Questions on violence were based on a modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale and were designed to measure the incidence of three general kinds of tactics: reasoning, verbal aggression, and violence. Respondent age was used to examine the incidence of common couple violence across the life course. As expected, gender symmetry characterized common couple violence resulting from the privatized setting of American and Canadian households. Although the United States exhibited significantly higher rates of societal violent crime than Canada, Canadian women and men were more likely than their American counterparts to use severe intimate violence and to inflict severe and minor violence more often, contrary to the culture of violence theory guiding the study. Similarly, higher rates of wife to husband severe violence across the life course in both countries were inconsistent with the culture of violence theory. Several ad hoc explanations are offered to account for the unexpected findings. 56 references, 2 tables, and 1 figure