Ah, you're so lucky! My ex had a bad temper and was very defensive. I got pretty moody (moodiness + defensiveness = bad combo, I know), but I tried to be less so. Still, whenever I said something irrational that would just happen to push his buttons, no matter how calmly I said it, he would blow up. And sometimes I'd ask him to just drop it because things were getting too heated, but he'd say that I was just chickening out (or something like that) and that I started it by saying something stupid, so no, he wasn't going to drop it. sigh I too, initially, had that problem of not dropping arguments, but eventually he proved himself to also be incapable of dropping arguments, even after I learned to try to defuse them.

I also want to learn what good compromise is! I think my idea of compromise might have become skewed because of my ex. He loved making lewd banter with women. I don't mind lewd banter per se; of course I liked it when he'd do so with me, but it really made me uncomfortable how he enjoyed doing it with other women so much. I would keep asking him to tone it down, but for him and his friends, that was tantamount to not having a friendship at all, so they started avoiding each other and blaming me for getting between their friendships. Then my ex told me that compromise means that both parties don't get exactly what they want, and so he wouldn't tone down his banter anymore, because that would mean that I got what I wanted whereas he didn't get what he wanted. Somehow, I don't think that his idea of compromise was right, but I was afraid to argue even further. He insisted that I was asking for too much, and that he never asked me to compromise anything (but that's because he's super chill and hardly cares about anything like boundaries, whereas my comfort levels are a bit more sensitive). It's not even that I was all give and no take; I made sacrifices, too, but he felt that I was asking for too much by asking him to tone down his banter. I don't know - maybe I, too, didn't know how to compromise. What's it like to be able to compromise in a good, healthy relationship?