You know, I get this question a lot. And I want to tell you something that might sound a little strange at first: the goal isn’t actually to stop fighting.
Stay with me here.
You and your spouse are going to hurt each other. That’s not a bug in the system, that’s a feature of loving someone deeply. You care so much about this person that when it feels like they’re not there for you, it’s genuinely painful. And they feel the same way about you. That’s not dysfunction. That’s love with nowhere safe to go.
So here’s what I actually want to help you do: shrink the box of suffering, and learn how to repair it well.
Think of it this way. Right now, maybe your fights last 10 hours, and in those 10 hours you’re both doing real damage to each other. And then you crawl back to normal with something like “I’ll pick up the kids” or “fine, I’ll make dinner.” That’s passive repair. You get back to baseline, but nothing got healed. You’re just waiting for the next round.
What if you could get that 10 hours down to 10 minutes? And what if at the end of those 10 minutes, instead of just going back to normal, you actually turned to each other and said, “Show me where you got hurt. Can I love you there now, in the way I couldn’t love you then?” That’s what real repair looks like. That’s the visible, felt evidence that you did the hard thing together.
But here’s the skill that makes all of this possible, and this is the hardest one: you have to be able to see what the fight is actually about.
I use this example with couples all the time. You walk out of my office, there’s a parking ticket on your car. One of you says, “you told me we weren’t over the meter.” The other one fires back, “well if you hadn’t taken so long, we wouldn’t have had to rush.” And now you’re off. But here’s the thing: you stopped fighting about that parking ticket about 0.2 seconds after you saw it. What you’re actually having is an “if you really loved me” conversation. If you really loved me, you would have been more careful. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t be disappointed in me when I’m doing my best.
As long as you both think you’re arguing about the parking ticket, things are going to get ugly fast. The real skill is how quickly you can both wake up and see: this isn’t about the parking ticket. This is about how much we mean to each other, and how frightening it feels when it looks like we’re not there for one another.
The other thing that kills repair before it even starts is jumping to solutions too fast. I’ve been there myself. We’d have a rupture, and I’d want to jump straight to the future where everything was figured out. But connection wouldn’t hold. Because we’d skipped the 20 minutes of actually reconnecting first. A solution will never hold a disconnected nervous system. Connection first. Solution second. Every time.
So. The fights aren’t going to disappear. But you can get to a place where you recognize them sooner for what they really are, you shrink them down, and then you repair them in a way that actually builds something between you instead of just papering over the crack.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
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