I grew up thinking that occasional screaming arguments were a normal feature of marriage, because they were a regular occurrence in my household.
In retrospect, this explains a lot about why I was so ambivalent on the question of marriage until meeting my now-spouse. I had seen how marriage could be romantic and wonderful, sure, but I had also seen how it could be terrifying. It involved legal and financial entanglement with someone who might turn out to be your terrorizer – or, alternatively, you might find yourself turning into the terrorizer, overtaken by the stressors and annoyances of living with someone that closely day in and day out. No thanks, I thought; I’m good.
So it confused me when I got into a long-term relationship in my late teens/early twenties that was not characterized by blowout arguments at the slightest inconvenience. Even when I was annoyed with my partner, it didn’t occur to me to scream at him about it, and it certainly didn’t occur to me to throw things, break things, etc., nor did he seem to have these impulses either. When we disagreed about something, we just… talked about it, and laid bare our own feelings on the subject, dumping them out on the table between us like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we hoped to assemble together.
The same is true for my current relationship: no screaming arguments. The closest we’ve come is a couple times I physically left a restaurant we were eating at because I got too upset during a discussion of a tense relationship issue and needed to get away from the situation. We always patched those up afterward, with more love than anger.