So you may have started the fight—but does that automatically mean the responsibility is yours to end it?

You may have dealt the first blow, but was it the hardest? What are the rules, if any,of the dance of conflict in the love relationship?

For example, I indeed may have perchance been the one to raise my weapon and start making little pokes on a most inopportune day at a most inappropriate time. (the wedding anniversary, ehhem.)

But once the provocation has started a jest, and he’s in the fight… I don’t have to be the first one to drop the proverbial sword, do I?

Some of my clients who have come out of long marriages recently are in the position of finally surrendering after years and years of trying to get around a tangled web woven through the missteps of a steeply declining holiness of the matrimonial state. They sound tired, but relieved that they have finally put down that sword.

In the game of He Said/ She Said, should male chivalry always prevail? I suppose I have to admit that my attitudes are in some ways medieval–in the sense that, regardless of the fact that I was a naughty princess, I still expect my prince to be gallant enough to take the fall for me.

So I am signing us both up for Aikedo. I figure this will beat the worn-out European prissiness out of me, and I’ll get the gumption and the training to end a fight I started. Seems to me a rather elegant turn of events… and indeed a fine anniversary present.

“Here, honey, I will work on my ability to finish fights I start, sparing us a few days of exhaustion every few months, and aggregative, we’ll have about seven more years of fight-free time as we live out our lives together…”