Conflict is a fact of life. If we interact with other people over any stretch of time — siblings, friends, colleagues, the awesome postal worker who’s been on our route forever — we’ll eventually have moments of disagreement.
And though relational conflict can be difficult with anyone, the fights we have with our intimate partners are often the most distressing. When we lack the skills for productive conflict, run-ins with our significant others can derail us — and our relationships — in ways that touch all parts of our lives. This might be why so many of us avoid it.
But scrambling to avoid disagreements with our partners creates a whole new set of problems. “Conflict is a natural part of every human relationship,” explain relationship researchers John Gottman, PhD, and Julie Schwartz Gottman, PhD, in their book Fight Right. “And it’s a necessary part of every human relationship.”
“We tend to equate low levels of conflict with happiness,” they add, “but that just isn’t true. The absence of conflict doesn’t indicate a strong relationship — in fact, it can lead to exactly the opposite.”
Always spoiling for a fight isn’t any better. “It’s not whether there’s conflict in your relationship that makes it or breaks it. Even the happiest couples fight,” they note. “It’s how you do it.”
The Stakes
How couples approach conflict is a revealing barometer of their relationship’s health. The Gottmans’ research has found that the first three minutes of a fight can reliably predict whether a couple will be together or apart six years later.
Couples who exhibited what the Gottmans call the four horsemen of the apocalypse — criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and defensiveness — split up, on average, within five years after getting married. Couples with a higher ratio of positive-to-negative interactions during conflict, on the other hand, were more likely to be together down the road. (These positive gestures can be subtle, like using humor to lighten the moment.)
Couples who didn’t fight at all didn’t wrestle with the four horsemen, but over time their relationships were no longer intimate. When couples stuffed their complaints and frustrations rather than expressing them and working them out as a team, they stopped really knowing each other. They had no major conflict, the Gottmans note, “but also no humor. No question asking. No interest in one another.”
Learning to navigate conflict in a relationship-building way requires knowledge, practice, and more practice. For many of us, it means changing old habits. Our approach to conflict is usually born out of how we learned to handle emotions as children, and deeply ingrained responses and behaviors require a lot of effort to change.
Yet the deeper connection you can ultimately have with your loved one is worth the fight.
The Skills
“It’s only human to have conflicts. It’s even humane to have conflicts,” the Gottmans explain. “Often, it’s exactly the right thing to do.”
At the same time, the benefits of conflict are only possible when we bring our full humanity to our disagreements. The Gottmans have found that couples who go the distance are the ones that have learned to treat conflict as collaboration, not war. And when someone gets hurt (which will inevitably happen from time to time), these couples know how to come back together and make amends.
“One or both parties slows things down,” they explain. “They intentionally defuse any building hostility with an infusion of positivity — anything from an overt apology to a simple nod of, ‘OK, I see your point,’ to a little inside joke that breaks the rising tension.”
If this doesn’t exactly describe your conflict style, don’t despair. Most of us need to learn the skills of relational conflict. These guideposts can get you on the road to healthy conflict.
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Let go of the myth of “the one.”
As a young adult, communication coach and author Jayson Gaddis bounced from relationship to relationship, assuming once he’d found the right person, things would feel perpetually amazing. “I bought into the notion that when you find ‘the one,’ or meet the ‘right’ person, it should always feel good and the two of you should never fight,” he writes in Getting to Zero. “Of course, this is absurd.”
Yet many of us are unconsciously driven by this myth. It’s understandable: From childhood on, we’re bombarded with rom-coms, love songs, and pop-culture fantasies that reinforce the idea that after a meet-cute and a few adorable speed bumps, couples will sail off into the sunset.
Conflict is a when, not an if. It is not a sign that you’re with the wrong person. It’s a sign that you’re with a person.
But if we layer this template over our real-life relationships, it will always seem as if we’re with the “wrong” person — because life isn’t a rom-com. Conflict is a when, not an if. It is not a sign that you’re with the wrong person. It’s a sign that you’re with a person.
“If you’re a human being and you want to be in relationships and you don’t like conflict, you get a dog,” says couples expert Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT.
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Understand your conflict style.
The Gottmans describe three potential conflict styles in a healthy relationship: avoiding, volatile, and validating.
- Avoiders fall into two camps. The first type tends to be overwhelmed by strong emotions, especially negative ones, and prefers to skirt topics that rock the boat by focusing on common ground. The second is more comfortable with strong emotions, including ones that differ from their partners, but they don’t want to argue with their partner about them.
- Volatile types are not just comfortable expressing big emotions, they relish it. Fights can get heated quickly, but tussling over things is part of the way volatile types connect, and sometimes even enjoy, each other. They’re the opposite of avoidant types.
- Validators fall right in the middle. Unlike avoidant types, they aren’t afraid to disagree, but neither are they interested in a heated debate like volatile types. They want to debate an issue and find common ground, or problem-solve, without too much fuss.
Neurodivergence can also play a role in our conflict style, explains Tatkin. He notes that negative bids for attention are more common among people with ADHD, possibly because their prefrontal cortex is hypoactive and receives less blood flow and oxygen. “They poke and they prod to create conflict in an effort to stimulate the frontal area in, say, the way coffee does,” he explains. (Read more: “How to Thrive in a Neurodiverse Relationship.”)
Navigating these different styles in a relationship is an intricate dance, but simply knowing where you and your partner fall on the spectrum can help you approach conflict in a healthier way.
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Give your partner the benefit of the doubt.
Our brains make quick cause-and-effect connections continuously, most of which are beneath our conscious awareness. Say the person you love arrives home late from work. You might assume traffic was terrible, or that your beloved partner is a thoughtless person who doesn’t care about spending time with you.
Many of us may assume the latter. When it comes to understanding other people’s behavior, some evidence suggests that people in more individualistic cultures tend to favor personality-based explanations over situational ones; this is known as the fundamental attribution error. If we never pause to question our assumptions, we might turn our partners into enemies without anyone saying a word.
Try to catch yourself when snap judgments crop up.
Try to catch yourself when snap judgments crop up. Ask yourself whether circumstances might be to blame. Give your partner the benefit of the doubt until you have more information.
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Make room for your partner’s enduring vulnerabilities.
No one escapes childhood without some emotional sore spots, says couples therapist Carrie Cole, PhD, LMHC. “We like to call those spots ‘enduring vulnerabilities,’” she explains. “Those hurts weren’t necessarily intentional — some of them might have been, but some of them might have just been messages that we got from somebody who was frustrated with us. They can leave lasting scars.”
For example, someone who grew up amid conflicts that could escalate into violence might remain jumpy around raised voices. Someone else might be highly reactive to any whiff of criticism that sounds like what they heard repeatedly as a child.
If you’ve been with your partner for a while, chances are you already know their sore spots. If you don’t, take some time to learn them. Then you can create agreements for how to handle them going forward, such as by promising to argue calmly and avoid using words that you know could be extra hurtful.
This helps create the kind of trust that makes healthy conflict possible. “Couples have to develop social contracts around behavior so that they’re ensuring each other’s safety and security and able to deal with each other without fear,” says Tatkin.
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Remind yourself you love this person.
When tensions rise between you and your partner, take a moment to remind yourself that this is the person you love, recommends family therapist Terrence Real, LISCW.
It will probably not come naturally. “Do you remember, really, in that heated moment when fear or righteous anger courses through your veins, that you love this person?” Real writes in his 2022 book, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. “The sobering answer, if you’re dead honest with yourself, is that you do not.”
Even modest conflict can switch on the survival mode in the autonomic nervous system, and the ensuing neurochemical cascade overrides the executive functions of the brain — the parts that help you value other people.
This temporary amnesia is caused by our fight-or-flight response. Even modest conflict can switch on the survival mode in the autonomic nervous system, and the ensuing neurochemical cascade overrides the executive functions of the brain — the parts that help you value other people. Essentially, you stop seeing your partner as your partner and start seeing them as a cheetah chasing you on an ancient savannah.
This requires just a brief check-in with yourself, not a five-paragraph love letter to your partner. Maybe even silently repeat something silly, like “not a cheetah, not a cheetah.” Doing whatever you can to pause and retrieve some awareness of the love you share can diffuse the impulse to fight as if your life is at stake when it isn’t.
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Know the signs that your child self has taken over.
One reason we avoid conflict or become aggressive during conflict is because our child selves are usually the first to show up to a fight. Real describes this part of us as the Adaptive Child: We developed it during childhood to handle whatever difficulties we had to face without the help of reasonable adults.
Although our Adaptive Child strategies protected us when we were young and had limited options, they tend to have disastrous effects on adult interactions. Maybe an ability to lie or evade the truth helped protect us from an intrusive parent. Or our parents never set any limits, and now we have difficulty empathizing and feel enraged when others won’t meet all our demands. That might have worked great then; not so much now.
To get back to what Real calls our Wise Adult self, we need to learn the signs that the Adaptive Child has taken over. One is what Real calls “the whoosh”: “The visceral reaction that comes up from the feet like a wave washing over your body.” Chances are we’re also feeling perfectionistic, relentless, rigid, harsh, hard, and certain.
When this happens, take a break from the disagreement until you can settle down and return when the Wise Adult is back in charge. You’ll know you’re there when you’re able to be nuanced, flexible, forgiving, yielding, and humble.
(Learn more from Real about how to cultivate your Wise Adult: “How to Move Beyond Individualism to Create a More Loving Relationship.”)
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Develop rules of engagement.
The best time to prepare yourself for a disagreement is when you’re not having one. If you and your partner make decisions about how to handle conflict when you’re both calm, you can minimize damage and increase the chances that your arguments are productive. (Use these five questions to get started.)
You could start by writing down some phrases to signal that you need a break, such as “This is getting too rough; let’s take a time out,” or “I’m starting to hit overwhelm; can we take a break?” The Gottmans note that feeling really overwhelmed and flooded can make it hard to say anything at all, so you might also consider agreeing on a hand signal for a time out, like the typical T that coaches use.
The best time to prepare yourself for a disagreement is when you’re not having one.
When you take a break, seek out activities to help reset your nervous system — a walk, a hot bath, a workout, or some deep breathing. If you need to call a friend for support, avoid the temptation to simply complain about your partner, which can just keep you activated.
When you do take a break, be sure to set a time to return to the conversation so the conflict doesn’t linger. Be specific: “I’ll come back in half an hour.” Or “let’s return to this tonight after dinner.” When there’s no plan to reconnect, a break can be as stressful as staying in an unproductive fight. A boundary lets your nervous system know it’s safe to power down.
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Remember that conflict is a chance to know your partner better.
If you express your anger with contempt, criticism, stonewalling, or defensiveness — the four most destructive ways of interacting — it automatically turns your partner into your enemy. They’re someone you’re fighting against.
But if you can approach your partner with even a little bit of curiosity, conflict becomes an opportunity to understand them better. That’s because conflict, at its core, reflects a basic, neutral fact: Our partners are not us. A relationship involves two individuals with diverse backgrounds, hopes, worldviews, and fears.
“Conflict has a goal: mutual understanding,” the Gottmans explain. “Without conflict, without fighting, we would not be able to understand each other fully or love each other fully.”
Think of conflict as an indicator light. When it turns on, it’s simply a reminder that you and your partner don’t see things in the same way. This moment is a great opportunity to get to know them better. If you can understand conflict as a chance to learn something new, then you can fight together toward a deeper, more connected relationship.
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