My husband and I had our dumbest fight ever. It was about whether or not to include pinenuts in a pasta dish. I didn’t care and he wanted them. That is totally AOK. No issues at all. I like pine nuts. But I wanted him to understand my perspective and after explaining it for quite a while, he said he no longer wanted pinenuts. That was not at all what I was trying to achieve. I wanted understanding. He wanted release from being made to understand. What to do?!
A few days later I wrote the following paragraph as advice to myself. It’s very useful and necessary for me, maybe less so for people who don’t talk so much or who don’t have an obsessive need to communicate their every inner rumination.
Try to swallow your complaints, your perspective, your need to be understood on your own terms. Try not having terms. Your terms are as a sandcastle to the surf of other. Try to enjoy merging with the ocean. It’s going to happen regardless of your compliant.
On another note, these are a few recent abstracts from my current little book. I plan to write about them soon. I’ve been doing theme and variation on the idea of grid.
Sidewalk Face 
Great post. I have wasted much of my life in the pine nut loop!
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Thank you Geoff! I want to get out of this loop but I don’t know how. I may have to sew my mouth shut!
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Ha, that is a drastic measure of last resort!
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Love your grid. I immediately thought the pattern would make a good quilt. Ha ha.
That’s sound advice.
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Thank you Mariss! What a nice thing to say! And the inspiration I need to start writing about this grids!
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It’s a great feeling to be understood, but you’re right, it shouldn’t be a requirement for contentment. Plus, regardless of which side of the argument you’re on, aren’t we all a little…nuts?
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Ha! Yes! So true. In his defense, my husband gets me like no one else. I just need to reciprocate and get that he needs to not articulate every single thing every single time. Fair enough!
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We fought over pasta because he thought it was a pasta that easily overcooked and accussed me of having bought a pasta that was not of quality. And then from pasta we moved on to other things. However, he knows very well that I hate shopping, and I also hate cooking, yet he takes it out on me often, despite the fact that I try to do everything and I get tired and I’m not even in good health. The fact is that sometimes he is stressed by other thoughts and he takes it out on me for some trivial reasons like pasta, or the lack of milk in the fridge or something else. These fights make me feel very bad, also because I have heart problems, but he does not stop. Maybe he’s waiting for me to have a heart attack, so he’ll always be able to eat his perfectly cooked pasta.
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When we fight over trivial things, the real disagreement is almost always something else, hidden. The trivial is just a metaphor. I think he needs to be responsible for the pasta in your relationship. Wishing you good health!
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