How much emotion are you supposed to be able to show in a relationship?

Specifically talking about your unhappy feelings. It's so easy to be loving and kind when you're happy, but when you've got issues or things you would like to talk about in the relationship that are going to seem negative and attacking, those are not easy feelings to talk about without starting a huge fight. How would you build a relationship that allows you both to express what you're feeling even if it's bad?

A~ left me an email this morning, complaining that she had been receiving a bunch of late-night phone calls and was wondering if it was me making the calls. (Isn't.) She wanted to affirm that she hadn't called me in months. (That is true.) It has been quite nice for me that she has a newer ex-bf, J~, to call now when she finds herself with something on her mind at 2am. Even if I am hurt that it turns out that I'm not special, it is just that she is calling her last big relationship, whoever that turns out to be. So now, I keep waiting for her to call me so I can say, "I'm sorry, I'm going to have to refer you to your after hours provider. Do you have J~'s number on hand? Okay, I'm going to let you go now so you can call him."

Anyway, when A~ mailed me, it brought back the whole robot voice thing.

I used to catch all kinds of hell from her about the robot voice. It came up when we would be fighting. She would be passionately and emotionally coming at me, and I had no idea what to do there. Nothing seemed to defuse the situation. The only response that seemed to me not likely to escalate the fight even further would be to show less emotion; to avoid the temptation to rise to her pitch of emotional intensity. Because then it would spiral up and out of control, right? So, she'd get more and more emotional, and I'd get less and less, until eventually I was HAL, "I understand why you are upset, Dave. Yes, Dave, I hear what you are saying."

It drove her nuts, but I didn't see any other options. Is the robot voice a good thing? It seemed to be the only tool I had at the time. Back in the day, I certainly had no venues for expressing how I was feeling in our relationship. Without complaining about what really was a wonderful and beautiful thing, we had so many issues that any time I tried to share how I was feeling, it sparked all her issues and resentments and the attack was turned on to me.

I hadn't really thought much about the robot voice between then and now. It was just that annoying thing that I did that we can laugh about now because neither of us has to be around it. But then I realized a little bit ago: if someone else came at me with the robot voice, it would drive me mad. If you turned the tables and I was free to express my feelings but then she started using the robot voice on me, I would be furious. I would feel very unheard. I would feel that she wasn't really engaged in the conversation or was listening to me. Imagine my surprise! There I thought I was doing the only thing I could not to escalate things, and suddenly it occurs to me that I was adding fuel to the fire.

Where the heck was that flash of insight four years ago?

And if that handy tool is off the table (excepting times when I -want- to infuriate my partner), I am back to wondering how to structure a relationship where you both can share your feelings freely, especially when you fight?

Because I remain a terrible fighter. It's just a skill I never learned.

For a long time, I blamed my parents (pop psychology's wonderful out. Is there anything you can't blame your parents for?). I grew up never really seeing them fight, just hearing the occasional snide comment here and there about religion or money. For years I told gf's that my parents had a no-fighting-in-front-of-the-kids rule, and as a result I had no good models for what good committed in-love people do when they're fighting.

Then I finally got around to having this conversation with my Dad, and it turns out they had no such rule. They just don't fight, or so claimeth my father. It was a huge letdown for me. I wasn't deprived of anything - there was just never anything there for me to learn in the first place. What am I supposed to take away from that? That successful couples don't fight? Boy, that seems unlikely. At least, unlikely for me to be able to implement.

My parents are such unlikely folks in so many ways. Married at 18. Diametrically opposed life-views in so many ways. Never fight. Yeah, okay. I'll get right on that.

The current philosophy of fighting is that everyone gets to yell. At some hypothetical future relationship fight, I figure we'll both just yell our heads off and make our feelings known and go storming off furious to our separate corners. What happens after that, I have no idea. At least it'll be something different. But I'll sure miss the robot voice.