There are certain fighting words in relationships: you always x, you never y, calm down, grow up, I don’t have time for this. Among these you will not find “How funny to see a bear while just out hiking for the day.” Likewise, wildlife does not appear on the list of subjects couples fight about most often; those generally run more toward money, sex, romance, kids, in-laws, and chores. But that is because any such list is inherently a little misleading. Although it is true that money and chores and so forth are common causes of domestic friction, a huge number of arguments between couples are triggered by something invisible to outsiders. In fact, that morning on the trail, the inflammatory nature of my remark was, at first, invisible even to me. “Just out hiking for the day,” I had said, and C. fell silent, and I knew right away, as one always does in a relationship, that something was wrong.
Every couple fights, of course. Even if you are lucky enough to find a partner who is as committed to your well-being as you are to hers, no one person maintains perfect equilibrium all the time, and no two people glide smoothly along through a life consisting exclusively of tenderness, lust, and contentment. To begin with, you must contend with whatever issues, external as well as internal, you and your partner brought into your relationship when you met. These are all but unlimited in number and variety, although they often take broadly recognizable forms: health problems, financial worries, unhelpful habits formed in earlier relationships, the inward toll of how a culture treats its different individuals, and the aftermath of past emotional trauma. In some cases, that trauma can render the very idea of love suspect. For those who have experienced love chiefly as withdrawal or cruelty, who have had it wielded against them by parents or partners or others and were made to suffer in its name, it can be difficult to believe in a version that is tender and generous, let alone find it and sustain it. A regrettable truth about our species is that our capacity to love is matched only by our ability to harm and hinder that capacity, and one measure of how fortunate you are with respect to fate, family, and society is how much you have been left free to find happiness with another person.
Still, even if you have a relatively unimpeded capacity to love, sooner or later, you or your partner or the two of you in collusion will find plenty of ways to tax it. C. and I are lucky in that, however much our upbringings differed in other respects, we both had the good fortune of growing up in happy families. Partly because of that, neither of us struggles to imagine or commit to a loving relationship. And life is easy on us in other ways as well. We have the same values around money and are sufficiently well-off that financial stress seldom exerts pressure on our relationship. We also have the same job, and so, although we go about it very differently, it is easy to help each other, and to make allowances for the other’s schedule, habits, eccentricities, and work-related bad moods. We both derive pleasure from cooking and cleaning (so much so that a friend once joked that by getting together we had deprived two other potential couples of clean sheets and decent dinners), with the result that it is almost impossible to imagine quarreling over the laundry or the dishes. But none of this kept us from torpedoing a perfectly lovely hike over a disagreement about a bear.
Like most of our arguments, or anyway most of the memorable ones, this one took place during the first year of our relationship, a time when C. and I fought terribly. I don’t mean that we had exceptionally terrible fights (although they certainly felt that way to me in the moment), or that we fought terribly often (we did not). I mean that we were terrible at fighting. As it turns out, all those obvious differences between us that had worried me when we met—of age, geography, class, religion—did not matter nearly as much as one I wasn’t even aware of for quite some time. This was a difference of temperament, which manifested, most notably, as two wildly divergent strategies for handling conflict between us.
In the world at large, C. is not one to walk away from a fight. Once, when we were in New York City together, we stepped into a subway car where a man was arguing with a woman—not a little domestic squabble but the kind of loud, profanity-laced, menacing confrontation that seems like it could tip over at any moment into violence. Her instinct was to move toward him to be ready to intervene if necessary; mine was to hustle her to the next car to steer us clear of any possible danger. Her response struck me as scary; mine struck her as useless. As that suggests, C. is not afraid of confrontation. She would never start the physical kind, although she admires the courage of those who place themselves between the vulnerable and the dangerous, but at the verbal kind, she is formidable. It isn’t that she is liable to lose her temper. On the contrary, she is liable not to lose her temper, or at least not to show it in the usual ways. If anything, conflict makes her cooler, more focused, more exactingly logical. When persuasion is what’s called for, she can be stunningly convincing; she once talked some strangers down the street from us into taking down the Confederate flag in front of their home, an act of neighborly diplomacy I was certain would fail. But woe betide anyone who belittles her or underestimates her or provokes her disgust. I have seen her riled like that, and it brings to mind a flag snapping in a thunderstorm.
Curiously, though, in the privacy of our own relationship, C. is not like this at all. In the face of a conflict with me, her instinct is to retreat into herself, to tend to her wounds while thinking her way through and eventually out of her anger or hurt or fear. By contrast, my instinct in the face of the same conflict is to rush toward it—not because I am fearless about confrontation but because I am a peacemaker down to my last nucleotide and can’t bear the feeling that something is wrong between us. As a result, in the early days, whenever anything was amiss in our relationship, we were almost comically mismatched. What she needed most in such moments—a little space and time to herself—was the one thing on earth I was least equipped to provide, because what I needed most was to immediately know what was wrong so I could set about trying to fix it. Neither of us was ever any good at getting out of this bind, even after we had been together long enough to understand each other’s needs, and even though each of us genuinely wanted to accommodate the other. For me, sitting there tranquilly doing nothing while she vanished was like sitting there tranquilly doing nothing in a nest of yellow jackets. I could not manage it for even a minute, and when I tried, which I did, and thought about her silence and withdrawal, I just got more and more stung.