It seems logical that at different points in a relationship we are going to have to have what we might call a serious talk about something. First of all, that is a sign that we are in a serious relationship. Casual arrangements do not require anyone to sit down and work anything out. You just drift apart and move on.
It would be a great invention if couples had a robotic therapist on demand, something sitting in limbo in the living room, waiting for the next conflict to erupt. But the problem is that the couple would never feel a real sense of accountability. Nobody stays reasonable for a machine. It takes a respected human being acting as an arbitrator to make two people mind their manners.
And I find therapy to be an expensive place to try to work out an argument. An hour at three hundred dollars or more, the conflict still unresolved when the hour ends, and then a week of waiting for another few minutes of direction or clarity. That is a slow and costly way to learn something you could practice at home every single day.
In my view, the old way of seeking counsel was to sit down, talk about the issues, and try to arrive at some kind of compromise, and that simply did not work. I had half a dozen relationships that made their way into therapy in one form or another, or into some similar kind of support group, and I found couples counseling for conflict to be ineffective.
There is an exception. When a couple is already in therapy together, already making progress, already relaxed into the process, receptive and accountable to each other, it can work beautifully. But that takes time. It takes the same kind of time it takes to build trust in one on one therapy. The couple has to develop a dynamic with their therapist where they both feel safe, and safety is not something you can buy in a single hour.
So my theory is that the smartest place to resolve conflict is in the conversation itself, where your personal discipline is to mind the details of your own behavior, not only to keep the peace but to truly resolve the thing and let the relationship flourish afterward.
What does that mean in practice?
The first thing is that you have to have a plan, and you have to commit to not losing your cool no matter what, because you are going to get to the other side, and the other side is forgiveness and love. You can expect to be triggered in one form or another for years. That is not a failure. That is just what it is to be two people with histories.
For a long time I believed my honor and my pride had to be protected at all costs or I would be humiliated in some way. I also took a lot of pride in my logic. I did have a good logical mind in a conflict, except I was applying that logic to the wrong information, and I have done that enough times in my life to see that the results were fruitless.
What I realized with my wife was that I was not in a fight for my life. We were married. I am committed to her for life, which means I have time to work things out, even when I think she is wrong. I have to be patient and accept that I am not going to settle every battle in every conversation.
A battle is not necessarily a chance to win something. It is a chance to plant a seed. It is a chance to help someone you love deeply to grow, without preaching and without teaching, just by being relaxed and demonstrating a calm nervous system that the other person can settle into.
That is the plan. The plan is to show yourself your own growth, to listen to what your partner actually needs, and when you feel the pull to react with something defensive or something sharp, you breathe, you speak softly, and you stay vulnerable. That last part is probably the hardest thing for a man to do, though not always, of course, because women carry similar wounds.
What I have come to believe is that every conflict needs rules of engagement. It cannot be a free for all.
The first rule is that everyone agrees peace comes before everything else. There are no winners and no losers. Everybody has to walk away feeling whole, or nothing has been accomplished. You get there by lowering your tone and following some basic common sense.
Know the players. You should understand the kind of person you are in a relationship with. Are they thick skinned, able to absorb a lot of external and internal triggers, tired and hungry and still able to manage themselves? Or do they melt down under any one of those conditions? Knowing this helps you decide whether this is even a good moment to open the conversation. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is put it off until later.
Know each other’s weaknesses. If you know your partner is sensitive to sharp words, hostility, or anything that sounds like a threat, then you do not use them. That is not a tactic, it is a defense mechanism dressed up as strategy, and it is an attempt to gain power. It is not honest, even though most of the time it is unconscious. Forcing your partner into submission because you found the soft spot, abandonment or whatever it happens to be, is manipulation, not intimacy. You have to catch yourself doing it, stop doing it, hold yourself accountable for not doing it, and talk about how you are not doing it with your friends later.
Listen as much as you talk. I really believe in couples setting a timer when the anxiety and the intensity are running high, with no exceptions. If you talk for five minutes, your partner talks for five minutes right after you, and then you exchange again. Time spoken is time owed listening. That is the golden rule. Otherwise you are in a relationship with yourself.
Understand that you are not there to rescue. You are not there to fix your partner’s broken mind. You can listen to it, take notes on it, absorb it, but you cannot repair it in the middle of a conflict. If the two of you like psychology, there is a time for that. Sit together on a quiet afternoon and listen to lectures on YouTube when you are both relaxed. But to sit in a tense moment and explain your partner’s childhood to them is desperate, and it is not intimacy either. What you are really doing in that moment is trying to mold them into someone more capable of handling you. Yes, we are here to share and to help each other. There is just a time and a place.
The next rule is that it is not a battle to win. It is not a battle at all. This is a human relationship. It is emotional. It is about the nervous system, about anxiety, about the hurt people carry and the fears they have not put down yet. That makes this the most important time in the world to be gentle.
The next rule is to stay with your own feelings as much as you possibly can. When you have to digress and talk about your partner’s behavior, talk about the behavior only. Do not narrate their motivations and do not tell them what they feel. Say something like, when you did this, I felt like that. Do not say, you made me feel this way because you were not being aware. The first version is a report from inside your own body. The second is a verdict handed down about theirs.
The next rule is to treat your partner in that moment like a player on your team, and you are the coach. Coaching is motivational. It is not training, it is not teaching, it is not reprimanding, and it is not threatening. Coaching in this case is less about showing a person how to do something and more about paying them compliments for what they already do well, building up their sense of self esteem. Praise them five to ten times more than you critique them.
The next rule is this. If you are walking into an evening conflict to debate your partner’s addictive behavior patterns, their drinking or whatever it happens to be, and you are staging this intervention alone, you are more than likely barking up the wrong tree.
Another good rule is to stick to one topic, and to put a time limit on the whole conversation before it begins. Say it to your partner in advance. The rules say we do not go on for too long about this. One subject, one window of time, and then we stop.
How We Resume
I think it is of critical importance that we also think about how we resume the relationship after a conflict or a blowout.
Everyone is familiar with the term makeup sex. We all know it is exciting, that it carries an adrenaline rush, and that sometimes, though not always, it smooths the problem over. It can create a real feeling of reconnection, and from there the body can move into the chemistry of relaxation, which is a genuinely good thing.
But beware. When we do not resolve the conflict and we go straight into the physicality of the relationship and the excitement it brings, we can unconsciously train our chemistry to link conflict and drama with that sexual dopamine. And it is likely that if we are doing this at all, we already link chaos and drama to some desperate action that produces dopamine, which is the essence of addiction in some ways. Over time the body starts to demand the drama in order to feel complete.
So what it means is that we have to be mindful about why we need the sex in that moment. It is usually not the sex. It is the connection, the connection we failed to create during the conflict or failed to complete in a poor resolution.
There is no set rule that says you cannot have makeup sex. It is only that without a real resolution first, the sex can allow a couple to sweep important issues under the carpet. No pun intended.
There are many scenarios I could cover here. I am going to walk through a few of the typical arguments I see, including some of my own.