Kristen Revealed Why She & Dax Fought For 3 Straight Days & It's Intense
Even America's favorite couple fights sometime. Kristen Bell recently opened up about fighting with Dax Shepard, and her description of one particularly nasty fight that lasted for three days sounds, well, intense. During a Jan. 28 appearance on Justin Long's podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long, Bell explained what went down.
"We had this pretty incredible fight recently. Incredible. I mean, like, top of the lungs screaming," Bell began. "It was about things around the house that I felt I needed help with, and we have a relationship where you are supposed to be able to say, 'I need your help with this.'"
"I left at 10 a.m. I wasn't going to be back until 2:30. That's a nice chunk of your Sunday you have off, right? I left a note and I was like, 'Hey, Dad! Would you mind taking the two towels in the dryer and folding them,' and then, like, one other thing," she continued. "And I thought, 'That's 10 minutes of work. I can say that.' At that point the house was getting to be a lot for me. Just keeping up with all the mom stuff."
Bell didn't particularly think the note was a big deal. She went about her day like normal and got back home thinking "everything was fine" until they got in bed together that night.
"We're laying in bed and he turns over and, like a puppy can sense it when you're about to get angry, I can sense it in him two seconds before it happens. And he goes, 'When you leave me notes, yeah, I feel really controlled.' And he launched into how he felt about it," she shared. "And I said to myself immediately, 'Don't react. Don't react. Don't react.' And I said, 'OK. I totally hear you. It will never happen again. If I need something to be done around the house, what's a way that I could do it that you'd be OK with hearing? What's a better way I could do it?'"
From there, she admitted they both "blacked out and got into a fight."
"I don’t actually remember what happened, but what transpired was a lot of volume, a lot of harsh words being thrown around, and it was an angry, angry fight about how nobody does anything for anybody else," she recalled. "I grabbed my pillow and I stomped down the hall and I sleep in the front room and I’m crying, right?"
Of course, the fight wasn't really just about the note. "I was saying, 'I need help packing the lunches, I need you to notice when things need to be done,'" Bell explained. "And he's like, 'I can't notice what you notice!'"
The argument cut so deep that Bell shared for three days she and Shepard didn't speak to each other outside of "administrative stuff" having to do with their two young daughters.
So, what put an end to this super intense fight? A dog. On the third day of their cold war, Bell had taken their daughters to play with some rescue dogs. The dogs were so cute that she couldn't help but text her husband, who's allergic to dogs, asking if they could bring one home. He said yes.
"I didn’t get an apology, but I got a dog! This is so much better than an apology!" she joked. "... We never talked about that fight ever, but I will say this: Every single thing that I have needed done or thought, 'I’d want help with this,' since that fight, he has been ahead of. I couldn’t complain about him if I tried right now."
Sharing one of your most intense fights with your spouse with the entire world may seem like a lot, but Bell told Long that she and Shepard are committed to exposing both the good and the ugly parts of their relationship.
"We decided we were never not going to be asked about our relationship, so if we were going to talk about it, let’s make sure we show the good, the bad and the ugly, and how we handle it," she said. "Let’s not make it saccharine. And we really try hard to not make it saccharine, and we talk about the fact that we do fight, we do go to therapy, we dislike each other a lot sometimes."
The fact of the matter is fighting isn't always necessarily a bad thing. Almost all couples fight; when done productively, arguing can be healthy. Let's be grateful to Bell and Shepard for shedding some of the stigma surrounding it.
