do you & your boyfriend ever fight? i believe there’s no reason for couples to fight if they just DON’T piss each other off but my friend says its healthy to be mad at each other once in a while. i’m not speaking of physical fights obviously

I agree with both you, and your friend. I think that any two people who are together for a long time are going to piss each other off. No matter how much you care about someone there are always going to be those times when you being a raging bitch somehow coincides with them being an irate ass. It’s life. No one is perfectly pleasant all the time and if they are, well, their blowups are usually twice as heinous. So get pissed off, but take that pissing match and turn it into something useful.

This is where I agree with you. Fighting isn’t productive. I don’t think my boyfriend have ever been in a fight  - at least not your typical Hollywood fight. No screaming, no throwing things at one another, no name calling or talk-to-the-handing. We’ll get irritated with one another, we’ll want some time alone, we’ll need to talk stuff out that makes us angry, but we don’t fight.

Fighting feels like the inability to communicate how you’re thinking and feeling either accurately enough or quickly enough. It also has to do with some particular personality traits – like perhaps the preference to hold things in, or the tendency to get hot-headed.

You’re taking out the negative emotions that have built up within you and your relationship and basically wrapping them up throwing them at your partner. What do you expect to get out of that? Makeup sex? A better-than-thou hardon?

I think it’s healthy to express when you are upset and why you are upset but I think there is a time and a place and a way for this to go down. There are a lot of different methods for conflict resolution that deserve more than a secondary place in this blog, but  I don’t think yelling and screaming is one of them.