I’ve heard that it’s healthy for couples to occasionally fight, provided that both people in the relationship fight fair. What constitutes fighting fair might vary slightly from person to person and culture to culture. But I think we all have a general sense of what it means to quarrel responsibly.
When in doubt, I often ask myself this question:
If I saw a character in a movie doing what I’m doing, would I root for the fictional character?
The answer is a good indication of whether or not I’m fighting fair. I think if most of us could step out of our bodies and watch our lives the way we take in fiction, we’d usually know what to do. Most people can tell when strangers are being awful.
These days, Alicia and I mostly only fight about relatively meaningless things, which is a blessing, for sure. Since the fall of 1993, we’ve been vulnerable and intimate with each other. We’ve also spent most of the past twenty years living and working in the same place. We each know when the other is being ridiculous. We know exactly how the other person will occasionally fail to be the best version of themselves, especially when tired and/or hungry. We know how to push each other’s buttons. And we know how to put each other back together again.
I once heard it said that in every relationship, one person plays the role of order and the other plays the role of chaos.
You see this a lot in movies.
Stanley Kowalski has order in his kingdom until Blanche DuBois starts spraying her perfume everywhere. Nurse Ratchet has order until R.P. McMurphy reawakens her ward’s lust for life. Red has Shawshank Prison all figured out until he bets against Andy Dufrense. Sal’s Pizzeria has order until Buggin’ Out asks how come they “got no brothers up on” the restaurant’s Italian-American Wall Of Fame. Carl Fredricksen has order until he discovers little Russell has stowed away in his floating house.
You need order and chaos dancing together in order to propel a plot.
You also need them dancing to propel a life.
For more than three decades, Alicia and I have been taking turns playing each other’s order and chaos.
I remember long ago reading Anne Lamott and being struck by a quote, which I mentally stored in paraphrased form. The internet says the first part goes like this:
“One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day.”
Alicia and I have definitely taken turns being nuts. Over the years, we have each played analyst and analysand, especially back before we both entered into analysis. But our individual psychological quirks are not the same. It’s not my place to comment publicly on my wife’s psyche, but I’ll tell you a little bit about mine.
Whenever I start to feel tired or anxious or frightened, order becomes very important to me. One way that manifests is an intense need to keep our possessions clean and in their proper places. When I am stressed, I really need my surroundings organized. And I can become a bit obsessive about that. Okay, a lot obsessive. This makes me a pretty reliable and often conscientious person. If I hone in on, say, getting a manuscript in proper order, my mental health tics can become a super power. I will compulsively work longer, harder, and more meticulously than most people free of the terrible need for order. There are many ways in which our society rewards obsessive behavior. But the aforementioned need can also, occasionally, make me tough to live with.
The other day, I came home exhausted from a hard run in the South Carolina heat and humidity. It was early August. Beastly. “Wearing the weather,” I recently heard someone say. I had been working all morning and afternoon on a page-one spec screenplay rewrite for a person who has the ability to make things happen in Hollywood. High risk, high reward situation. I was spent, but I felt good about the day’s work.
Post-run, I am our dog Kingsly’s favorite thing to lick, and his tongue was attacking my salty legs and feet. This can be a cute bonding experience, but when you are not in the mood to have a wet warm dog tongue darting between your toes, it can be a wee bit annoying.
Alicia was in the kitchen cooking Asian noodle bowls. The house smelled great. I was salivating. Dinner was ready, so there was no time for a shower. I covered the dining room chair with protective towels and sat down.
As Alicia served the meal, she oh-so casually said, “I can’t find the black cover for the paring knife. Did you put it somewhere?”
Suddenly, order was under assault.
“I always put things where they belong,” I said, returning fire. “You must have misplaced it.”
“I don’t think so,” Alicia said, and then sat down to eat.
I got up and started searching the kitchen for the little black knife cover.
Why did I do this?
Because I am a masochist.
Because I was overworked and exhausted.
Because I NEED ORDER.
“You really have to start putting things back in their correct places,” I said to Alicia.
“Maybe you misplaced something this time,“ she replied.
“I never misplace things,” I said, and then my face flushed, as I remembered recently misplacing several things.
“Yes, you do,” Alicia said, as though she could read my mind.
“No, I don’t,” I lied.
“It’s a two-dollar piece of plastic. Come eat your meal. Sit down.”
But I was already going through the trash, determined to find the knife cover, prove I hadn’t lost it, and return the missing item to its proper place.
I needed to restore order.
That’s when Alicia said, “I’m pretty sure you used the paring knife for lunch and I think maybe the cover wasn’t on when I took the knife out of the drawer.”
I knew this was impossible, because I was the order person now.
Alicia was playing chaos.
Then I was going through all of the kitchen cabinets and drawers. I was on my hands and knees searching the warm mysterious shadows under the oven. I was looking in the refrigerator drawers, peeking under kale bunches and cucumbers, and lifting cartons of oat milk. I NEEDED to find the cover for the knife. Not because I wanted the knife covered. But because something was out of place.
As Alicia ate at the dining-room table and I continued to frantically search the kitchen, a paranoid part of me started to wonder why she had mentioned the missing knife cover. Did she really forget what happens when you wave a scent under this bloodhound’s snout? Had she mentioned the knife cover with the intention of triggering me? Had she even intentionally hidden the knife cover? Was she playing a game? Having an internal laugh? Was the cover in her pocket?
After I searched every square inch of the kitchen and my wife’s apron pockets, Alicia nonchalantly said she’d buy a new knife cover on the internet.
I looked over and saw that she had finished eating.
I had missed the meal.
A delicious offering that my wife had worked hard to create.
In my mind, I watched the movie of my past ten minutes.
I wasn’t rooting for myself.
Not even a little.
“I’m tired,” I said.
“I know,” she replied.
As she began cleaning up, I ate my meal standing at the counter.
When I finished, I went into my office to answer an email.
I had hardly sat down when Alicia yelled, “I found the knife cover!”
“Where?” I said, striding back into the kitchen.
“In here,” she said, and then pointed to the junk drawer.
“I looked in there,” I said. “Twice!”
“Well, you must have missed it.”
“No way.”
“You probably put it in there after lunch.”
“Impossible. I would never do that.”
Alicia rolled her eyes, put the cover on the knife, and slid it back into the utensil drawer.
Order was restored.
I felt a profound sense of relief.
Knowing that everything was in its right place was so psychologically freeing that I decided to mentally drop the whole thing and just chalk it up as a fluke.
Alicia and I walked Kingsly around the neighborhood. We strolled and chatted and everything was okay again. There was no tension. We were good.
When we got home, I went into my office and saw something terrible.
The image entering my pupils felt like a knife plunging into my stomach.
A nine-inch piece of black plastic.
On my writing desk.
Just staring up at me.
The cover for the largest kitchen knife we own.
Out of place.
“What is this?” I yelled. “Are you trying to make me crazy?”
“What are you talking about?” Alicia said.
I stormed into the living room with the large knife cover in my hand.
“Why do you have that?” Alicia said. “That belongs in the utensil drawer on the big knife. You didn’t misplace it in your office, did you?”
“You’re gaslighting me!” I yelled.
When Alicia started laughing her ass off, something ripped down the center of me.
One side of me wanted to laugh with her at my own ridiculous nature.
The other side of me wanted to embrace victimhood and say the word ‘gaslighting’ a million more times.
As Alicia continued laughing, I felt the two parts of me battling.
The reason a story needs chaos is that narrative propulsion is fueled by change.
No chaos, no change.
One thing that’s certain, I’ve changed a lot since I met Alicia in 1993.
“Come on,” Alicia said to me. “It’s funny. You have to admit it.”
“My mental health is funny to you?” I said in the most righteous way imaginable, which made Alicia laugh harder.
Part of me fumed.
Another part of me put a pin in the whole argument. It also suggested Alicia and I go upstairs and continue watching Season Three of The Bear, because it’s brilliant and we both love it and I was beyond dangerously tired.
So we watched Season Three of The Bear and I noted how the main character, chef Carmy, becomes a tyrant in his kitchen because he’s failed to properly deal with his personal trauma history. In this season, he’s estranged from his love interest, because his obsessive need for order pushed her away. It’s sad. His friends try to save him, but he just keeps insisting on more tyrannical order. He’s a world-class chef, but an impossible-to-please boss. His employees and friends make spectacular efforts to love Carmy, but his dark perfectionism locks him away from that love.
I sympathize with Carmy. I also cringe at his behavior. All the characters on the show cringe too.
The synchronicity was uncanny.
I wasn’t even a chef, but my literal kitchen had to be ordered perfectly.
Jeeze.
The show transported Alicia and me. We focused on the problems of fictional people for a few hours. The writing is extraordinary, brave, profound. Made us remember why we want to tell stories. Made us remember why we two storytellers fell in love so many years ago, despite the fact that we couldn’t have put that reason into words back then. We share a faith. A faith in narrative to heal and transform and make the world a better place. We believe that narrative can show us who we really are, so that we might improve and transcend the lesser versions of ourselves.
By the time Alicia and I went to bed, all was forgiven in the Bessette-Quick household.
I fell asleep fast and hard.
I woke up around three AM.
Laughing.
Why was I laughing?
I wanted to howl with glee and felt I easily could.
All of the tension wanted to escape.
I told myself not to wake Alicia.
But if I had really let myself go, I could have roared. I could have laughed until I cried. I could have laughed until I started coughing. I could have laughed until I turned blue in the face.
After seeing me freak out about a misplaced knife cover—missing dinner—my wife snuck into my office and intentionally misplaced an even bigger knife cover on the most-sacred-to-Matthew-Quick place in the entire house. My writing desk. I don’t let anyone even see my writing desk. Alicia’s joke might have been the most profane thing my wife has ever done to me in the entire thirty-one-year history of our relationship. The biggest violation of my obsessive rules ever. But at three AM, I found her transgression hilarious.
The internet says the second part of that Anne Lamott quote goes like this:
“Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.”
One of my old teaching buddies liked to laugh a lot. His humor was often self-deprecating, but he went after others too. He made me the butt of many jokes. At-risk kids tended to gravitate to him. His classroom was a safe haven for many a teenager. Especially during lunch periods, when kids who had no one to sit with in the cafeteria would come and play video games in my friend’s business and marketing classroom, which was located in the high school basement. All were welcome. You just had to roll with the jokes. Sad friendless kids laughed there. It was beautiful to see. While I was eager to please our bosses and community, my friend seemed free of all that. He used to tell me, “Laugh at yourself and others will laugh with you.” And he did all sorts of wild things for a laugh. He was the chaos to my order back in my teaching days. And my mental health was better for it.
My Jungian work has taught me that we are always subconsciously dancing with others. I’d bet money that my analyst—who is probably reading this right now—would say that I subconsciously pulled the trickster out of Alicia with my extreme need for order, induced by overworking and not keeping my anxiety in check. Humans are psychologically wired to balance each other out. We attract what we psychologically need. And give what others need. We’re seldom aware that we are doing any of this. What we often need is to learn some unknown truths about ourselves.
The next morning I told Alicia about my middle-of-the-night giggle attack.
“What did you find so funny?” she asked.
I hesitated and then admitted that I was laughing at her audacity, her putting the big knife cover on my writing desk, going for the comedic jugular.
“That’s because it was fucking hilarious,” Alicia said. When she grinned, I saw shades of divinity.
Perhaps we all need to find more ways to laugh at the very things ego is most precious about. When I was laughing at myself in the middle of the night, it did not feel masochistic. It felt like letting go and sliding down a twisty waterslide, into a huge pool of the life I’m not living whenever I’m obsessing over trivial things—like where the knife cover might be.
When was the last time you really laughed at yourself? When did you show ego that it is powerless over your soul? When did you last conjure shades of divinity in the facial expressions of your lover?
PS - Did you read the September 25th post? "The Sure Way To Lose Is to Have To Win" (Alicia Sings A Song)
