Intramarital Dispute Data Tracker.xls
#14 of 52 Fictions: A Story a Week for 2026
I love Excel spreadsheets, and I have used them to track many elements of my life: favorite movies, garden plantings, home repairs, sleep, skin care products… Let me give you an example. When I decided that we needed to separate, I presented my husband with a spreadsheet. I had been working on it, off and on, for some time. I had never shown it to him or spoken of it. In the spreadsheet I had tracked our arguments, going back almost ten years. Each argument had a row in the spreadsheet, and across the columns were documented the date of the argument, the topic(s), the location(s), the person who “started it,” and the intensity level of the argument on scale of one to ten. The intensity was also color coded, with pale green at one, increasing through yellow to orange, and red at ten. If you scrolled down, you could see the colors shift over time from mostly greens and yellows toward the oranges and then, over the last couple of years, a lot of red.
I had also created some graphs. A scatterplot showed how, over time, as our arguments became more ferocious, they had also become more frequent. Another graph, which I thought was very interesting, showed how our arguments, when grouped into topical categories, had drifted over the years from politics and movies and vacation plans to household decisions and past events.
When I showed my husband, he had some questions. He asked, “How long have you been doing this?” I scrolled up to show him the date of the first recorded argument. I admitted that I had missed a few here and there. He asked, “Why did you do this?” I said that I liked data. He asked, “Did you make spreadsheets for happy moments or sex or anything else?” I said no. He asked, “Why not?” I said because when trying to diagnose a flawed machine, you need to examine the moments when things are going wrong. He asked, “Are we machines, then?” I said obviously not, it was a metaphor. He asked, “Why did you keep this Excel thing secret from me?” I said because it was for me, because Excel spreadsheets help me to organize my thinking, and that I hadn’t shared it with him in the same way that I wouldn’t share with him every thought in my head. He asked, “Then why are you showing it to me now?” I said because I wanted a divorce, and I hoped that the data would help him to understand why. He said, “All right, we’ll get divorced.” He said, “But not because of your data.” He said, “We’ll get divorced because you’re fucking nuts.”
I should clarify that this wasn’t the only or first time that we had decided to get divorced. Sometimes I said that we should get divorced, and he agreed, and then nothing happened. I showed him a graph I had made showing the dates of when we had decided to get divorced and how the decision had been made more and more frequently over time.
He said this was crazy, and I should see a therapist. I said I was seeing a therapist. When I told her about my argument spreadsheet, she got very excited, and she said it sounded like a terrific nontraditional processing tool, and she was going to share the concept with all her therapist friends, and so I liked her. He said that I should see a different therapist, because obviously this one sucked. I said that we should see a couples therapist. He said we had tried that. That was true. My graphs indicated that the couples therapy had done nothing to change the trend of our arguments.
Anyway, after this argument, I cried, and then I opened up the argument spreadsheet, and I added the new entry. Then I texted a friend who had gone through a divorce, and I asked for the name of her lawyer, and then I called the lawyer.
In the morning I took our daughter to the car, and I told her that I had forgotten something, and I ran back into the house. I told my husband that I had set up a meeting with divorce lawyer, and we should both go, and he said OK, great. That night I moved the argument spreadsheet into a folder named “Done.”
Truth is, it’s sometimes a bittersweet feeling when you finish with a spreadsheet.
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This story is by Nick Arvin. Check out the previous stories. The fabulous illustrations for these stories are by Erin Schoepke/Lunascape Photograpy. See more of her images here. Follow her on Instagram. No AI is used in creating the story or the illustration.
Love, this, Nick!