19 People Talk About ‘That One Terrible Fight’ With Their S/O That Completely Ruined Things For Them

1. “My husband and I got in a fight about whether or not leaving lint in the dryer was a fire hazard. Mind you, neither of us actually ever left lint in the dryer, we just argued about it theoretically. It was so stupid and for some reason it lingered around all day, a Saturday we were supposed to be enjoying together. Ridiculous.”

—Michelle, 30

2. “This is going back a ways but when I was 16 I was dating this girl who suggested we take IQ tests together because she thought it would be a fun thing to do. So, we took them and it turned out I was about 20 points smarter than her. This made her so angry that she literally smacked me and kicked me. It was then that I suddenly realized I only liked her for looks anyways and broke up with her. She spent the next six months trying and failing to sleep with all my friends.”

—Ethan, 27

3. “We got in a fight while traveling because he’d made all these detailed plans for us. I mean, I gave him license to plan everything because he was so amped to do it but at some point it seems like he forgot it was supposed to be a fun vacation. So, he ends up dragging me from tourist trap to tourist trap after making me get up at 6am for two days straight. On the third day I said ‘enough’ and made him scrap the rest of his plans. The rest of the trip was awkward as hell and we haven’t talked about doing anything else in over a year.”

—Julianne, 26

4. “This was awful, I mean really brutally traumatizing. I’d been in an LTR with this one girl for about a year and because of the distance things had gotten a little rocky. She came to visit and she wanted to fight about why I wouldn’t move to where she lives even though the reason is literal physical proximity to my son from a previous marriage. Pretty good reason, right? Wrong, she ended up insulting both my son and my ex-wife (just frosting on the cake there) in some kind of misguided attempt to convince me I should move in with her. I ended it right then.”

—Jacob, 34

5. “Ironically, the last fight I got in with my ex was over communication. I liked him a lot and so I tried to get him to talk with me about how we don’t seem to be able to communicate very well and that we needed to make some kind of effort here. He literally nodded and said ‘uh huh, I agree’ the entire time so even thought we never actually fought it still felt like a fight. We broke up soon after.”

—Cynthia, 23

6. “It’s amazing to me how the littlest things can ruin your whole day. Last week my boyfriend asked me to take Friday off so we could celebrate my birthday together over a long weekend. Sweet idea, sure, except that I didn’t want to take that day off. And when I hesitated to email my boss right then and there about it, like he demanded, he flipped out and said that if I couldn’t at least take a day off to spend more time with him, he’d find someone who would.

I replied that if he was going to be a micro-managing control freak, I’d happily find someone else too—and that I’d find that other person way faster than he ever could. It was all down hill from there. We got REALLY nasty with each other. I ended up taking that Friday off—either because I’m a total fucking pushover or because I came to appreciate that he just wanted to be with me even if he was an asshole about it.

Weirdly, it ended up being just about my best birthday ever.”

—Brenda, 29

7. “Sex, specifically he got mad at me because I couldn’t have an orgasm when he thought I should be having one. Yeah, that didn’t last long and it was really awful when it was happening and I mean both the relationship and the sex.”

—Emma, 22

8. “It started because I didn’t put away his socks for him and escalated from there. Apparently we were both irritated with the other person’s housekeeping habits for different reasons so the fight could have been good if we’d ended up making the other person happier with our housekeeping behaviors. But this positive resolution didn’t happen for months, months of shitty tension, and during that time he was ridiculously passive aggressive about making sure his socks were left out in the open like he was daring me not to put them away. I didn’t. He doesn’t do that anymore.”

—Sophie, 25

9. “Curtains, we got in a fight about curtains which is just so stupid if you think about it. She loved these just really fucking terrible purple curtains and wanted to hang them in our rental that had darkish yellow walls that we couldn’t repaint, like insisted on it. It made the room look terrible and we went back and forth. The next time she left the house I took them down and that solved the problem. She just sort of accepted it. It’s for this reason that I believe that the curtains were somehow actually causing us to fight. I threw them in the trash and we got married a year later.”

—James, 25

10. “Movie tickets, specifically who was going to pay for them. My girlfriend makes about twice as much money as I do and she’s chill and awesome so she takes one for the team pretty much whenever we want to do something that costs money. She knows I’m tight on bills every month and she’s absolutely a wonderful person in that way. However, there was a time about a year ago when I was pretty insecure about her making more than me and I insisted on paying for a movie and popcorn one night during a time when she knew I was flat broke. It turned into a whole fight about how she was being controlling with money and all that. She wasn’t and I was just feeling really inadequate. We sorted it out but it absolutely crushed any semblance of a pleasant evening and took some real working through.”

—Noah, 23

11. “This was with the first girl I ever lived with. We didn’t have a lot of money but once a week we’d splurge on two or three bottles of wine and kind of rage together while watching movies or whatever. It became a real ritual and I always looked forward to it. But, surprise surprise, sometimes when people have had too much to drink they say mean things to one another. The last time we did this she got super sloppy and started complaining about how we never did anything together and how she thought I never wanted to be around her. Like, we both worked a lot for our crappy wages, this was totally unreasonable since I spent every spare minute with her.

Anyway, she ended up basically telling me that I should be able to make enough money without working more hours so that we could see each other more. God knows why I was held to this standard and she wasn’t but I basically shut the whole thing down and took a long walk. When I got back she was asleep and the next day she said she didn’t remember any of it. The relationship was just toxic after that and I moved out a few months later.”

—Lucas, 28

12. “I’m not really a fighter but I’ve definitely been involved in some crappy situations. I’m one of those that just doesn’t want to fight. My ex was the opposite of this and he was also raised in a super strict military family and so he had peeves that I did not have. The last fight we got in was about me not making the bed every day. I don’t know how it got to this point but he literally threw a plate across the kitchen yelling about ‘consistency’. I remember just standing there and thinking ‘what the hell just happened?’ I went and stayed with a friend that night and he was very apologetic the next day but it didn’t matter. He’d lost my trust.”

—Nora, 25

13. “This was such a stupid fight. My boyfriend and I were hiking and I ended up getting a tick on my leg and since I’m paranoid about Lyme Disease I kind of freaked out. It shouldn’t have been a huge deal but my boyfriend at the time then yelled at me to stop talking about ticks. It wasn’t just him bossing me to be quiet that bothered me. It was the way he said it, like, he had this evil tone in his voice and he looked at me like he wanted to kill me. Hike ruined aaand we’re not together anymore.”

—Christiana, 21

14. “The craziest fight I ever got into was while on a road trip with my current husband. We were just dating back then and we were driving out to Phoenix to see my family for Christmas from upstate New York. We got in a screaming match around Memphis because he was clearly exhausted and driving badly. I finally convinced him to take a break and a nap but that was sooooo stressful. If you really want to know somebody then take a road trip with them.”

—Aria, 29

15. “I was camping out with my girlfriend and she did forget to bring sleeping bags so we had to drive all the way to town and buy them. And, of course, I had to buy them. Then she wanted to go to a restaurant that was about an hour from the campsite, and was so adamant about it, and I got so passively aggressive quiet. Eventually, she said we could go to a closer restaurant, which was a pretty divey place, and for some reason she wanted to eat by the bar — and I was so upset BECAUSE IT WAS A FUCKING BAR, and they had a quiet dinning room. I was like why am I dating such an idiot but then I got drunk and sort of forgot about the whole thing. Night was ruined by the rest of the trip was okay.”

—Damien, 24

16. “I’m a vegan and my boyfriend is not. That should be enough for you to know where this is going. His family had a tradition of grilling out like twice a week when it was warm out and while I like grilling too I just didn’t like grilling veggies close to his meat. It just made me feel gross. He didn’t get it. It took me a month to convince him that doing grilled vegetables wouldn’t cause his entire family history to crumble and disappear. To his credit he did come around and he gets it now but wow was he stubborn.”

—Lily, 24

17. “I forgot to buy toilet paper. That was it. That was all. The store wasn’t closed and it wasn’t impossible to just go out and buy more. Nope, I just forgot to pick some up on the way home from work after my wife had reminded me to. Arguments about ‘why the heck are we arguing’ are the worst kind of argument because they last forever and are basically impossible to resolve without both people just going ‘okay, that was stupid’ and letting it go.”

—Henry, 30

18. “My husband and I briefly entered into a period where the question ‘who is better, the Stones or Led Zeppelin’ dominated our interaction. Three days later we used three bottles of wine to settle the question and the answer turned out to be ‘who cares, I love you.’ So weird, the things couples end up fighting about.”

—Madelyn, 31

19. “About eight months ago I started having to travel a lot more for work and a couple of times I was gone 20 days out of the month. Turning what had been a relationship where we’d see each other every day into an LTR was weird and both of us were pretty clueless about how to deal with it. One thing we absolutely didn’t realize is the effect a lack of intimacy would have on both of us. I’d arrive back in town and we’d both be in a bad mood. It seriously took us three months to realize we should be having sex immediately after I got back before doing anything else.”

—Oliver, 33