Getting away with it

On learning that relationship conflict isn't trouble, it's the point (shocking, lads).

Hello! I’m back from a much-needed hiatus! Thanks for reading. <3

I’ve probably spent a large chunk of my life chasing the relief of not being in trouble when by all estimations, I believed I was in capital T-Trouble. I had got suspended from school for bunking (I have always been myself) and I cried not at the injustice (many others bunked too without being suspended) but at the fact that I knew my dad would be so unspeakably angry.

In my house, anger was corrosive and corrective — he didn’t live with it alone, he ruled with it. In any case, I called him because I had to and for reasons I’ll never know he was unspeakably angry but in this instance, not angry at me. Angry at the school. Angry at the teachers. Angry at authority. He fetched me and I could barely believe how good it felt to have a common enemy, we cackled all the way home. I loved him so much. I cried and he swore and I spent the week watching TV without much examination from him. 

The simple math of my childhood was you did something wrong, and then you got in trouble, big trouble. The anger was meant as a deterrent and a punishment. The anger was meant as a philosophy and a warning. All could be well, and you could do something wrong and then boom, is that trouble? Cos you’re in it, kid. So, there was being in trouble, there was being good, and now after this suspension business, there was this third thing: getting away with it. 

Since then, many times over, I have been unable to shake the feeling of “being in trouble” when doing something wrong, whether by mistake or intentionally. I have also lied, told petty half-truths (to myself and others) to try to swing for “getting away with it” and if I learned any lesson last year (and I learned many) there’s no “being in trouble” and there’s definitely no “getting away with it”. 

Truly revelatory from

Beth McColl

…

These early lessons about conflict were unquestioned when I built a template for my adult life. I didn’t think to be curious about how anger can and should show up in the world. I didn’t know that people could be upset with you, and it could be okay (still absolutely shaking at this tbqh!). In fact, it’s more than okay, sometimes it’s necessary for both parties. As Alain de Botton describes, I hadn’t learned that some people “crave arguments to seek their equilibrium”. 

All of this to say: I am conflict-avoidant and had up until recently viewed conflict in any relationship as some sort of failure, albeit sometimes minor. But failure implies a binary — pass or fail, in trouble or good — and real relationships are often good because they nurture the messy middle, or better yet, render markers like “good” or “bad” irrelevant in favour of an authenticity absolved of simple labeling. The revelation came, oddly enough, through attachment theory. I love a theory! While reading about avoidant partners and their need to be seen as successful, I recognized myself, despite being comically anxiously attached. (I really recommend the book Secure Love by Julie Menanno!) The math was simple: avoid conflict to maintain the illusion of success. Keep the peace at all costs. Great, totally chill system, except for one small detail — it makes real intimacy utterly impossible.

It was a random Instagram post that I can’t now find that finally cracked it open for me: conflict isn't something to be avoided in relationships because conflict is where connection happens. Sometimes truth arrives from ancient texts and sometimes truth arrives in a millennial-coloured Instagram carousel. The post stripped away my complicated equations about being good or bad, in trouble or safe, and laid bare the challenge: true connection is carved in the marble of conflict. If I'm to have a solid relationship then I am to accept conflict not as its price but as its making.

The cosmic joke in all of this is that my love, Mohato, is literally thee most chill guy in the universe. I’ve watched him in awe as he has goodnaturedly weathered multiple crises that would even in bite-size doses bring me to my knees. He moves through life with such natural peace that witnessing him has become its own kind of meditation — and mirror. His ease illuminates my constant vigilance, my certainty that I am perpetually one fight away from being kicked to the curb with a little bindle over my shoulder.

Me af

But maybe that's exactly why we work, besides the fact that we are both equally hot but in very different directions (more on this another time). His zen gives me space to learn that disagreement doesn't mean disaster, and that conflict can be a conversation rather than a shouty sentence. (Truly groundbreaking for my deluxe edition fight-or-flight response.) That sometimes, the thing you think will actually ruin fucking your life (I’m being dramatic but sometimes… yes) is actually building you, one difficult discussion at a time.