Sometimes people do fight. It's part of life. There may also be advantages to having fights. However, it is important to fight fair and clean.

Those who fight fair have a chance to make up with and have a civil relationship with the adversary in the future - if not a friendship. Those who fight dirty may turn a minor squabble into a long-term and possibly never-ending battle that may never be resolved in the future.

What is the difference between a clean and fair fight, and a dirty fight?

Partners in a fair fight face each other and go to battle. May the best man win.

Partners in a dirty fight use methods that put the partner at an unfair disadvantage. The sides are no longer equal:

• They use psychological warfare
• They use tactics that require the partner to stoop to their level in order to win
• They involve third parties in the fight
  • They use people with a charismatic manner of speaking in order to turn the other side against them
  • They slander and tell lies about their partner (see below)

That's dirty.

Slander

When you slander your partner, he can respond in only one of two ways:

• By silence, which can wrongly imply acquience
• By slandering in return
  • In such a battle, the party that exhibits better skills in badmouthing is supposedly the winner
  • The fight now reflects skills in badmouthing
  • The fight no longer reflects the issues

  The goal of a dirty fight may change frequently. The original topics become forgotten or irrelevant. Partners wash their dirty laundry in public, and the fight is likely to become embroiled in larger and uglier things.

  The partners in a fair fight know and stick to the original issues. That battle may have a real winner, and there may indeed be a fight over right and wrong.

  

  Read more about fighting

  Read more about psychology

  Find out about the Jewish Psych forum

  Find out about other Jewish and Hebrew forums

  ---

  Are you required to read this webpage for a course? Do NOT print out the article. It is copyrighted.
  Your exercise for this article is as follows:
  

  Click here for subject and title lists of articles by David Grossman

  Copyright © David Grossman. World rights reserved. This article may not be printed, forwarded, reproduced, or copied in any way or in any medium without written permission from David Grossman.

  

  Keywords: Fight, Intermediary, Skeletons, Slander, Truth
  /GrossmanPsych/Fight/Fair