My grandmother is fond of reminding me that each person has a fight or flight reaction to conflict. Some immediately want to get it all out in the air. They don’t mind the yelling and screaming and name calling so long as a conflict is dealt with as soon as it comes up. Then there’s the flight reaction: avoiding conflict at all cost. “Let’s just talk about this later.” Or, “I don’t understand what the big deal is, let’s just get over it.” Or maybe not even that; maybe just turning your back and walking away.

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I am of the second breed. I don’t fight, I fly. I’m trying to work on it. I’m trying to deal with conflicts as they come up, but I have little patience for – what often feels like – arguing for the sake of arguing.

Something that my grandmother never did tell me is that there are people – many people – who actually enjoy conflict and arguing. I am discovering this more and more and I am trying to understand it better because it is obviously something that is not going to go away.

So far, my theory is that it’s not the actual arguing these people are interested in, but what inevitably follows. The making up. Or as behavioral primatologist Frans de Waal calls it, reconciliation.

In many relationships (romantic, friendships, family), there is a passive, easy going, stoic person who goes through life without many emotional ups and downs. They’re often referred to as “type B’s.” Then there is the more emotional, driven, talkative, and impatient type who is the “type A.” The stereotype is that more women are type A’s while more men are type B’s, but it’s also often the other way around.

(Type A’s and type B’s seem to be attracted to each other. Must think about why.)

Anyway, my theory goes that the type A person starts getting fed up of with the stoic, inexpressive character of the type B person and wants to experience an emotional exchange, but doesn’t know how to make that happen. Come to think about it, I think those emotional exchanges are really what we live for in life. Those moments when a conversation lasts 4 hours, but you’re so lost in it that you don’t even realize how much time has gone by. Or if you’re a musician and your jamming with some friends and all of a sudden it starts to all come together. Or you’re on the basketball court and your team is playing like finely tuned machinery. Or you are overcome with desire for someone and you want nothing more than to mesh into one person, to make love for hours, days, weeks, forever. Even writing on a blog … if it feels like it’s really flowing and that it will make an impact on someone reading it (especially if they comment saying so), that too is an emotional exchange.

But how do you sustain those moments? And especially in a relationship. It’s so easy for us to take each other for granted. Sometimes we get drunk or do drugs and go dancing … that can do the trick temporarily, but it feels fake and it doesn’t satisfy the emotional need like the real thing.

So I think that some people, when they feel their relationship or friendship has been lacking in these emotional exchanges, they (subconsciously) seek out an argument because they know it will inevitably lead to reconciliation, which is an emotional exchange. Or as I often overhear groups of women saying in the cafe I work at, “make up sex is soooo good.”

But for whatever reason, I don’t have the same reaction as everyone else. After reconciliation I don’t’ want sex or cuddling or even talking. I want to be by myself. I feel introverted and reflective, trying to figure out what the hell happened, what was that whole argument about anyway?

I guess I am still learning how to argue.

Anyway, I just finished my second book of the year, a collection of short stories by Dave Eggers called How We Are Hungry. This story is entitled She Waits, Seething, Blooming:

She is a single mother and has no interest in any men but her son, who is fifteen and has not called. It is 2:33 am and he hasn’t phoned since 5:40 that evening, when he said he’d be eating dinner out. And now she is watching Elimidate, drinking red wine spiked with gin, and is picturing slapping him flat and hard across his face and is thinking that the sound it would make would almost make up for her worry, her inability to sleep, the many hundreds of dire thoughts that have torched her mind these past hours. Where is he? She doesn’t even know where he would go, or with whom. He’s a loner, he’s an eccentric. He is, she thinks, the sort of teenager who gets involved with deviants on the Internet. And yet somehow she knows that he is safe, that he is fine but has for whatever reason been unable to call, or has not even given it much thought. He is testing his boundaries, perhaps, and she will remind him of the consequences of such thoughtlessness. And when she thinks of what she will say to him and how loudly she will say it, she feels a strange kind of pleasure. The pleasure is like that enjoyed by the passionate scratching of a body overwhelmed with irritation. Giving oneself up to that scratching, everywhere and furious – which she did only a month earlier when she’d contracted poison oak – that was the most profound pleasure she had ever known. And now, waiting for her son and knowing how righteous will be her indignation, how richly justified will be anything she yells into his irresponsible face, she finds herself awaiting his arrival in the way the ravenous might await a meal. She is nodding her head. She is tapping a pen against her dry lips. She tries to order her thoughts, to decide where to start with him. How general should her criticisms be? Should they be specific only to this night, or should this be the door through which they pass in order to talk about all of his failings? The possibilities! She will have license to go anywhere, to say anything. She pours more gin into her tumbler of merlot, and when she looks up, at 2:47, his headlights are drawing chalk across the front window. This will be divine, she thinks. This will be superb. It will be florid, glorious; she will scratch and scratch and bloom. She runs to the door. She can’t wait for it to begin.

How We Are Hungry, I realized, is the first piece of fiction I’ve read in quite a while. It’s also the book I’ve most enjoyed in a long long time. Eggers has an incredible talent describing those unsaid thoughts that just barely skim on the surface of our consciousness. I can relate to every line he writes; even where he places his comments, the way his mind speaks. I wonder if this is how some people feel when they read Sheakspeare? (a homeboy I really don’t relate well to at all) Eggers’ first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius will always be one of my favorites because when I read it, his intense, cynical, emotional, and sloppy logorrhea couldn’t have been more appealing. But with You Shall Know Our Velocity and now How We Are Hungry, I respect how he’s making his work tighter, more selective, more subtle, and what some would call more “literary.”

If you check out How We Are Hungry, The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water and Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance were two of my favorites. On page 201 there is a six page story called There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself which consists of six blank pages. That’s something I can relate to. Often it is what I’m most tempted to write about on here that I should really just keep to myself.