When a man says, “I fought with my wife” there is a lot more to it than just the mere statement of fact. The two key words are the smallest two in the sentence ‘I’ and ‘my’. The I in the above brings the focus on Him, yes. But not in the usual me first way. Here the emphasis of I is more than just that. The I is a way of accepting ‘yes, I fought with you’ it says, ‘yes it’s my fault (that we fought)’ it implies, ‘yes, I could have avoided it if I would have tried’ and above all and most importantly it says, ‘yes, it’s my mistake’.
The second key word my is equally, if not more, important. It maintains and holds on to the fact you are my wife. It keeps it personal by saying you belong to me. The phrase my wife immediately creates a mushy-mushy feeling in a man’s heart. And the use of it here, in this sentence, means that he still loves her. If he still loves her he regrets fighting with her. And if he regrets fighting with her the fight is over.
When she tells her friend, “He fought with me” she does two things. One, blames it all on him. Even though we all know that A cannot fight with B without B fighting back with A. Since she has started off with blaming it all on him it leaves a sour taste in the mouth and she can now only see the ‘bad-things’ about him: he is like this, he is like that, he always does this, he never understands, he fought with me.
Second, she will hang on to with me, since it come at the end of the sentence, they will hang on to it. And from there on its all about her. The he has disappeared in some corner of the light grey matter and the we was never given a thought to.
Because of their habit of hanging on to the words said last, women tend to misinterpret the my wife phrase. When men try to say, ‘You belong to me’ women hear, ‘I own you’. Earths apart! Women, to stuff more words in a sentence will replace the bigger belong with the smaller own. Not all words are always replaceable. Not all words having the same meaning can be interchanged.
We use belong when something means more to us than a mere object. Remember the first book you got when you were a kid? It had a printed label on the first page which said "This book belongs to _________". It could also have been written as "This book is owned by _________". But at that age we were being taught to treat the book as something more than a stack of papers tied together. We were taught to cherish the book. To keep it safely, treat it with care, love and remember it always. Therefore the label said belong. Therefore belong and own are not interchangeable.
A fight usually ends in a cold war. Some small, some big. Some just cold, some freezing. If it is a serious fight, going off into the next room might not help ease off the pressure. At times the words exchanged are so harsh that one wants to leave the room or even the house, for one hears those words reverberate within the four walls. Usually the man has just come home and the woman has been at home for some time or at least has been mulling over the impending verbal war for a better part of the day. It is usually she who in one swift move will grab her purse, the handle of which will entangle in something breakable, crashing it to the floor, boom across the hallway (invariably where he is seated) on her way out shutting the door behind her with a bang loud enough to advertise her anger. Leaving him worried sick, wondering where his pretty baby has now gone...
...With a Crash, boom, bang...
You arrive, only outdoors.
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