Being good together doesn’t mean never fighting

One thing we’re great at is moving from one extreme of the issues to the other. When we talk about love then, or about relationships between people in general, it is even easier to divide the world in two, as if there were no valid middle ways. After all, being together is a complex issue and in the face of complexity, resorting to extreme simplification thrives. Hence, passing from a vision of “being well together” where the quarrel should be the rule, well enclosed in the famous phrase “love is not beautiful if it is not a quarrel”, to a vision for which one must always and only “go of love and agreement », is a moment. We should all agree that neither vision takes us very far. If there is in fact to beware of the first vision, where the dispute tends to delegate much of the responsibility of keeping the relationship alive, there is also to beware of the second, where on the contrary there is the risk of transforming the dispute into a sort of taboo. It will be counterintuitive, but the absence of conflict in a relationship is not a good sign at all, indeed, it is a rather reliable indicator of its deterioration.

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The vision according to which being well together means never entering into conflict is nothing more than the umpteenth false belief linked to that concept of a perfect relationship in which there are no lows, but a single great high, constant and imperturbable. One of the many legacies of that love understood as a form of mutual and absolute belonging, in which one of the two practically always ends up flattening on the other and attributing exaggerated importance to the couple, until it becomes the only possible world. It is clear that here too we are at the extremes, but in general the risk involved in understanding a relationship that works, of whatever nature it may be, as a separate dimension, immune from chaos, emotional turbulence and conflict, lies in being stranded within it. Today we are used to seeing many couples laughing and joking together on social media, staging their own complicity in a very often sweetened way, and it is also because of this continuous exposure to the hyper-positive love of others that we should be careful not to develop a one-dimensional view of “being good together”, all cuddling, caressing and kissing. In addition to not there is a relationship completely devoid of friction points, because from what I know once closed Instagram we are all human beings, it is essential to avoid the idea that their presence is an anomaly, something to worry about or even be ashamed of.

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The points of friction are as important as the points of contact, even if unlike the first they are not valued enough, because it is still evidently very annoying to us to accept that to feel good you must first learn to feel bad. The truth is that a quarrel can be worth much more than a hundred kisses, because thanks to the quarrel, normally repressed sensations can come to the surface, which could hardly be revealed in any other way. On the other hand, there is no growth without contrast, and when a relationship stabilizes to the point that it is never questioned, it happens that the discontents become latent. Quarrel certainly cannot be the rule, the backbone of the relationship, because this inevitably triggers a long-term toxic dynamic, but it cannot become the exception of the exceptions either. If it becomes so, it means that one has entered a dangerous phase of stalemate, equally unhealthy, or perhaps even more unhealthy, because coexistence has turned into connivance, and the crime committed concerns oneself.