Learning to disagree

again. Hubby and I have been married for 20 years. During that time we have argued. Big. Time. Then we grew up and just had little disagreements. For about the past 5 years or so we haven’t had any real arguments because I’ve learned how to handle him. We’ve gotten angry with each other but there have been no real fights. As a result we’ve kind of lost the ability to argue effectively. That has to change. Soon. We had our first argument over the house today. Hubby wants to paint the house before we move in. I, knowing that we are going to redo each room, don’t really care and think it’s a waste of time. That lead to a fight. He got all pissed off because I thought painting was a waste of time and he said to forget it and didn’t want to talk about it anymore. That’s what he does. But that is not going to work this time. We are talking about a house and the things we want to do with it. We are not talking about whether to take the dogs for a walk or not, that’s usually what we get angry over. So I told him we are going to have to learn to argue again. There is going to be a lot of things we disagree about and we are going to have to work them out. In this case, even though I think painting is a waste of time, I just don’t care enough about it. If he wants to paint, we’ll paint. Whatever. I’m not going to be excited about everything he wants to do and I don’t expect him to be excited about everything I want to do. So what. If it really matters we’ll come to a compromise. If it doesn’t matter to one of us, the other wins by default. I can see the disagreements that will be coming; the furniture, the kitchen appliances, the counter tops, the bathroom, the plasma mounts; yeah, it could get ugly.