Pick a fight with me

On the benefits of debate in relationship

My parents took the boys for the entire week, and although we miss them and their adorable chaos, it feels like the nicest vacation ever to be home with just one child. I’d rather be home, in my clean house with Guion and the baby, than go to Spain.

Last night, Guion made steak chinoise, in celebration of his own birthday, and we ate it with a glass of chilled red wine out on the deck while Lucy slept—and, reader, we felt like one million dollars. We actually talked to each other and argued about unimportant ideas, which is the hottest thing to me.

As a couple, we love abstraction and ideas, and we also love to debate them with each other. It is one of our marital quirks that often makes other people uncomfortable, I’ve noticed. We get heated. We trade mild insults. We wax loquacious and exchange sarcastic barbs. It’s very sexy to me—and very unsexy to many other people.

Our obnoxious tête-à-têtes are unappealing to people who just want “everyone to be nice and get along.” I can’t think of a more tedious evening, frankly. When conversation hits a lull, I like to throw a topic bomb into the middle of the table. Do you believe in Satan? What’s worse: Population collapse or climate change? Should people own pets?? Guion is typically one of the few who is willing to pick it up and try to defuse it with me. This is one of the reasons I find our marriage perpetually exciting, fourteen years later.

If we’re together for any extended period of time, the ideological sparks fly. It’s sport, for sure, but I also see it as bonding and sharpening. Our ideas are getting better; our relationship is getting deeper. There’s hardly anything I find as exciting as that.

I grow increasingly bored with people who don’t challenge me or can only talk about polite things. To me, the measure of a deep friendship is someone who is willing to argue with me, about anything, significant or not. I find it hard to trust someone who won’t argue with me. If you’re not willing to tell me—to my face—that you think I’m terribly wrong, and here’s why, I fear our relationship will only remain at a surface level. I am disinclined to try to go deeper.

For all of these reasons, I’m often a disagreeable dinner party guest. I perhaps overvalue vigorous parley as the marker of a healthy relationship and a good time (blame it on the years spent in the profound nerdery of homeschool team policy debate). I am easily exhausted by polite conversation and small talk. I feel like I’m suffocating when I’m in a room and everyone is chit-chatting about the weather and their job descriptions and their childcare arrangements. Hence, the topic bombs. It’s selfish; it’s because I’m bored; but it’s also a test. Who is willing to go there with me?

In mixed company, I often find that it’s usually men who will pick up the conversational gauntlet. This sometimes bums me out. I think it’s because women my age are (A) typically carrying a heavy mental load of practicalities, making abstractions far off and unappealing, and (B) trained to be agreeable. Be meek, be nice, be lovely. Certainly, I know many women who love a rousing debate, and I keep them close to me, but more often than not, women stay quiet. I fall prey to these traps myself, too. Sometimes I come home and Guion wants to talk to me about Thought Forms and I just stare blankly and ask if the laundry has been folded and if we need to bathe all the kids tonight. Other times, I feel the social pressure to be demure, be pleasant, be ladylike. Sometimes that’s called for. But I grow weary of these wallflower tendencies, in myself, in others.

All of this probably just means I’m a conversationally dramatic and bad person, a tense little incendiary device who will blow up your nice dinner party. I guess I’m saying I’m OK with that, in my old age. If the invitations cease, I’ll always have my hot, super-intelligent, unusual husband to come home to. (HBD, lover.)

---

My reading has ebbed and flowed in dramatic ways this year. I read ravenously during my leave, consuming nearly fifty books in twelve weeks, but now the reading pace has slowed to a mere trickle. I can barely finish a single novel now. I read haltingly on the Kindle at night, during Lucy’s wakings, but feel unsatisfied. The Kindle feels like junk food to my reading mind; I don’t know why. The text is the same, but the reading experience is so different; it changes how I read and whether I remember what I read. You can’t beat it for convenience, for the dim light it supplies itself during those 4 a.m. nursing sessions, but I miss my real books. Impulsively, I went to New Dominion and bought five real paper-and-ink books, and just surrounding myself with them made me feel calmer. I’m very excited by the new Rachel Cusk novel, for what it’s worth, and reading it slowly, with my eyes and hands, savoring each wild paragraph.

---

The summer movement of the natural world interests me right now. I feel like baby Lucinda, watching everything with new eyes: Bees descending into the open bowl of a magnolia blossom, starlings pecking rhythmically in the lawn, cottontail rabbits freezing in place, spiders spinning from one railing to the next. Sometimes, contrary to my prior opinions, it is good to just watch.

---

Currently Reading

• Parade, Rachel Cusk

• The Death of Vivek Oji, Akwaeke Emzei