Baby carrots and armpits aren't generally the stuff of romantic scraps, or are they?
A Twitter account titled @WeFoughtAbout chronicles all the fights one Chicago couple has had since August.
Twentysomethings Claire Meyer and Alan Linic moved in together in September and have been at it ever since. Their shared account has some 2,000 followers and boasts nearly 80 spats since this summer. A sampling:
Claire realized it was one of her ex's birthdays today, but she forgot when mine is.
I thought Claire was using a "tone." She wasn't.
Alan found an ex girlfriend's hair while unpacking.
I texted Alan while he was in the middle of a show and he did not respond.
I thought Claire was flaunting that a boy had written on her Facebook wall.
New York Magazine's Maggie Lange calls it a "couple's therapy exercise for the social-media generation."
"We Fought About does not attempt to catalog the big themes of relationship conflict: freedom, jealousy, prioritization, selfishness, pettiness, betrayal, meanness. It focuses on the immediate circumstances that prompt Meyer and Linic's fights," writes Lange, continuing, "By excising the context, they've managed to keep the account vague enough to not seem invasive, specific enough to entertain."
According to the NY Mag piece, the two don't post their fights until they are over and dealt with. They told Lange that the joint Twitter account has served as a handy catalogue of their triggers and disappointing patterns – such as the boyfriend double booking himself. And since the two must agree on the wording of the tweets, the exercise has also served as a form of conflict resolution.
Some have found the account imminently relatable.
"Fights, in real life, are inevitable," writes Megan Garber at The Atlantic. "The romance-industrial complex, however, tends to teach the contrary: that fights are exceptional. That they represent, somehow, rupture rather than regularity. But the documentation of disagreements – disagreements that are often silly, but disagreements that, more to the point, are often routine – brings a certain kind of freedom. To Claire and Alan and, maybe even more significantly, to the people who read their tweets."
Readers over at NY Mag weren't as smitten; they took shots at a pair they see as precious ("Alan got jealous of a pear") and exhibitionist: "This Couple Will Disguise Their Crippling Need for Attention from Anonymous People as a Progressive Study of Open Examination of the Nuances of Opposite Sex Relationships," quipped one reader. And another: "Will they tweet when they've broken up?"
It wouldn't be a first.
Zosia Bielski