'I Told Alan His Pants Don't Fit': This Couple Posts All Their Fights to Twitter
The conventional wisdom of coupledom holds that intimacy equals privacy. Claire and Alan are reversing it.


There's the funny:
Alan didn't take my "hair journey" slide show seriously.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) November 7, 2013
Alan called me Hair Meyer because of my armpits.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) September 15, 2013
I told Alan that his transitional lenses were a disaster.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) October 1, 2013
There's the vaguely mysterious:
Alan got jealous of a pear.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) October 27, 2013
There's the fully curiosity-inducing:
Alan ruined the Skymall game I made up.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) September 30, 2013
There's the ridiculous:
Yesterday I sent Claire a #snapchat of myself as a panda. I know she opened it and was super patient, but she didn't comment on it at all.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) August 30, 2013
Claire put her hand too close to the garbage disposal.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) November 7, 2013
There's the self-referential:
Claire didn't tell me we were fighting. I had to find out from this Twitter.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) September 1, 2013
There's the slightly worrisome:
Alan went on a lovely sushi dinner on our 8 month-iversary. I was not invited.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) November 2, 2013
I thought Alan was buying bread for another woman.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) October 12, 2013
And there's the you-can-definitely-see-why-this-turned-into-a-fight:
Alan joke-threatened that he might not marry me.
— We Fought About: (@WeFoughtAbout) September 23, 2013
Ultimately, though, there's a record. (A very well-written record: Claire and Alan met, New York's Maggie Lange notes, through the Chicago comedy scene.) Fights, in real life, are inevitable (maybe especially so for Claire and Alan—who are, they tell Lange, both "passionate" and "sensitive," which may help explain how a fight could be triggered by transitional lenses). 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.
"We thought our fights were just ridiculous and way too bizarre and that’s why we started it," Claire told Lange. On the contrary, though, "we kept hearing the same feedback of, 'This is exactly what we go through.'" The couple's publication of their idiosyncracies has ended up emphasizing their universality. "It actually," Claire says, "has made me feel like more of a sane girlfriend."