Have to know how to fight

Do you know how to fight?

If you care about your relationships dare to practice fighting. 

It does not really matter what you fight over....just dare to push and dare to allow to have your buttons pushed every once in a while. I am not talking about violence here, I am talking about verbal sparring back and forth about things that matter to you. We all know that no one couple or friendship can hold out too long without fighting. No matter how much you love each other, at some point there will be a disagreement and when that happens, if you want the relationship to survive, you have to have had some practice. 

In my marriage, we argue. Not a lot, not a little. But I know it's not a huge scary thing it use to be and overall arguing is okay. When my husband and I first met though he would hate arguing and would avoid me to "keep the peace", or so he thought, which would make me even more upset. As we grew to know each other more over the years we got better at resolving things without it causing so much stress. We learned that arguments are okay. That apologies after always matter and that sometimes we are wrong and sometimes we are right. That's it basically....re-read those words. want peace? that is the secret right there. 

I write this now because I just came to realize today that I lost a very special relationship a while back because we never learned how to argue. So much pent-up pain and hurt kept getting swept under the rug in order to "keep the peace", or in order not to shake the boat, that one day there was no more room to move. hurtful actions, events and words from the past were never properly and openly addressed in fear of disrupting the peace. These topics kept creeping up over and over and over again in weird, subtle, and noxious, understated ways which poked and poked until one day the friendship was no longer worth the weight of the pain.  None of us at fault, but how does one fix a broken thing when one does not have the tools to fix what is broken.