We’ve Just Had Our First Fight. Is Our Relationship Doomed?

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

Hey Doc,

After years of having problems meeting women and going on dates I’ve met one with whom I’m vibing really well. With her I did not feel that I needed to hide who I am, that I needed to play games or second guess my actions, dating went pretty much smoothly and felt effortless.

We are both 27, for me this is the first relationship, for her it is not. She started in college and had multiple boyfriends until now but told me this is her first healthy relationship. Three months in we are having our first problem and I’m scared this is the end.

We were with some friends and the topic of children came up and I said I don’t want any. That night she asked me again to clarify, there I reiterated my point and learned that eventually she wants to either bear children or adopt. From the discussion it seems that she is at a point where she is almost ready to move to the “family” stage in her life. From my side I barely experienced the “couple” stage. Some days have passed and this discussion is making us grow distant, she switched from this lovely girlfriend to a platonic friend. It feels that we are both wasting time and is going to make the eventual break up hurt even more. I might change my mind after I had more time with her or I might not. Same for her, maybe these wishes disappear or maybe not.

Am I just overreacting or are these kinds of moments normal in a couple? Should I break up and in the future try to find someone that is in the same stage of life?

The Troubled Beginner

I’m going to spare you the lecture I give folks in the early stages of their first relationship, TTB. You’re a reader, so I’m sure you’ve seen it many times before, especially recently. All I will say is that at three months in, neither of you are really in a position to make an informed decision about whether you want to entangle your lives permanently by having kids together.

Instead, I want to point out that, despite how things feel right now,  the problem you have isn’t the one you think you have. And as weird as it may seem, that’s actually OK, because this is actually a learning opportunity for you. I hope you take it seriously, because what we have here is the chance for you to learn a series of lessons that are going to make an impact on your relationships – both your current one and any that you have in the future.

The first lesson is simple: the number of relationships a person has or hasn’t had are less important than what someone has learned from them. The fact that your girlfriend’s had multiple boyfriends in the past doesn’t mean as much as the fact that those relationships weren’t healthy for her. The problem, however, is that even if one can recognize unhealthy or toxic aspects to a relationship, that doesn’t mean they may not have taken the wrong ideas from them anyway.

One of the important parts of recovering from a toxic relationship – or a string of them, for that matter – is making sure that you recognize patterns that you may have developed or fallen into over the course of them. If, for example, you (the general “you”, not you or your partner specifically, TTB) were in a series of relationships where disagreement or conflict was “punished” by withdrawing affection or intimacy or giving the other person the silent treatment, you may fall into those same behaviors yourself, behaving the same way with future partners.

The problem is: this sort of behavior is the antithesis of healthy conflict resolution. Pulling away or punishing the other person doesn’t make it more likely to come to a solution that’s going to actually fix the problem. It just serves to ensure that one person gets what they want and the other person has to go with it or continue to endure misery.

This leads to the second important lesson: conflict isn’t inherently bad. Conflict in a relationship is inevitable. If you have two or more people in a relationship, you’re going to have conflict. No matter how much you love one another, how compatible you are or how much your goals and lives are aligned, there are still going to be areas of contradiction and discord, where your interests, ambitions or desires bump against theirs. That’s not a sign that there’s anything wrong with the relationship; it’s a sign that you’re two individuals, not exact duplicates of one another.

Sometimes conflict means that there’s an intractable issue in the relationship… but not always. Many times, conflict is about how you’ve expressed something, about needs being neglected or going unmet or simply about different points of view. One of the marks of a healthy relationship is how you confront and deal with conflict, rather than throwing your hands in the air and running around in a panic because you had a fight at three months.

Which leads us to the third lesson: effective conflict resolution means actually talking about the issue and trying to make sure you and your partner know where each other stands and why you both feel the way that you do. Case in point: it sounds to me like you’re making assumptions about how your girlfriend feels or where she stands in terms of the relationship. It also sounds like maybe you and she weren’t communicating as clearly as you could be over the issue of having kids – not just the issue of whether they were on the table, but when it might be an option. Poor communication means that you both come away with mistaken ideas about what the other person is feeling or what they’re thinking. It sounds to me like you’re thinking she wants them right away, while it seems like she thinks you don’t want them ever.

This is one of the reasons why I talk about the Awkward Conversation structure – explaining your position, how it makes you feel and why, and what you think a good solution or compromise might be and why you think that would explain things. Then you give your partner her chance to explain how she is feeling, what she sees as the issue and what she thinks would be a good resolution for the issue. In both cases, you want to make sure that you take turns explaining your side of things as clearly as you can, without interruption. Even if you have questions or feel like you’re being misunderstood or misinterpreted, interrupting to object, to clarify or to ask questions runs the risk of derailing the conversation and sending you both down unproductive side conversations. That makes it much harder to return to the main issue – especially if those side topics only end up obscuring or confusing things further.

And now the fourth lesson: don’t borrow trouble from the future. Here is a truth: all relationships end; it’s just a question of when and how. Some relationships end because people break up. Some relationships end because one person dies. None of these mean that the relationship was a failure or that it was doomed from the start. Nor, for that matter, does an eventual ending mean that the relationship was a failure or a waste of time and you should’ve ended things sooner rather than later.

You aren’t psychic. You aren’t Nostradamus. Ending a relationship NOW because you anticipate a break up in the future is profoundly short-sighted… especially for reasons that may or may not actually be in play. You’re not responding to careful consideration of facts and evidence, you’re responding to your own anxieties and fears. Yes, it’s true: breaking up now would mean that it would hurt less than in the future… but that’s true of every relationship you will ever have. If you were to follow that train of thought to its logical conclusion, you’d want to break up with someone as soon as possible after getting together, lest you experience greater heartache down the line. But that sparing yourself the theoretical pain comes with a cost, and that cost is the happiness, joy, intimacy, growth and companionship you would have in the meantime.

Right now, you’re having a low-key freakout and it’s got the brain weasels gnawing at your anxieties. But having anxiety doesn’t mean that you’re correct. Anxiety isn’t rational; that’s why we call it “anxiety”. It’s just your brain’s attempt to protect you. But – importantly – protecting you doesn’t mean “looking out for your best interests”, nor does it mean “ensuring your happiness”. It just means “trying to preserve your safety at any cost”. Is it possible that this relationship isn’t going to work in the long-term? Of course. But that’s not the same as definitely not going to work. Especially when you’re reacting to assumptions, not information.

This isn’t about “stages of life”, nor is it about whether a relationship is doomed. This is about you and your girlfriend needing to practice some better communication and conflict resolution, instead of jumping to conclusions based on fear and misunderstanding. You and she need to carve out time to sit down and actually talk things through and ensure that you two are actually hearing each other. This means having an Awkward Conversation paired with making sure that you are hearing and understanding what the other person’s position is – saying “Ok, if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying X – is that right?”

Once you reach the point of actually hearing and correctly interpreting what the other is saying and feeling, then you can focus on next steps and what that will mean for the two of you going forward. Part of those next steps will be deciding whether this is an intractable problem. After all, there isn’t really a compromise position if one person wants children and the other doesn’t. You can’t exactly try out children for a while to see how it goes. Nor is it fair of you to try to wait things out in hopes that she’ll change her mind and those desires will “just go away”. That’s the sort of behavior that ruins relationships, curdling love and respect into bitterness and antipathy.

If it really is the case that you don’t want kids ever – rather than right now – and she wants them ASAP, rather than at some nebulous point in the future, then yes, your best course of action will be to break up. That’s ultimately the kindest choice, especially for her. But if that’s not the case, then breaking up now would risk cutting off your nose to spite your face – sacrificing the present for a future that may never come to pass.

But this brings us to the fifth and final lesson: just because a relationship ended doesn’t mean that it failed, nor does the length of a relationship define its success. One of the problems with how we view relationships is that we assume that relationships are only successful if one or both partners die in the saddle and that’s not true. A relationship between two people who stayed together while seething in resentment isn’t a success just because it lasted for decades. A relationship isn’t a failure just because it only lasted six months. A relationship’s success or failure is ultimately measured in how you feel about one another.

If you end a relationship and still have affection and respect for one another, that’s a success. That doesn’t mean you have to be close friends or still be in each other’s lives; you can know that you have to separate completely and thoroughly but still be able to look back with fondness on what you had and acknowledge that the good outweighed the bad. You can also know that not every relationship is meant to last for a lifetime and still appreciate it for what it is – for what it’s brought into your life, for how it encouraged you to grow and mature and learn about yourselves and each other. Not every love story is meant to be an epic poem; some are just meant to be a short story and that’s ok.

But again: that’s still a possibility, not a certainty, especially for where you are now. Right now, what you need is to put these lessons into practice and talk with each other instead of pulling away at the first sign of trouble. The sooner you learn that lesson, the more successful relationships you’ll have, while avoiding unnecessary heartbreak.

Good luck.

Dear Dr. NerdLove

I am a mid-50s male, retired early and work part time at a retail shop in their “order online, pick up in store” desk.

A few days ago, I was waiting on a customer who went on and on about how his wife orders online, how he has to pick it up and…. While he was talking a nice-looking woman came up (40s-50s years old?) and waited. We made eye contact and she rolled her eyes about the guy talking on and on and I kind of rolled my eyes also.

As the guy was done checking to make sure he got everything and started to walk away he said something about “I hope your wife doesn’t do things like this to you”. I said “I am single, I don’t need to worry about it”. The lady stepped up to the area and said “I am single too, maybe we should have coffee or something sometime”. I said “sure”, all while I scanned her phone, the package she picked up from the bins, and printed the receipt which took a very short amount of time. She then walked away. As I had another customer walking up I really couldn’t ask he to come back to the counter to ask more questions.

So, she gave me the invitation to get together, that is the good news. Bad news is she personally didn’t give me any contact information. Good news is I have her account information with name, address, and phone number. Do I use this information to call her? Or because it is actually the store’s information I have access to I shouldn’t? Or, I checked her public social media profiles and it says she is single, so I thought about going to the area around where she lives and conveniently running into her as I do have her address, is this creepish/stalkish?

Thanks,

Customer Service Cupid

Let me make this incredibly simple, CSC: holy hopping sheep shit don’t do that. Don’t do any of that – don’t look up her information, don’t call her, don’t crawl any further on social media, don’t “just happen” to show up in places where she hangs out. DO. NOT. DO. THAT.

Yes, I know, she made a comment about getting together for coffee. There’s a difference between an idle comment and an invitation with intent. “Maybe we should, some time” is not the same as “I would definitely like to do this, here’s my number, please call me.” She did not give you consent to try to find her by any means necessary. This is an astoundingly bad idea on many levels, with a near-certainty that it’s going to go horrifically wrong for you, messily and all over the place.

Let’s start with pure self-preservation. Simply accessing the store’s information on a customer for your own purposes is going to get you fired if you’re lucky, regardless of the whys and wherefores. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the employee handbook and terms of employment you signed have very specific things to say about how you can access and use customer information and even more pointed things to say about misusing it.

But let’s say that you manage to find a way to look it up without leaving a trail – either because you logged in, you used someone else’s access or you just happened to shoulder-surf and find it while someone else was looking it up for legitimate purposes. Your contacting her out of the blue, friending her on social media or just “conveniently” being in the area is the sort of behavior that has an incredibly high chance of freaking her the everloving fuck out. She may not remember you, or may not remember making the comment about being single and maybe you two should meet for coffee. Hell, you might be misinterpreting what she said, because memory is a slippery thing. But even if you are recalling it correctly and she remembers saying it, that’s not the same thing as giving you permission to go sleuthing around to get her info and doing it this way is going to send up more giant red flags than a military parade in Moscow.

Why? Because this is a significant violation of privacy and boundaries. It suggests that you’re capable of finding her even if she doesn’t necessarily want to be found, and you’re willing to make wild leaps without getting permission, based on very little. Under the most generous interpretation of those actions, it would suggest that you don’t have the emotional intelligence to know that this would be a bad idea, which would imply that you lack judgement in these sensitive areas. A less generous reading would suggest that you knew but didn’t care.

Yes, you know you have the best of intentions. She does not. So even if she was sincere, the way you’re talking about going about it has high odds of changing her mind.

And if we take this further, the consequences of those actions escalate. Now your romantic gesture means complaints to your manager and the store – again, if you’re lucky. It could also lead to things like, oh, ruining the store’s reputation or even suing the shit out of the place for this incredible breach of privacy. Which, I might point out, could very easily rebound onto you, with you being held liable in civil proceedings.

So no, under no fucking circumstances should you do this. This is a series of very bad ideas with no upside, just varying degrees of how fucked you’d be for doing so.

What should you do instead? Simple: you wait and let her come to you. She knows you’re an employee and she can make reasonable inferences about when you’d be on shift. If – and this is a mighty big if – she’s serious and would like to see you again and she realizes that she didn’t leave you her contact information or get yours, she’s entirely capable of coming back to the store to find you and rectify that mistake.

If she doesn’t? Well… that’s a shame. But all it means is that this wasn’t meant to be. You don’t need to leap on every chance that comes by, especially when the risks are so drastically out of proportion to the reward. There will be other women and other opportunities… opportunities that don’t involve massive invasions of someone’s privacy.