Dating : Unconditional Love Is a Myth

How we communicate with our partner is the number one predictor of divorce. The communication strategies you choose to interact with your partner predicts the quality of your relationship.

What does this mean? It means how you fight determines the outcome of your relationship.

Disagreements in relationships are normal. How you fight is crucial to a healthy long-term relationship. Are you a clean fighter? If you are a decent fighter, you do not use sarcasm, rolling of the eyes, name-calling, hitting below the belt, criticism, defensiveness, contempt, or stonewalling (not allowing for bids of reconnection after a fight, shutting down emotionally).

Be a clean fighter.

A clean fighter listens openly without judgment or sarcasm. A clean fighter uses empathy to hear what is troubling their partner, and then he/she responds with understanding.

After you listen, then you get to talk.

Clean fighters don’t use the current argument to hit below the belt in the next argument.

John Gottman of the Gottman Institute believes that some marital fights will never resolve, yet you will have them again and again, hundreds of times.

After being married for ten years, I know this to be true.

So stop having them. There are some issues you will never see eye to eye on because you’re two sperate people with two different perspectives. Leave those fights alone, or make a joke about them and try to laugh when they come up. “Honey, I know you hate when I do so and so, but you love when I do x in the bedroom…”

A hug goes a very long way. A smile, a laugh, a thank you, a please are ways of diffusing a disagreement that goes nowhere and usually ends in a fight.