Are argument's always bad?

Two weeks ago we were staying  with  family down in Utah. One night everyone was winding down for bed so I suggested to my husband that we hit the hay as well, it wasn't too early for us night-owls only about 9-ish. I had recently finished listening to the audio book for Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. As Richard was getting ready for bed, since it was unusually early for us to be going to bed, I figured that we could stay up just a bit longer and watch one of the Frankenstein films in our bedroom. I started looking up which one we could watch while Richard was snuggling down into the air mattress and fluffing up his pillow. It was at about this point that I found the version that I wanted to watch and excitedly told Richard that I had a surprise for him. (We had talked previously about finding a film adaptation of the book to watch earlier, but hadn't settled on a time, version, or place to watch one.) 

What happened next was not what I expected.

Richard was very adamant that we should just go to sleep, while I simply wanted to watch the movie. We ended up getting into a debate as to whether or not we should or should not watch the movie in bed or not and our reasons behind our choices. Both of us were very frank with each other and I even admitted that I was feeling childish but still didn't want to give in. Some people might even call it an argument. Ultimately it was all a matter of miscommunication mostly on my part. After talking for a couple hours we both felt better and had come to a resolution. Got to sleep and watch the film once we got home.

The next day while we were on the road we started  listening to John M. Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. I have to say that we both started laughing when in Chapter 2 he started talking about conflict in marriage, since we had argued the previous night. It was however a wonderful experience to look at the argument we had just had with the new knowledge we were gaining from Dr. Gottman. We must have paused the book 500 times so that we could continue discussing and analyzing what we had each experienced and the advice from the book.

While I don't recommend arguing on purpose with your spouse, if you do,  John M. Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, is a wonderful book to start reading together as a couple and hopefully you'll be able to laugh and gain a better understanding like Richard and I did.