That said… here’s another piece of advice: When your partner raises an issue, and then in the course of the discussion starts raising all kinds of other issues, try to take a deep breath and avoid flipping out and crying “Foul!”. Try to calmly suggest that you would find it much easier to deal with one issue at a time. Or perhaps just listen, and try to figure out what the *real* issue is. Your partner may have started off bitching about A, not realizing that was really bugging him/her was B. If you refuse to discuss B, you may be missing something important that you need to deal with in order to fix things.

Oh, and one last point, while I think it is true that guys tend to be prefer to focus on one thing at a time, while women are more comfortable dealing with a wide range of things at the same time, it’s not just women who play the “bait and switch” game in arguments.

The Temptress sounds like a typical lady. You are right, when you guys no longer respond to our nagging sometimes some of us tend to hold the rest of the argument anyway to the detriment of the relationship. Hopefully this will open alot of other women’s eyes.

And hopefully you are now with a babe that knows how to fight fair.

Before you cry ‘Witch’ and stone me to death, let me clarify that statement with a true story.

I was dating a girl, I’ll call her ‘The Temptress’ because that’s what I call her anyway, who would constantly argue with me, and every time would drag old arguments into current ones, and would say things that I didn’t remember. (And contrary to popular opinion, my memory is pretty good.) So I finally called her out and said she was making these things up and I had never said that, and I handed her a mini-recorder. From then on, any time she started fuming, I would tell her to start taping. Eventually, she called up an past argument that was on tape, and her ‘facts’ were proven inaccurate. I do, however, believe that SHE believed what she was saying.

My theory is that women will continue an argument in their head long after the man has stopped talking, and their perception of the situation changes the facts around in their minds. The number one cause of this is them not saying what they REALLY feel and leaving it up to the man to figure out the source of the anger through hints and innuendo.

Men may be stupid and forgetful, but women are crazy.

Post-script to that story is that The Temptress and I didn’t last too long after the tape recorder proved her fights were unjustfied, and once the make-up sex stopped, so did the relationship. *shrug*

-Stuck