There's no such thing as a healthy argument
Happy Monday everyone!
This past week, I started listening to an audiobook about relationships in hopes it could be the one I recommend to a book club I’m in.
I couldn’t even get through the first chapter because I couldn’t get on board with almost everything the authors were saying.
Their main point is that fighting in relationships is healthy as long as you fight in the right way.
Their argument was based on the idea that fighting builds connection.
While they believe fighting where partners verbally attack each other and refuse to listen to each other’s point of view is bad, they also believe that zero fighting between partners is bad too.
They think that zero fighting means partners are keeping everything bottled up, avoiding difficult conversations, and silently resenting their partners.
Essentially, they see fighting as an inevitable thing in a relationship and wanted to help readers learn to fight with their partner in healthy ways.
The problem with “healthy fighting”
Healthy fighting doesn’t exist.
Mariam-Webster has the following definitions for the word “fight”:
to contend in battle or physical combat, especially to strive to overcome a person by blows or weapons
to attempt to prevent the success or effectiveness of something or someone
to struggle to endure or surmount
to gain by struggle
a hostile encounter
a struggle for a goal or an objective
By definition, “fight” implies the presence of a winner and a loser.
There’s no such thing as a “pleasant” fight. A “calm” fight. A “nice” fight.
Saying that the absence of fighting is just as bad as fighting in a relationship because it means avoidance and silent resentment is also problematic.
While keeping issues to yourself and getting angry with your partner without telling them that what they are or aren’t doing is upsetting is bad, it’s not the only thing that can be going on if a couple doesn’t argue.
That can definitely be what’s happing in relationships where the couple doesn’t fight, but maybe they actually don’t fight.
The answer is communication, not “healthy fighting”
I think the authors of the audiobook I was listening to do know what they’re talking about (they’re the leading experts in relationship research after all), I think they just chose incorrect and outdated language to describe the issue and their solution to the issue.
When they say the answer is to “fight healthily to build connection,” they actually mean “build connection through communication.”
Fighting
Again, “fighting” implies that one partner is trying to undermine the other partner’s perspective.
“Fighting” can look like:
yelling at your husband because he didn’t discipline your child for shoving another kid on the playground
giving the silent treatment all day because your boyfriend once again left the toilet seat up and you almost fell into the toilet in the middle of the night
banging cabinets and drawers in the kitchen because your wife didn’t put the dishes away before going to bed like she said she would
making snarky comments throughout the day because you want a dog but your girlfriend doesn’t and then one day you bring a dog home as a surprise, thinking she’ll grow to love the little fur ball
What’s the one thing all of these scenarios are missing?
Communication
A better way to phrase “healthy fighting” is “communicate clearly with your partner.”
Communication, unlike fighting, means meeting in a neutral space to exchange information clearly and effectively.
Re-imagining the fighting scenarios above as scenarios with clear communication may look like:
“I didn’t like that you didn’t discipline Sally for what happened when she shoved another kid on the playground. Her behavior was problematic and I think we need to sit down and talk about how we should handle things like that in the future so we’re on the same page.”
Realizing you never actually told your boyfriend that him leaving the toilet seat up is an issue so you say, “I almost fell into the toilet again when I got up in the middle of the night. Can you please try to remember to put the seat down after you use it? I’ll also try to remember to start checking to make sure it’s down before I sit.”
Realizing that your wife not putting the dishes away before going to bed like she said she would isn’t that big of a big deal and that you don’t know the reason she didn’t do the task…maybe she got a bad headache and wanted to sleep it off, or maybe the kids’ bedtime routine took longer than usual and she just didn’t get to the dishes. It’s a task that can be done tomorrow.
Asking your girlfriend why she doesn’t want a dog and explaining why you do. Having an open conversation where you realize that her reasoning for not wanting a dog most likely has nothing to do with you so there’s no need to be defensive or start an argument. She may have a valid reason for not wanting a dog that you didn’t notice, or it may not actually be as big of a deal to her whether you have a dog or not and hearing how much you want one may change her mind.
No fighting, just conversation.
How do we communicate with our partner?
Talk about the issue, not about each other
The most important thing about communicating effectively with your partner is understanding that most of the time, they aren’t attacking you or your beliefs just because they don’t agree with you.
President and Cofounder of the Center for Applied Rationality, Julia Galef, recommends that people divorce their beliefs.
She isn’t saying people should get rid of or change their beliefs, she’s saying people should separate their beliefs from their identity.
For example, if you strongly believe that swimming is the best form of exercise a person can do, but you’re partner says they think running is the best, they aren’t saying you’re stupid for thinking swimming is better than running. They simply have a differing opinion.
Realizing that our partners are not in fact attacking us when they believe something different than we do removes the hostility from a conversation.
We no longer feel the need to get defensive about who we are or what we believe and recognize that not everyone has the same beliefs. We no longer feel the need to attack them back because we realize they never attacked us in the first place.
Recognize it may not actually be an issue
Maybe the things you argue about with your partner aren’t actually an issue to begin with.
Say you firmly believe that making the bed every single morning sets you up for a good day, but your girlfriend thinks making the bed is pointless because no one sees your bed but you and you’re just going to mess the covers all up the next night anyways.
You have differing opinions.
But, is making the bed really something you want to argue about? Is it even really an issue?
Instead of trying to change your girlfriend’s opinion to match your own, understand that your opinion is yours alone and that’s okay.
The solution? You make the bed every morning since it’s important to you. Your girlfriend doesn’t have to change herself to meet your expectations.
But what if it is an actual issue?
What if the differing opinion is on a more heavy topic, like religion and raising kids?
Say you’re a devout Christian and want to raise your future children as devout Christians, but your boyfriend is agnostic and doesn’t want to raise his future children under any single religion.
This is a differing of opinions on a fundamental level that simply isn’t going to work.
It doesn’t matter how sweet you think your boyfriend is, or how wonderful he thinks you are, and it doesn’t matter if you have similar outlooks on all the other things in life.
Disagreeing how to religiously raise children is something that probably isn’t going to work itself out with even the clearest communication.
These differing of opinions often become big blowup fights because people think their partner will change in the future.
Or, it’s not an issue right off the bat because you aren’t thinking about raising kids when you’re just starting a relationship with someone. But then years down the road, when you start talking about having kids it becomes an issue.
This is where the sunk cost fallacy1 comes into play. The sunk cost fallacy states that people will remain in unhappy situations because they’ve invested too much time and energy into the situation to change it.
The cost outweighs the benefits.
People who don’t address fundamental differences between them and their partner tend to get caught up in the sunk cost fallacy later in the relationship because they believe they’ve put too many resources into the relationship to end it and move on.
So how do we avoid the sunk cost fallacy in our relationships? It sounds formulaic or like I’m removing the romance aspect from relationships, but the answer is to assess compatibility before deciding to start a relationship.
Assessing compatibility
I’ve written about the relationship between Corey and I before, but the short version is that we became really good friends before we every considered dating.
On long walks after our shifts at a shitty job, we had some deep conversations and really got to know one another.
All of the topics that usually cause arguments or friction in a relationship were on the table from the get go:
our beliefs on religion
how we each would raise kids if we had them (not together because we weren’t considering dating yet)
opinions on the hot button topics in politics
our likes and dislikes
our goals in life
Then, once we both started to like each other and started to consider dating, we literally sat in his car in the parking lot after our shift one night and laid out what a relationship between the two of us would look like:
our hard line boundaries that were non-negotiables based on our past relationships
what we were looking for in a relationship
what we weren’t looking for in a relationship
what happens if one of us ever starts to feel like we aren’t fully invested in the relationship anymore
Because we had these conversations before agreeing to start a relationship with each other, we knew everything right up front. We could both make a fully informed decision about entering a long-term relationship.
And to this day, almost 10 years later, we still agree on all of the topics that usually cause friction between a couple. And we both still have the understanding that if we were to ever disagree on a foundational topic, then we are no longer compatible and our relationship has run its course.
We laugh every single day and have never once felt resentment toward each other.
All of this isn’t to say that I think the authors of that audiobook are wrong. I just think they’re using the wrong language by saying a lack of fighting is impossible and are glossing over the key component of a relationship: communication.
Again, the goal isn’t to “fight to build connection.” The goal is to “build connection through communication.”
Until next week,
Rychelle 💜
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel prize in 2002 for his work on cognitive bias. This led to economist Richard Thaler introducing the idea of the sunk cost fallacy, formally knows as the Concorde fallacy.