The Russian lover and I had a knock-down drag-out fight last night, a one-off action spiraling into a series of miscommunications and dramatic gestures. It is so hard sometimes, when we fight, for me to figure out how to say what I want to say without somehow making things worse. I have a natural talent for making things worse without trying; for making things worse the more I make every effort to the contrary. Five minutes spent contemplating the best way to phrase a text message only results in something that comes across as passive aggressive and bitchy, when I was going for mature and thoughtful. And instead of diffusing a tense situation, I inflate it to epic proportions.
I'm still learning how to have conflict in a way that is constructive instead of destructive; I'm still learning to communicate instead of trying to manipulate. And all I need to do is simply say what I have to say without trying to hide it or color it or sneak it in somewhere, and this is something I have gotten infinately better at while being in a relationship with someone who will not hold my trivial opinions and preferences against me. The Russian lover is, in some ways, curing me of being a "woman" in the worst senses of the word while slowly helping me to become a woman in the best.
I think the better a relationship is, the bigger the occaisional arguments are. Or at least, the bigger they feel. Some relationships are mostly about conflict, with latent friction surfacing almost constantly and fights about laundry as intense as those about infidelity, but all of it on the same frequency of general unhappiness. But in a good relationship, where things are pleasant and comfortable and even wonderful most of the time, the disappointments are more jarring and upsetting. Conflicts are ruptures, a departure from the normal state of things, and both parties are as angry at the argument as they are at each other.
No two people will ever coexist without arguments, as much as we might wish it otherwise. But it's whether you allow the arguments to become simply rifts, or whether you allow arguments to teach you about yourself, your partner and about your responses to your partner, that determines whether two people survive their arguments and grow closer after them or are merely separated by them.
Thus the importance of fucking; sex is like the kiss and a bandaid for relationship boo-boos that make them all better. So even though we had sex a few hours ago, I'm here at work thinking that I just want to spend the rest of the day sitting on the Russian lover's penis. And if we could figure out the logistics so he could continue getting work done at his computer while I did so, I might do just that.