In the back of my head, during pretty much every fight I have, there’s a part of me thinking: “This is going to be great when we finally get it resolved.”

Every fight I have with my wife, I mean.

We don’t like to fight, even though you’d think so if you were our wall-sharing neighbors. But we do like to make up, which you’d know if you were our wall-sharing neighbors.

Ahem.

We fight about the typical things: bills, insurance, spending habits, what we can afford, our credit card. It’s pretty much all about money. Sometimes we’ll fight about other stuff, but cash and what to do with our general lack of it is the big one.

We’re doing OK, as far as people do—especially when you compare us to most of the rest of the world. But what we’ve got coming in determines who of us works and how often, and where we live, and what we eat—and all that stuff may sound like what we’re fighting about, but underlying all of it is the bottom line.

But under even that is the understanding that this fight will be temporary—much, much, much shorter than my marriage to this amazing woman. On the geologic scale of our relationship, one fight isn’t even the Holocene. It’s the complete series of Firefly compared to an epoch. Except Firefly is awesome, and fighting isn’t.

I got lost somewhere in that metaphor. Actually, I got lost somewhere in this overall post.

My point is that we’ll work the money stuff out. And we’ll get through our communication issues. Because we told each other we would more than nine years ago. We told each other we’d keep working at this—even the hard stuff.

So after a fight—even a big one—we like to remember that commitment. And if we’re good at fighting, we’re really good at making up.

On a totally unrelated topic, prostates and testicles are awesome, don’t you think? (Yes, this is unrelated.) But cancer isn’t awesome at all. Check out what’s happening on my face this Movember.

And check out Firefly if you haven’t seen it.