I grew up in a family that didn't argue much. I didn't have an angry verbal confrontation with a friend until I was in my twenties. Sometimes I wonder if any of those long-lost friendships could have lasted if I'd just spoken up, if I'd been willing to take the risk of coming to blows with someone I cared about. Because if you're not fighting about a problem, you're probably trying to avoid the problem. And avoiding the problem eventually becomes avoiding the person associated with the problem, distancing yourself emotionally or even physically. At some point you won't know what happened; the relationship will just be over.
Of course, fighting all the time is just as bad as not fighting at all. I'm glad that the Russian lover and I have found a happy medium of conflict -- enough to address our occaisional problems without wallowing in them. I don't count spats as conflict - spats are just the friction that comes from sharing space. Running late, losing things, taking up too much room in the closet...two people trying to do life together are simply going to step on each other's toes from time to time. And it's not a big deal unless you make it a big deal.
But there are big deals - about who the other person is, and how they live their life, and the decisions they make. What they contribute to the relationship, what they take out of it. And if the relationship is worth fighting for, you're going to fight. I'm glad I've learned that fighting (in moderation) is not what drives people apart; the refusal to fight is.
The Russian lover and I have very different conflict styles. I simmer like a pot on the stove; he explodes like a burrito in the microwave. With me, you have to wait a long time for the water to boil; with him, you think you've got three minutes before it starts to get hot but 30 seconds later you are scraping burnt tortilla and beans off the walls.
When the Russian lover goes into Very Angry mode, I tend to go into Conflict Resolution mode. This is probably owing in part to my pacifist Mennonite heritage, and the rest to the fact that I am female. I immediately try to have a Meaningful Conversation. This does not provoke a welcoming response; I have since learned that a Very Angry man simply needs the time and space to be Very Angry. He may need to go for a walk, or shut himself up in a room with beer and a cigar. He does not want to talk about his feelings, because those should be obvious. He is Very Angry! But when he has calmed down, you can talk about what went wrong and what needs to be done differently. And then you can have sex.
When we first started dating, I did not know at all how to respond to the Russian lover. I associated anger with Complete and Total Rejection, and I would go into a panic. After our first big fight, the Russian lover went out for a walk and I grabbed a bottle of bourbon, having convinced myself he was never coming back, or that he would come back in the morning after having a meaningless fling just to upset me. My fears were not based on anything resembling reality, because I disassociated the anger from my lover. I believed that anger made people into someone other than the person they told you they were the rest of the time. Anger felt unpredictable, like all bets were off and the other person was going to wound you in any way they could.
There was a time of my life where I kept company with a man who was a walking time bomb, a self-absorbed bottle of repressed rage. But I didn't realize it wasn't that he became a jerk when he got angry; he was just a jerk who sometimes got angry. Eventually I was able to understand that he was existentially an asshole, and his anger had simply been a magnification of what was already there.
I no longer feel the need to drink myself into a stuper and sob into my cell phone at someone anytime the Russian lover and I have a time-out inducing conflict. I let him have his space, and I go into mine. And when it's time, we find our way back to each other. Good men get angry sometimes, just like good women can be little bitches sometimes. We all cast shadows.