Where would we put a bathroom if we were going to renovate in 10 years? If I followed football, which team would I go for? If we ever got around to getting a microwave, who would be allowed to use it and could they make hot chocolate in it or not?
These are the arguments we have in our house.
People of a certain age will remember Claytons, and the fabulous piece of ’70s television advertising that spruiked this non-alcoholic drink as the drink you have when you’re not having an alcoholic drink.
Over here, we have Clayton’s arguments, argy bargy about stuff that’s never going to happen. Fights about nothing that’s real. We argue in hypotheticals.
For example: what if he ever found a vintage Holden Brougham for sale. Would he be allowed to buy it?
What would we be doing if we hadn’t met each other? (He says I’d still be watching reruns of A Country Practice in a dingy share house, not that I ever did this, and I say he’d still be tapping his toes in cowboy boots behind a Fitzroy bar, serving drunks with beards and kids old enough to be his.)
Would we interfere if one of the kids went out with someone we didn’t like, or had friends who were a bad influence, or if they failed a subject, or wanted to drop out of school at 15? There are always lots of hypothetical arguments to choose from when you have kids.
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In fact, we have hypothetical arguments about kids we didn’t even have, especially when it comes to the names we might or might not have called them, which room they’d have slept in, and what car we’d have needed to buy to fit them in.
Then there’s pets. There’s an ongoing discussion about what dog we might get if something happened to the two we already have, who are pretty much still puppies.
Crazy. These arguments about things that don’t and may never exist, fictional propositions, imagined for whatever reason, may be because – and maybe this is a good thing – we’ve nothing else to argue about.
My friend said he and his beloved had a ginormous screaming match when she noticed he was talking to a colleague on LinkedIn. She said the girl looked lonely and desperate and that’s how these things start. She was good-looking, and now she’s been unlinked.
We’re so good at it here we’ve even invented the retrospective hypothetical; the hindsight fight. For example, if we had bought that beach house we saw for nix 20 years ago, how much would it be worth now and would we have let our extended family use it?
If we didn’t fall out with such and such at that silly, drunken year-2000 party, would we still actually be friends with them?
There is also such a thing here as the pre-posthumous fight, too, which is when you argue about what might or might not happen after you die. Always a fun one.
Ah, the fun twists and turns you can take with a hypothetical argument. It’s much more flexible than a recurring, rehashed old barney – a hypothetical argument about something that may never happen offers lots of room for creative thought.
And, one would argue, hypothetically speaking, much less emotional damage. But maybe we should discuss that a bit more …
