Mike Tyson once said “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”, and let me tell you, at the start of my marriage with Jeff, I had what I thought was the greatest game plan for whenever arguments would arise; I reaaaallly thought it was all figured out, and we would breeze through our disagreements. I had 20 years of previous experience with an argumentative marriage prior to Jeff and was convinced that I had learned from my mistakes. I had counseled for years to identify, acknowledge, and uproot deeply embedded bad habits. I had researched and studied conflict resolution. I was an English major with a primary focus on communication, and I prided myself on being patient and understanding. If anyone was going to master resolving conflict and smoothly sail through disagreements, it was going to be us–until I got “punched in the face” (figuratively speaking of course) with the hard blow of reality.
I realized very early on that my idea and method of communication differs greatly from that of my husband. I am an audible processor. I like to talk through e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, and I strongly desire an immediate resolution. On the complete contrary, Jeff is a silent processor (or as I like to call him, a “blinking” processor because he will stare into space for several silent minutes and blink excessively while thinking on how to respond to my last 30 minutes of long-winded expressions, and sometimes he will say nothing at all in response for days.) The silence used to infuriate me. However, over time I have realized that he is not necessarily ignoring my concerns, discounting my feelings, or rejecting me. Most times, because he genuinely would prefer to avoid conflict, he is running through the entire conversation in his mind, from trying to understand all the things I said, to determining all the ways that he could respond, then running through every possible way that I could react to his response, and then processing every imaginable outcome. It literally can take him days before he is ready to address my conversation, and sometimes he reasons himself out of revisiting the conversation at all.
Whew! To me that is exhausting, but it is also challenging because it requires a much deeper level of patience, love, and understanding from me as I try hard to respect his process. Although I often find myself frustrated, and sometimes even angry, at our varying communication styles, one thing that I am so thankful for and really respect about us both is that we continue to show up. Regardless of who initiates it or prompts it, we have not given up on fighting for solutions and resolutions. Sometimes it feels like we have lots of losses in delayed gratifications and deferred remedies, but we have experienced several wins with which I am most pleased. Two victories that I am most proud of in our strive to fairly fight is our relentlessness to always return to the ring until we accomplish a win and what I like to call “Delayed Discord”. We have learned not to succumb to the intimidation of conflict and to keep showing up, and we have learned to postpone stressful conversations and choose peace when needed. Disagreements are inevitable, but fighting doesn’t have to be. The objective is to eventually both be in the same corner, fighting the REAL adversary TOGETHER.
