You know what I want to say to you first? The fact that you’re asking this question tells me you care. You’re not here because you’re indifferent. You’re here because this person matters to you, and the fighting hurts. That’s actually a good sign. Stay with me.
Here’s the thing most people get completely backwards. They think the goal is to stop fighting. And I understand why. Fighting feels terrible. But if you love each other, you will scare each other. That’s not a flaw in your relationship. That’s evidence that you actually love each other. Conflict is not the sign that something is broken. It’s the sign that you’re bonded to each other deeply enough that disconnection feels like a threat.
So the goal is not to stop the fighting. The goal is to learn how to go from disconnected back to connected. That shift right there changes everything.
Here’s what’s actually happening when you fight. You’re both in what I call two separate suffering bubbles. You’re in yours thinking “I feel terrible and they did this to me.” And they’re in theirs thinking exactly the same thing about you. And when two bubbles come together, ninety nine percent of the time, they just burst. The fight escalates. More words get thrown. More damage gets done.
But every now and again, something different happens. Two bubbles come together and instead of bursting, they merge into one larger bubble. And when that happens, it shifts from “I’m hurting” and “you’re hurting” to “we are hurting.” That is the state change you’re looking for. Not a cognitive trick. An actual biological, physiological shift where you stop being two enemies and start being two people who love each other and got caught in something painful together.
So how do you get there?
First thing. Stop trying to solve the content of the fight before you address the emotional rupture. I cannot tell you how many couples I’ve sat with who sprint straight to fixing the logistics, the dishes, the money, the schedule, whatever it is, without first attending to the fact that someone’s nervous system is on fire. A solution will never hold a disconnected nervous system. Never. The rule is connection first, solution second. Every single time.
Second thing. Stop litigating who started it. I call this collapsing the timeline. You cannot figure out who hurt who first. You cannot. The old wounds and survival strategies come in all at once, everything, everywhere, all at once. When you spend your energy trying to prove you were less wrong, you stay stuck. Both of you have fifty percent of the truth. And fifty percent of the truth is wrong.
Third thing, and this is the big one. You need to see the cycle as your common enemy. Not each other. The cycle. The pattern where one of you pushes and the other one pulls away, or you both come in hot and it escalates fast, that pattern is what’s hurting you. Not the person in front of you. When you can both step back and name it, when you can say “we’re in it again” rather than “you did this to me again,” something opens up.
That’s where empathy becomes possible. Empathy for yourself, empathy for your partner, and empathy for the us, for the relationship that’s getting battered by this cycle. And it’s only from that shared ground that real repair can happen.
Here’s the line I come back to again and again with couples: love is not the absence of hurt. Love is the presence of repair. The magic is not in having a relationship where you never fight. The magic is in what you do after. That’s the proof of work of love. The visible, felt evidence that you did the hard thing, that you turned toward each other even when it was uncomfortable, even when part of you wanted to defend or explain or disappear.
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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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