'It was an angry, angry fight.'
Kristen Bell is opening up about a recent fight with her husband, Dax Shepard.
The 39-year-old actress appeared on the most recent episode of the Life is Short With Justin Long podcast, and described herself and her husband of nearly seven years as "really good fighters," before going into detail about one of their huge arguments.
"We had this pretty incredible fight recently. Incredible. I mean, like, top of the lungs screaming," she said. "... 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," Bell 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."
Though "everything was fine" when she got home later that day, things took a turn the next 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," Bell recalled. "... 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?'"
Everything escalated from there to the point where both Bell and Shepard "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 said. "...I grabbed my pillow and I stomped down the hall and I sleep in the front room and I’m crying, right?"
The pair didn't talk for three days, aside from "administrative stuff" related to their two daughters -- Lincoln, 6, and Delta, 5 -- because the fight went much deeper than the note itself.
"I was saying, 'I need help packing the lunches, I need you to notice when things need to be done.' And he's like, 'I can't notice what you notice!'" Bell explained.
The fight eventually resolved itself after Bell took their daughters to play with rescue dogs and reached out to Shepard to ask if she could bring one home. Much to Bell's surprise, Shepard, who's allergic to pups, quickly agreed to her request.
"I didn’t get an apology, but I got a dog! This is so much better than an apology!" she quipped. "... 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."
As for why she and Shepard decided to be open about their relationship ups and downs, Bell said that it was something they agreed on from the start.
"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 explained. "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."
Watch the video below for more on Bell and Shepard.
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