That Weirdness After a Fight With Your Boyfriend
I had a fight with my fiancé last week. I was really mad that he kept placing the canola oil on the very top shelf where I couldn’t reach. I know, I know. Cooking oil is not a reason to lose my cool and start a fight with a person I love and cherish, but after climbing on top of the counters on my knees like a five-year-old looking for the secret candy stash, I lost it. I couldn’t TAKE it anymore. Everything seemed so UNFAIR. My height (but not even, because I’m tall), the way my kitchen was designed for giants, and my fiancé’s decision to place things in inconvenient places. Every ounce of calm in me evaporated. I became a different person. A monster.
“REALLY? You put the canola oil on the top shelf AGAIN?” I texted him, and added that reddened angry face emoji for emphasis. He absolutely needed to know I was pissed, big time.
I thought texting would have given me the chance to get all that crazy out, but it didn’t. I fumed until he got home from work and as soon as he shut the door, I just let him HAVE IT. Obviously, the fight was stupid, and he eventually apologized for placing bottles out of my reach, and I apologized for acting like an insane person, but the next few hours were really, really awkward.
We went grocery shopping that night, and I was still not emotionally ready to speak with him, so whenever he would say something, I only answered with a single word. I would grumble, “Yeah,” or “Sure,” or “No.” Obviously, this became annoying because acting like a toddler is usually annoying, so he just stopped talking to me and we completed our grocery trip in silence. Let me just say, silent grocery shopping isn’t actually conducive. We accidentally bought two tubs of sour cream. He picked out a cereal we already had. And we came home annoyed and exhausted.
“OK, this is stupid. I’m not even mad anymore,” I said, putting away the two tubs of sour cream. He agreed with me, and we made dinner while making a few feeble attempts at jokes. I asked how his day was. He said, “It was OK.” I told him our cat locked herself in a shelf again. We laughed, but it was kind of forced. I asked him to pass the salt. He did. AWKWARD.
Later, while we watched The Leftovers, I started to feel sad that our normal, wonderful dynamic was temporarily tarnished because of my quick, terrible temper. Who was I, even? Why would anyone love a person who is capable of a mental breakdown over canola oil? My fiancé, who could detect there was something wrong, sighed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!” I quipped. More like, everything, but whatever.
At this point, at least four hours had gone by since our fight. I didn’t even care about the canola oil anymore. Who needs canola oil? Olive and coconut oil are like, so much better for you, anyway. My fiancé looked at me, laughed, and said, “You know, I’ll love you no matter how psycho you are. Your psycho-ness makes you YOU.” I wasn’t sure how to take that, since I knew he was pretty much joking about my mental state of affairs. But I decided to embrace it; I can be melodramatic. So what? I decided it was time to let go of the canola oil and my embarrassing outburst over practically nothing. So I did.
