It's the little things that can really get you, the ones that you wouldn't expect. The most serious argument I ever had with my first partner was about my mustache. I was in my late 20s, and I'd been experimenting with facial hair after years of mostly not being able to grow a real beard or mustache.

I had a mustache when I met Lenny, but I thought it looked like a silly fuzzy caterpillar that a teenager might cultivate before his facial hair really came in.

So one morning a few months after we made our commitments to one another (marriage and domestic partnership not being possible then), I was standing in our steamy bathroom and for no particular reason shaved my stache off. "Good riddance," I thought.

I actually thought very little of it, but Lenny thought a lot, because he evidently really liked it on me.

We had a mild disagreement that gradually escalated over the course of several days into a great big hairy fight. No pun intended. ;-)

We each had lessons to learn about being in a couple, communicating, and taking each other's concerns and feelings into true account. Even little things, like a cheesy little mustache!

We both ended up apologizing to the other — Lenny for making me feel like he was trying to control my physical appearance, me for not respecting his genuine and sincere feelings about the matter.

I'm sure the lessons we learned helped us a lot years down the road when we faced much tougher problems.