There’s a natural level of comfort in a healthy relationship. There’s a level of comfort in your behavior and attitude. You’re most likely to take out your frustrations and angers on your significant other, not necessarily because he’s the one to blame, but because you know he’s not going anywhere. Why are you yelling at me? I don’t have anything to do with this? No, no you don’t. But you’re the one who is here, you’re the one I can vent to, you’re the one who’s still going to be around tomorrow even though I am being completely unreasonable. A while back, one of my single girlfriends got into her first fight with her then-boyfriend. She called me, distraught. Certainly they would break up over this. If my husband and I were to split up after a fight, we would have split up after only six months, and every day since then. He and I fight every single day. Every day. I think maybe when we went to Hawaii for four days, we went two of those days without fighting. But otherwise, every day. And usually about the same shit every time. Maybe we’re not out-and-out yelling at each other, but at some point during each day one of us expresses an annoyance of the other. Fighting is normal. And the reason that fighting is normal—even healthy in a relationship—is that you’re comfortable enough to fight. You’re comfortable enough to speak up and say, Hey asshole, stop doing that, and start doing this! You know that it’s safe to do so, that even though there are things that we dislike about one another, that even though we may speak and act irrationally at times, the other one isn’t going anywhere.
Every now and again, when one of us is doing something particularly disgusting, I ask myself, When did we get to this point? Have we gone a little too far? Are we too comfortable with each other? To a degree, it’s difficult to be sexy with someone after you’ve seen their poop. I have a lot of friends who haven’t reached this point in their relationships. I have a lot of friends who, even after years of marriage, still try to maintain a level of distance regarding certain intimacies. One of my girlfriends dated a guy for two years and in that time never once was in front of him without her make up on. That seems like entirely too much work for me. Even so, I sometimes wonder if my husband and I should lean more toward that. I’ve heard statistics saying that this increased level of comfort—including the decreased level of intimacy and effort to maintain physical attractiveness—is a leading cause of divorce. Maybe we should try a little harder to remain physically attractive to each other—slim back down to our pre-marriage (or at least pre-kids) weight, shave and get haircuts on a regular basis. Maybe we should give each other a little more personal space—use the bathroom only in private, close the door and light a candle. Perhaps doing so would put that spark back into our marriage. But to me, that level of comfort, that ability for me to completely and utterly be myself without hesitation, is the spark. Even though we fit together pretty damn well, even though we complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, what it comes down to, what makes us really work is that he and I are comfortable with each other. We can be ourselves. And I’m just too lazy and insecure to want to have to do that all over again.
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