1: We fought; he slept; I stayed up overthinking all my life choices.

2: He didn’t pick up his phone; I panicked, left him way too many missed calls; later he told me he was in a meeting; I felt guilty for my impatience.

3: I was pestering him to say why he was upset; he said he needed to process whatever had happened at work in silence; I felt blocked out.

P and I had been friends for seven years before we signed the papers and started sharing a home as a married couple. I was 19; he was 18 when we met. We grew up together, saw each other through my acne struggles, his weight gains; my medical woes, the anguish of his loss; our career moves and idealistic dreams. And so when I heard people say that the first year of living together is always the bumpiest, it made no sense to me. How bumpy could it be if you already knew all the speed breakers of your relationship? Turns out, no matter how much you know, there are always revelations to be had, and one is never prepared.

The differences were small, but if you were expecting them to be about wet towels and unkempt socks, that wasn’t it. The ‘smallest’ differences rose from the biggest thing: our respective legendary childhoods. He had his patterns, I had mine, and both came from our formative years. It was also fascinating to notice how gendered our patterns were despite our urban upbringing and liberal education. I was trained to be a ‘woman’; he was trained to be a ‘man’, and undoing that training to whatever extent possible is still a work in progress every day.

In the initial days of our marriage, whenever we had an argument, I would always end up apologising not because I was sorry but because I didn’t want the cold silence between us to last. I had this elder-daughter-people-pleaser urge to constantly ‘manage’ and make everything ‘alright’ as quickly as possible. I had also taken the very Instagrammable advice of always resolving everything before going to bed a bit too seriously. If you ask me today — four years into the marriage — I would say it’s not the greatest advice. Sleeping over an argument, giving time to marinate your thoughts, and some silence before you begin to resolve whatever needs to be resolved, more often than not, makes a lot more sense. Being a person whose first response is to freeze in the face of conflict, P anyway preferred this approach. I learnt it over time.

A few years ago, we had a fight, and P left the house in the middle of it. I thought of all the worst possibilities I could think of in his absence. When he came back, I broke down, for I was furious at him for leaving and relieved to have him back. It was a pattern between us. I would constantly and sometimes unnecessarily worry about his whereabouts. He would shut down or take off in the middle of things. I have always been anxious as a person; I knew it even before I was clinically diagnosed. And so for better or for worse, whoever is with me needs to know that I have to be kept informed. My mind needs to be aware of the specifics to ensure that it doesn’t make flying assumptions. P recognised this, eventually, and adapted. We broke our pattern. He stopped taking off and started giving me details, and I don’t remember the last time I had to worry about him.

Screaming and yelling during arguments doesn’t go well with me because of the experiences I had in my early years. P feels blamed and hence cornered and defensive easily because of his early experiences. Sometimes even when P isn’t really yelling but may have only raised his voice a little to put a point forward, I get triggered. Sometimes even when I am only questioning P about something and not really trying to blame him for the said thing, he gets triggered. We react to the present situation not as the adults we are today but as the children we once were. The child within us feels offended not so much because of the immediate happenings but because of what happened to them decades ago.

The result of triggering each other every now and then could have resulted in walking on eggshells or approaching the other with kid gloves. Thankfully and fortunately, though, that’s not how P and I dealt with it. With each passing day, it became clearer to the both of us that being in this together, of course, means all the good things, but it also means that we will hurt each other sometimes, no matter how much we hate it. And that’s inevitable. The mere awareness and acceptance of this fact helps. As long as I know and accept that I am triggered by a raised voice and P knows and accepts that he can perceive a question as an accusation, there’s always a way open for us to talk about it without the kid gloves.

Learning the story behind our triggers and differences obviously helps us navigate them better, but if I leave that aside, it is also one of the most intimate experiences one can have with their partners. No one, not even the people who birthed me, knows me better than P; and I promise if you ask P, he will tell you the same. Sharing a space, waking up and sleeping beside each other, getting groceries, planning meals and expenses, navigating work and caregiving responsibilities, and constantly helping the other while unintentionally stepping on their toes reveals the side of your partner that others rarely get to see.

At the end of the day, it is all about bringing our whole selves, our triggers and trappings to the relationship without any guilt or shame, giving space to the other person to do the same, and then finding ways to coexist with our individualities. I might not always understand everything that’s in my partner’s past, but I can respect and embrace all of it. The differences aren’t a threat; they are ought to be there as a reminder that I am in love with another consciousness and not a reflection of myself.

PS: All the excerpts shared in this piece are from the book ‘The Course of Love’ by Alain de Botton

If you’ve read till here, I am so grateful. Thank you! This is the eighth essay in a series of 40 essays that I am going to publish this year, on Sundays. I hope you like them; if you do, share it with a friend?

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