   Don't get me started on negotiation, which is what happens just before two countries lose their shit and go to war, and let's not discuss handshakes, which are modern torture devices in which both parties can covertly express their seething resentments as they "settle things like adults."

Ah, and then there's the fighting that happens in the pregnant silences where words normally reside but have since taken flight, having sensed toxicity in the air between the parties.  Indeed, some of the worst fights live in the realm of passive-aggressive "communication," wherein one or both parties have given up on language but don't want to go to jail for domestic abuse, either.  This is a dangerous place to be because problems thrive on pent-up anger and hurt, and all that energy could eventually leak into a lashing out that is far more devastating than the silence.

If the answer isn't in language, and it isn't in silence, if it isn't in paperwork and laws and theories about feelings, where is it?  Certainly not in guns and fists, which leave people broken or dead.  No.  I argue that the solution to conflict lies in two cats scrabbling in the living room, in kids kicking each other in the junk.  To settle conflict "like adults," we must regress.  I didn't reach the point of being able to tell my brother and sister to "knock it off" without first pulling their hair.  So we must get physical, but in relatively harmless ways.  This means we either need to learn how to wrestle, which is a fairly benign contact sport, or just decide to do the makeup sex before the making up.  Then both parties will be calm enough to say, "Fuck it.  Whatever it was, doesn't matter.  We're both dehydrated now and in pain.  And we broke a lamp.  So let's just focus on getting to IKEA to replace it.  Maybe while we're there, we can fight about something else and then test out the mattresses."

Because not all conflicts can end (or be ended with premature-) makeup sex, I argue that we all take up wrestling.  Not the WWF style, but the kind high schoolers do on the gym floor.  The kind that involves contortionist Gumby moves and those soft helmets and a penis next to a face during a serious pin.  In the end, it won't matter who's on top because both parties will have sweated and grunted it out, and if they are sexually attracted to each other and have even an iota of energy left, they can have some makeup sex too and then maybe talk about the problem in a rational way.  If they have to.  Or they can just be like cats.  Who aren't going to be using bullshit I-statements to talk about their "feelings."  They'll just be licking each other's heads or crotches and calling it a day.  Now, doesn't that sound good?