You know what? I hear that a lot. “We fight about everything.” And I want to tell you something that might sound a little sideways at first, but stay with me.
You fight about everything because you love each other. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
You’re fighting about whether you’re still on the same team.
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I know that sounds almost insulting when you’re exhausted and you’ve just had your fourth argument this week about who left the dishes in the sink or why someone was five minutes late. But here’s what’s actually happening underneath all of that.
Your organism, your actual nervous system, millions of years old, is constantly sending out these little sentinels into the space between you and your partner. And the sentinels are asking two questions, over and over and over again. Are you there for me? And am I enough for you? That’s it. Those are the only two questions that ever really matter in a relationship.
The dishes are not the dishes. The lateness is not the lateness. What’s actually happening is that somewhere in that moment, one of you got a signal, a felt sense in your body, that the answer to one of those questions was no. And when that happens, you’re not having a disagreement about household chores. You’re facing what your nervous system registers as an existential threat. I’m not being dramatic. That’s the actual physiology.
I use this story in my office all the time. Imagine you come to see me for a session, you leave feeling better, you walk to your car, and there’s a parking ticket on the windshield. And you look at each other and you go, oh no, a parking ticket, and your heads kind of lean together, we hate parking tickets, let’s just pay it. Right? You have a problem. It’s annoying. But you’re still on the same team.
You’re fighting about whether you’re still on the same team.
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Now run the same scenario where one of you says, I told you we weren’t supposed to park there, and suddenly the other one is saying, are you kidding me, why does it always take you so long to leave, and now you’re not fighting about a parking ticket at all. You never were. You’re fighting about whether you’re still on the same team. You’re fighting about whether I matter to you. Whether I’m enough.
So when you say you fight about everything, what I actually hear is that the emotional bonding between you two is really important to both of you. Which, honestly, is the raw material we need to work with.
The thing I want you to hold onto right now is this. The magic is not in never fighting. The magic is in the repair. What I care about, what actually builds a relationship over time, is what happens after you’ve gotten it wrong with each other. Can you find your way back? Can you, even messily, even slowly, start to see through the rain that your partner was hurting, and that you were hurting too?
You’re not broken. You’re just two people who love each other enormously, and that means the stakes feel enormous. That makes complete sense.
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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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