Fights Every Couple Has Before Breaking Up

Every couple has a blowout now and again. But what's the difference between a fight and The Fight That's About To Send You To Singleville? How do you know when the writing is on the wall between you and your partner? As soon as these disagreements pop up, you'll want to take a long hard look at your relationship…

The driving tear-up

For years, tedious comedians traded on the stereotype of women being bad drivers who couldn’t read maps. The actual source of motorway enmity is that a large number of men are hypertense control-freaks with hair-trigger emotions who spiral into an anxiety attack the second that they don’t know exactly where they are, if they’re on the right road or precisely how many metres it is to the next Little Chef. 45 minutes into the journey and any other-half in their right mind would be excused for popping the catch, rolling out of a moving vehicle like Jason Statham and taking their chances on the hard shoulder.

The wardrobe malfunction

You asked their opinion about your outfit. Which, if you’re being honest, you knew was ‘pushing the envelope’ a bit. They simply replied that maybe St Albans town centre wasn’t quite ready for ‘My own reinterpretation of Kanye West’s latest collection, given a TK Maxx twist.’ So the plans are cancelled, the outfit’s in a pile on the bedroom floor, you’re sitting on the sofa in a tracksuit in a furious silent rage, binge-eating a box of Cadbury’s Celebrations and stabbing at the remote control with an angry finger.

The weird political debate

It’s not even about something that actually impacts you, like Brexit. And it’s not even about something that might be revealing of a person’s fundamental character, like whether or not the death penalty should come back. It’s spiralled off some half-overheard story on Sky News about cotton tariffs in Africa and despite the fact that you’re both essentially saying the same thing, it’s led to the conversational equivalent of a fire in a nuclear reactor – a prolonged collapse which keeps flaring back into life, where you can only see about 10% of the real damage that has been done, and where every time you think it’s stabilised something else implodes.

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The one about your friend

If they just got to spend a bit more time with him, they’d see that having a nickname like ‘Purple Bollock’, having fathered two children who he never sees and having a CV consisting solely of ‘World’s longest GTA marathon’ and ‘four convictions for public nuisance’ don’t actually make him a bad guy. Admittedly, the bit about stealing a charity collection tin from the pub probably does actually make him a bad guy, but they don’t know about that particular infraction.

The travelling dilemma

You’re totally cool and non-possessive. And theoretically you get that the grown-up, sensible modern relationship can withstand your partner going off travelling for a few months. In reality, you’re going to be reduced to a jealous, insecure wreck before the plane even leaves the runway, and will waste countless late night hours carefully analysing every Vine they post in more detail than the Zapruder footage has been looked at, desperate to read some hidden meaning into a wobbly tracking shot of a sunrise. You’ll eventually go on a massive e-stalking binge to work out who that good-looking bloke is with their arm around them, before sheepishly realising that it’s their brother. Better just drunkenly torpedo the relationship the night before they head off and save your dignity.

Your diet

If you’re going to go through the miserable ordeal of a low-carb, bread-free, no-alcohol, fat-shredding diet, then the least you can expect is some moral support from your other half. Of course, being you, what you actually expect is them to go through it all with you and be every bit as unhappy as you are. And if they don’t want to? Well, I guess you just weren’t the person I told myself you were…

Money

Golden rules: never lend the other person cash; don’t claim poverty while ‘not including’ that trust fund/pension/savings account you’ve got quietly squirreled away; don’t lie about the value of easily-checkable status goods that you’ve treated yourself to like carbon-fibre road bikes and Stone Island jackets; and – assuming you want to be considered sexually attractive ever again – never do that thing of carefully splitting a restaurant bill to only include exactly what you consumed.

The hypothetical child

You’ll start by having this argument by proxy – over whether or not you should have a dog, whether you should move to the suburbs, over your robust borderline-Ukip views that all maternity leave should be banned etc. Eventually, the final breakdown in relations will occur over your ideas for what you’d want to name your first born – it seems that they just didn’t find your proposal to name a child after a brand of ‘legal high’ as hilarious as you did. Probably worth remembering that one for next time the discussion comes up.