Arguing for fun and sport

Today I was thinking about how, when I used to teach ESL, I would try and try to help my students understand the difference between a dependent and an independent clause, which was very hard to do, so they would write a lot of essays that contained sentences beginning with "but", "because", and "or", and I would try to convey to them that you could actually join two clauses together using words like that, and if you don't join clauses occastionally, your writing looks more like abstract poetry that a TOEFL-award-winning essay. For example:

I like to swimming with my family.
But my sister is not like swim.
Because my sister is afraid of to swim.
When the sharks are in water.
She is thinking they will be bite the foot.

I realized that my style of writing lately has contained a lot of those same awkward one-clause sentences, so I thought that I would write a post that contains sentences with a lot of clauses. Check out all the commas, and all of the conjunctions, and adverb clause markers. Whooo!

Today's post is for any armchair psychologists who might like to speculate on why we do what we do. The thing is, I'm an argumentative person, but I only enjoy arguing in certain situations, with certain people. Specifically, I love to argue with my husband or some other family members, but I am paralyzed with fear and anxiety if I can sense the slightest hint of an argument growing with acquaintances or colleagues. I'm too lazy to analyse the situation, but if anyone has any thoughts on why it's fun to argue with those we love, please let me know your thoughts.

My love for arguing resulted in a strange situation yesterday; I'd had an okay day, but when my husband came home, I picked a fight wherein I criticized his haircut, which is totally a legitimate thing for me to criticize because I am the one who cuts his hair, because he refuses to get his hair cut in a salon). I'm not sure why I started the argument, but my main points were as follows: a) I'm not good at cutting hair, because no one has ever taught me how, b) The haircuts I give Daniel make him look like a character from "Dumb and Dumber", because he will only use styling products on his hair for special occasions such as weddings and graduations, c) He should get a decent haircut in a barbershop or salon so I can at least use that as a guide for one or two subsequent haircuts. This went on for some time, and we both knew it was just arguing for the sake of hearing me raise my voice (because other people in the house need to hear my arguments so they can side with me when I ask for support).

(Writing long sentences is hard work)

The strange thing was that the argument ended with Daniel cutting his own hair over the bathroom sink, and this really wasn't my intention when I started the hair tyrade in the first place. Boy, did he show me! Now he looks a bit like he escaped from bootcamp before they finished shearing the new recruits.

Next time I pick a fight, I'll argue about the dishes or the vacuuming, so he can demonstrate his superior skill in those tasks. Back to my main question: Why do I argue for fun and recreation with the person I love most in the world, but I am terrified of actually disagreeing with people I don't like one bit?