fights with your boyfriend or girlfriend

I hate fighting with my wife. Worst feeling.
We don't fight very often, and when we do it's usually about my lack of contribution to the household (I have only been working part time since June.)
LUCKILY I will have more work starting in a few months, and I definitely understand her frustration w me. I'm not a very driven or ambitious person.
On the other hand, I do nearly all the cooking, probably more than my share of the laundry, and we share other cleaning and cat-related chores.

But I hate fighting it sucks. I just want to get along and be happy. But I know sometimes u can't get along with someone when you're disappointed in them, and there is occasional friction.

ok that's my story.

xposts: DINNER.
I do almost all the cooking, as stated above, and I'm usually involved in the planning of meals.
But one of my huge pet peeves is when I make a meal (sometimes nice, sometimes real basic) and inevitably she will find somerthing wrong with it. "Maybe roast the sprouts longer next time." "Maybe don't add water to (whatever soup or stew or curry), it's bland." I think for me, where I know i'm not the financially responsible one in the relationship, I really do try hard to compensate in other ways -- like cooking, or surprising her by doing laundry, or whatever -- and it bums me out to feel unappreciated sometimes.

Also the sregular, "I'm hungry but I don't know what I want to eat."

and i should prob start or look for another thread on it, but menopause makes relationships a rollercoaster of emotion and hot flashes and cleaning binges.

Not up for talking about relationship conflicts but enjoying the OT tangent:

Sometimes I try to express everything in metric units for fun ("I'll pick up 908 g of chicken"). I thought UK people were as bad or worse wrt Imperial/metric inconsistencies, though? Does anyone in the UK say "I am 177 cm tall" (except wacky people like me)?

The city of Windsor is wacky compared to the rest of Canada: it's the only Canadian place I've been to where everyone uses the Fahrenheit system.

Canadian English is even more inconsistent than those three words, tbf: "airplane" instead of "aeroplane", m/l a crapshoot regarding "s" vs "z" in words like "analyse" or "realize" (I follow the old RCM conventions and use "s" after "y" but "z" after "i"), single quotes are usually for scare quotes and not quotations. I have to edit my spellings if I submit something to an American OR a British journal or conference.

xpost Ian. I am critical about meals F prepares or even restaurant food. Hopefully, it's the same with the wife where she isn't criticizing you as a person but instead...like there are just so many cooking shows on nowadays, everyone is a f'ing critic on food. I used to think I was hurting his feelings when I later added more salt or spice or lemon but it's just different palates.

I think it's mostly that I get mad at myself for not making things better, then I feel sad.

ian, I'm sure this isn't what you intended, but FWIW from one unambitious self-critical sort to another, I'm mad at your wife now

xpost I get it, I sometimes don't work and I also try to compensate by doing most of the household labor, back/head rubs, finding ways to save money, cut costs, etc. Just focus on the things that you can control. Also, making completely new things for meals sometimes makes people oddly super happy. Like I don't ask F what he wants to eat sometimes, but I like, for the first time whipped out some naan from scratch this weekend and some chana masala and he was giddy.

i have gotten really good at bringing her tea in bed on saturday mornings.

And about menopause, I can't even imagine what that is like, but I know when I am hormonal it has nothing to do with the other person, my brain is stalled, so many feelings, I just want things to magically be known and taken care of.

Don't be sad. You are the best, Ian. These times are hopefully temporary.

oh yeah, no, i'm not really sweating it!
menopause is insane tho. and i know it's not about me or directed at me, but sometimes it can be tough when your partner is irrationally angry/irrationally upset and there's really not much you can do about it :(

Yeah, when I get like that F just starts shoving haribo and wine into my mouth and hopes I go to sleep.

https://www.everydayhealth.com/menopause/mood-swings-in-menopause.aspx

oh so my post was about going *out* to eat

who cooks and what they cook at home is a different matter

But one of my huge pet peeves is when I make a meal (sometimes nice, sometimes real basic) and inevitably she will find somerthing wrong with it.

Ugh, I needed to hear this because my partner is low on work atm and tries to help out in other ways and I'm often kvetching about it. "dont put the plates on that bench" "whys this been left out" "this teas got too much sugar" lol I am a fucking harridan sometimes :/ (I'm not snappy! just a negative idiot). But tbh until recently for a stay at home dad he wasnt doing very much housework either (dishes, boys lunches/toy cleanup... that was about it). So our fights would be me coming home from a very stressful job, exhasted to the point of tears, only to find that before I could even cook dinner I had to clean the whole kitchen I'd only cleaned 12 hours earlier. And then I'd get "when is dinnerrrrr" on top of all that. AND cooking dinner is a massive PITA in our house because we have 4 people with completely different diets so have to take turns. Drives me and my OCD insane.

It's all very complicated!!! I think a key understanding that Helen & I have come to is that, as long as we're trying our best, it's important to be patient with each other. On the other hand, if she's been at work all day and she comes home and I haven't cleaned the kitchen and I havent done anything with my day.. yeah, she's got a right to be miffed.

And while I do enjoy cooking and am okay at it, anything that begins to feel like a chore is gonna be a drag.

probably the biggest fights in my marriage involved food. at home this was mostly my fault because despite knowing how much her life revolves around food, i had neither the cooking desire or cooking skills to please her.

on vacation it became a nightmare of indecision on her part. i'm not picky; i'll go anywhere. but for her every meal had to be somehow ~special~ (in ways that i myself was not qualified to select). sometimes this worked out great if she could plan in advance, like this one place built into the cliffs above grenada. on the fly, it turned into us walking fucking halfway around lake como because nothing was 'suitable' and going back to the hotel to eat leftover cheese.

i ate much better when we were together, but i'll be happy with the guilt- and disappointment-free turkey sandwich and hummus i have tonight

ps canada is great

every meal had to be somehow ~special~

This may honestly & truly be the foundation of my marriage (I mean on both sides, luckily)

This is a little surprising how much couples fight about food. I thought it would be more about money or just incompatibility (which I guess the food issues are moments of that).

I don't think it's surprising. Food is something you put in your body. Some might deem it a question of consent.

tbf our other huge fight involved whether major league baseball players should be expected to know how to bunt

I am not even touching that consent comparison.

mookie, is she a chef? I feel like maybe I met her a long time ago?

For me its not the food itself, its the "prepare and clean up" (to quote Kristin Hersh). Having one kid with coeliac and a refusal to eat most things, both kids vegetarian, mr adult-kid hating his damn vegetables, and no one seeming able to wipe a bench or a dish, I tear my hair out lol.

it's pretty important that i date a woman who has similar taste in food tbh

i don't want to come to my house smelling like something that i consider awful

actually a long term relationship

dating i guess it doesn't rly matter

i hate cleaning up the kitchen, not gonna lie.

Y you may have met her, idk! (she was pretty great apart from these aforementioned issues, btw.) she is not a chef, but i think she might now do web stuff for m0m0fuku, so

My partner was vegan for over 10 years (he eats some seafood now - no shellfish)). I will eat anything, everything but that also means I am extremely flexible with being veg. But he is also flexible with me eating bone marrow, offal or game meat when we go out. The cleaning is probably more upsetting if I felt like he wasn't equal in it or bartering in that regard. I really love clean floors so I am more than happy to take care of that.

divine mrs m also has the ~it must be special~ thing re food, at home its ok cos we can both cook p well but when we're out for *non foody* reasons its pretty aggravatory behaviour not to just satisfice imo

I don't think it's surprising. Food is something you put in your body. Some might deem it a question of consent.

― Moo Vaughn, Wednesday, 14 March 2018 22:51 (thirty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you should be taken out the back and beaten

I have to say that eating cheese and drinking wine for dinner in a hotel room while on vacation ( F has hummus) is what I try to do at least a couple of nights. But I also really like to go to grocery stores in other countries.

Is that a personal threat or just a colloquial expression of toxic masculinity?

its a casual musing, delivered as airily as tbe original comment nbd

an idiomatic way of saying "fuck off mate"

hey try having arguments about food / eating out with a partner who has strict, ironclad rules about these things but will not discuss those rules and refuses to acknowledge they exist
apologies for venting, this thread is touching on a lot of hot topics for me

my wife got really mad at me this morning cuz i got transmission fluid on my jacket while working on the car and it is apparently a symptom of how i don't care about things and don't take care of them.

but boy you gotta do you!

hey dog latin sorry to hear about your breakup.

Can we talk about the most petty things we've fought with our partners about? yesterday it was about logic in website search filters.

had a huge fight - well more just me being harangued - with my ex because i laughed at a guy getting busted after he drove by a cop car while texting on his mobile phone

like for not hating the police sufficiently - and i do hate the police, i also hate distracted driving tho

understandably
i have to watch myself as a pedestrian with the damn phone it's awful and v dangerous

i rly think i came out of a lesson from this last fight, i have to be honest. i know "perfect from now on" isn't a thing (holla built to spill) but i learned that i have a way of going from really high to really low in a split second, and my sanity depends on recognizing those moments, and stepping the fuck back.

hi! so i made it until last Friday. April 27th. that's more than SIX WEEKS. no fighting! until Friday :( ugh that sucked. I got annoyed with the boo about something he said, but anger got the best of me and it quickly became:
(1) i said the wrong things
(2) i'm making my boyfriend feel like shit
(3) i'm a terrible person

which resulted in a me spiral and us having to talk about everything which was really annoying. i feel like i could have gotten in and out with an easy "hey, what you said kind of bothers me" instead of unleashing all that. we were able to resolve it and the night ended with a candid and chill conversation. didn't go to bed angry, woke up fine. it wasn't the worst, but it threw me for the weekend. i think both of us were exhausted from a long week. now trying to think about how i express my anger in the future. and that's my story.

6 weeks is great going surm. I wouldn't beat yourself over the odd argument. but it is worth trying to pre-empt arguments, pick your battles and work out how to address problems sensibly before things blow out of proportion. also worth trying to work out whether little bickerings are symptomatic of a bigger issue which isn't getting addressed.

<3 thank you for that