I’m questioning if my husband and I are actually the unusual ones or if we’re just surrounded by a high number of abnormal relationships. We essentially never fight. We certainly never get anything close to violent. We’ll have civil differences of opinions that we can talk out and we both have days where we’re already hanging by a thread and might get a little snappy but we’ve never, in nearly 20 years, had anything like a screaming match. I guess I figured that was normal. But recently I’ve started to question that.
I ask because of the couples I’m closest to, I’ve witnessed nearly all of them have intense fights that involve aggressive shouting and a lot of angry energy. We’ve gone on vacations with friends and family and the number of times we’ve witnessed couples raising voices, slamming or throwing things, being intensely passive aggressive, or “punishing” their spouse for something minor surprises me. The fact that it happens at all, but also that they don’t go to great lengths to keep those altercations private.
We hear our rural neighbors yelling with each other at least every couple weeks. Even when we can’t hear them, we know when there’s tensions in the house because their dog runs over to ours to escape the hostilities. I feel terrible for the pup and I worry how these fights affects their teenage children. I wouldn’t feel good in a home like that. I thought my parents had a marriage similar to mine but my mother confessed that, no – they yell at each other from time to time, they’ve just done a good job of hiding it from me.
So, how common is it for married couples to fight to such a degree? Am I in an anomalous marriage (not complaining, if so) or are we just surrounded by an abnormal number of toxic ones?