'While Lydia, with her ten-plus years of relationship experience, was able to look at our disagreements and recognize them as minor or typical, I had no frame of reference, and treated every clash like a catastrophe'
Illustration: J.V. Aranda Welcome to It’s Complicated, stories on the sometimes frustrating, sometimes confusing, always engrossing subject of modern relationships.
I should have found comfort in this , but I didn’t, really. My mom and dad at that time were 19 and 20, respectively. I was ten years older than she was then, and apparently believed there was an age at which you mature out of the ability to have stupid arguments about nothing. Twenty-six, maybe. That sounded about right.
We drove to San Diego, where Lydia grew up, and we stayed in her mom’s house. The first night we went out to the local lesbian bar, and the second night, when Lydia wanted to meet another hometown friend for catch-up drinks, I did the smartest thing I did the whole trip, and stayed back. Her mom made us veggie burgers and we ate them at her kitchen counter while she told me which friends of Lydia’s she liked and which ones she didn’t.
But if I wouldn’t have put it that way myself, I couldn’t in good faith say that she was wrong. She and I used to fight all the time, and hard. We didn’t bicker, or butt heads; we got along great when we weren’t making each other cry. Other people might have let a lot of those grievances go, but conflict avoidance makes me crazy. When a long-term relationship is the goal, I can’t see how stewing in one’s bad feelings is more productive or less scary than saying them aloud.
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