when will you carry me home
like the wounded star in the movie?
when will you carry me home
take it back to the start when you knew me?
Protip: Loudly belting out Travis songs as you mow the lawn is a great pick-me-up.
In an effort to better occupy the verbal processing part of my mind, instead of just letting it drift over songs I’ve listened to dozens of times, the same playlists again and again, I loaded my mp3 player up with old podcasts I had archived from my first stint at my current company, but hadn’t listened to in years. In the process, I also found I had saved a number of old NPR full concert recordings, among them one of Travis performing at the 9:30 Club in D.C. back in 2007. They put on a great show, and Fran Healy’s stage banter is some of the best I’ve heard (side note: major accent jealousy). As a songwriter, he has a real knack for melody, but beneath the delightful chord changes, the lyrics are deceptively deep. I’d love to hear them live.
Just about every song in their set was a favorite, but “Battleships” freshly stood out to me. Fran introduced it by dedicating it to anyone who’s ever had, or currently was in, a conflict with a partner, parent, sibling, friend, or any other loved one—which pretty much includes everyone at some point in time. As I listened, I thought about the nature of conflict in relationships, and my own approach to it. Some folks seem to be comfortable with it in the sense that it’s something they’re familiar with, perhaps from a fractured home life or a series of stormy relationships. It brought to mind the fact that she asked me, point blank, on at least a couple of occasions, what I thought our first fight would be about. I replied both times that I believed it would probably be just me saying something stupid and then having to apologize for it (which did happen several times, it should be noted). But thinking about the quality of her inquiries, it was like she was almost eager for us to have a proper fight, and then make up. I wonder if she thought that would validate the relationship somehow? Like at that point, we would have covered, presumably, the full range of emotions, witnessed each other in every possible state AND weathered a conflict with our affection (hopefully) intact. And the thing is, I can actually relate to that eagerness; it would have made me feel closer to her.
But on a deeper level, it occurred to me that it takes a lot of self-possession to have a proper fight. I mean, if both parties are honest with themselves and each other, and the issue that provoked the conflict is real and significant, then there’s a nonzero chance that it could catalyze a breakup. It’s a risky thing, and both parties have to be aware of the stakes. It’s far easier, but more cowardly, in a sense, to simply roll over every time the other party makes a demand, or suck it up every time they say or do something that irks you. Now—picking one’s battles is important, and there IS a time and place for compromise and reaching a point of understanding, but there are definitely times when assertiveness need to come to the fore, and that’s something I want to improve on. Put another way, I’m very conflict-averse, and I wish I weren’t. I’ve always been that way, and I’ve often wondered why. I suspect some of it has to do with the fact that I never saw my parents fight and make up; they always did it behind closed doors, ostensibly to shield my brothers and I from their struggles and present a united front—a noble goal, but a side effect is that my brothers and I never really witnessed an example of them having a genuine divergence of opinion, then working through it. And another reason may simply tie into an insecurity over being abandoned, but I’m not really sure how far back that goes, since I never, ever felt that in my family life, and I was conflict-averse before I ever starting dating in my teens. So I’m unsure where ground zero for that instinct is.
The irony, of course, is that the more I simply roll over out of insecurity, the less assertive I am in key moments, and the less attractive I am as a partner, and the more likely I am to actually be broken up with. I think it’s something I need to discuss with my counselor, since I can theorize about paths forward, suss out strategies that would provide a framework in which I would know when to stand my ground, but not having had an example, as noted above, I’d like to get a second opinion. One thing I DO know: I simply can’t wait until I have an absolutely airtight case before I assert myself. That happens SO rarely, and takes SO much time to build that the moment is more often than not completely gone by the time I’m done moving all my chess pieces into place. There’s a topic that should elicit some rich discussion: When to fight, how to fight well, and fight constructively. I’d really like to learn.