I don’t remember what the fight was about.

My husband was working from home, and I was taking a much-needed break from housework, kids’ schedules, and being overwhelmed from a combination of his frequent absences for work and our busy lives.

He was home after a stint of being away, and the transition period of coming together afterwards is always hard. I was quietly reading and eating a snack in the kitchen, and he came in and said something.

Or nothing. Sometimes that’s worse.

In a flash, I went from nibbling on cookies to spewing venomous words that, combined with the crumbs, made for a dramatic scene. It all went downhill so fast, neither one of us had time to make sense of the events. I didn’t care. I didn’t care that I looked ridiculous, didn’t care that the taste of tears mingled with the sugar and disgusted me, didn’t care that I must have looked like a big terrible baby throwing a very messy tantrum.

I was mad.

I whipped a cookie across the kitchen so hard that I felt a twinge of pain in my elbow, and watched with fleeting satisfaction as it hit the cupboard and broke into a million pieces, just like my resolve, my patience, and my sanity right then.

I would not clean it up until much later. I left it litter the floor and counter. My feelings were those cookie fragments: destroyed, messing up the house, ruining the mood and the rest of the day.

My parents recall through laughter a fight they had when they were younger and my mother was pregnant as she emptied the dishwasher right onto the floor, breaking all of their dishes. It wasn’t as funny then, probably. I knew ours was a similar, silly fight, one that I hoped I might look on later and laugh about – the ridiculous of it all, me eating cookies, then spitting them, then throwing them against the wall – but right then all I wanted was to run out the front door and never return.

It was all about the theatrics in that moment, and my loud, stubborn arrogance clashed against his quiet, resolute pride in a battle that both of us would lose.

We are products of our respective families. Mine is a yelling family, screaming our feelings, demanding attention. His is not so outspoken. I needed to let it out, cry it out, talk it out, and yell it out so that I could get on with my business – he needed to go away silently and process our conflict. For hours, days, possibly weeks.

That fight was some years ago, and one of that magnitude hasn’t happened again. We each took what we needed to learn from it, and it didn’t ruin our relationship, and we moved on from whatever offense occurred then. Thankfully we haven’t had to revisit the cookie fight, except in the telling of the story. Over the years in our marriage we learned what works for us individually, tweaking our reactions to conflicts to allow compromise, patience, understanding, and where applicable, apology. We still argue, but not quite as memorably, and not nearly as spectacularly.

“Fight nice,” parents lovingly admonish children when things get out of hand between siblings and friends. Fighting nice means that nobody gets hurt, that a conflict resolves itself without injury. It’s hard to get to that point – pride and the protection of our own feelings take precedence over seeing another point of view. My feelings have been hurt so badly that at times I considered a slap across the face, the quick-healing sting of physical injury, to be preferable to an emotional pummeling. Further, a relationship suffers in a time of conflict, which is isolating for both parties. Who is this person? Why is he acting like this? He is hurting me. I don’t like him right now. Can we survive this?

Despite the volatility that results from differing opinions, broken feelings, ugly pride, and score-keeping, over the years my husband and I have managed to learn how to fight nice. Sometimes I think that age tempers our tantrums – neither of us has the energy or spark anymore to endure big blow-ups. We are older, wiser, and know each other better – we’ve learned which buttons to tap softly and which to avoid at all costs. We use nicer words and are kinder and gentler with each other. Then again, sometimes I think it’s an individual maturity despite age that precludes the fighting, the arguments, the rash and often harsh reactions. And sometimes, I’m just too tired to argue.

Where does love come in? Shouldn’t love banish all conflict? For us, no. Love is there, enduring the battle, getting tossed by the winds of dissent between us, being battered and bruised yet still existing, panting on the sidelines. It’s what keeps us together, ultimately, but it’s not a cure for our differences. Can I say that our love is stronger because of our fighting past? Maybe, but love can become stronger whether or not two people argue. More often than not I think love is the referee, keeping us honest and mindful of why we are here, whispering in our ears, “Hey, you two. You’ve given this a go. It’s time to wrap things up.”

My husband and I have learned that it’s okay to back down, back up, and start over. To make allowances for wrongdoing, hurt feelings, and missed apologies. To stop keeping score (my toughest hurdle) and to start giving in (his).

I wish I could say that it’s easy, that there is a perfect formula and that we always act perfectly according to it so that conflict is minimal, forever and ever amen. But that would be a lie. We are human, and we make mistakes, and we do things that we know are wrong every single day. I can only speak for myself when I say that some days I don’t feel like doing my best in our marriage.

But I do trust with some sort of blind faith that just as we will continue to have differences, that as the years pass, we will continue to express them with more generosity than ever before. That we will continue to fight nicer.

Preferably without having to involve innocent cookies.

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