Your Familiar Fights May Be Good For Your Marriage. Here’s 5 Ways How.

Is It Fighting or Bickering?

Nicole Walker discusses the benefits of “bickering.” Couples create and grow a shared story. She says,

I have always believed that being in a long-term relationship, including friendship, is about creating a shared narrative. To get there, you’re going to have to iron out the details. Nicole Walker

Perhaps bickering is also a way couples practice making compromises and moving on. They learn in the small arguments to trust each other and the process thy have of ironing out the details of their joint history.  It is a bonding experience similar to the results of sibling rivalry.

Couple Fights, the Next Level Up

Most Americans have their share of big rock fights. Couples can try to avoid or contain them as much as possible and not let them grow into cliffs of granite. However, the irony is that couples cling to their rocks. It’s as if the boulders of their relationship have become foundational pillars of their togetherness and their behavior suggests they do not want to give them up. Familiar Fights become part of the couple shared story. That can be a good thing.

Overtly or covertly, out loud or silently, out in the open or behind closed doors, couples have tension points, hot topics that do not dissipate or get resolved. Fights not only continue, but the topics for fights are fairly common and predicable: money spending, sex (type or frequency), parenting (too soft or too harsh) and in-laws (your mother, my mother).

Perhaps the biggest source of relationship friction is he/she won’t talk about things (according to one partner) and she/he wants to talk too much (according to the other partner). “Why is my wife always mad at me?” is one question. “Why is my husband cold and distant, non-communicative with me?” is the counter question.

Regardless of the fight topics, you might think that over time couples would cross swords about a variety of topics, shifting from one issue to the other, if for no other reason than to stave off boredom. But that is not the case. Once a couple’s fighting gets attached to particular issues, it’s as though they don’t need other issues to quarrel about.

So long as they have their favorite topics for familiar fights, they don’t need more or new topics.

Having repeated or unchanging fight topics may provide comfort zones for a couple. Negative as fighting may seem and troublesome as they can be to quality married life, couples often refuse to let their familiar fight-zones go. Familiarity with anything provides a sense of security and stability for human beings. Whether or not it’s good for you or adds quality and depth in a relationship is beside the point.

In fact, it appears to me that the majority of couples use Familiar Fights to grow, deepen intimacy and strengthen their bonds of attachment over time.

Embrace Your Bickering and Familiar Fights

When couples come to see me in counseling, they frequently start with complaints about poor communications. Elaboration reveals that one or both of them thinks that they fight too much or the quarreling has become too intense, maybe to the point of emotional or physical abuse. The trigger or last straw for entering counseling has been a fight that escalated out of control and hit a new level of intensity.

What alarms couples in these instances is not so much that they fight, but that the familiar pattern of fighting has been violated one way or the other. Once we begin to break it down and get into the couple’s dynamics, frequently they don’t really want to give up the fight. Rather, they want to return to their familiar parameters of fighting.

Here are 5 healthy suggestions how to use Familiar Fights as comfort zones:

• With your partner, do some research to determine if you have regular and familiar fights about the same or similar topics? Put names on those topics. Like the old joke where someone yells out a number and everyone laughs. That continues and eventually the new guy in the groups asks what’s so funny about numbers that makes everyone laugh. He is then informed that the group has heard the same old jokes so often that they eventually just put a number to each joke so the tedium of retelling was not necessary. Put a number or name on each of your frequent fight topics.
• Identify the positives of familiar fights. What are the benefits of repeated fights over the same old topics? – For example, repetition is essential for life to be sustained. The familiar cycles keep us alive. Rinse and repeat. Eat, sleep and be active and then repeat and repeat. Sunrise, sunset, slowly go the days into growth and sustenance of health. Familiar fights can add to that supportive cycling.
• Another benefit: Is it not better to fight than not talk at all? I think of couple fighting as a sign the relationship is not over. People who don’t care about each other don’t fight. Fighting is a sign of caring and thus the couple is not finished with each other. Hate or anger is the opposite of love and caring. It’s the other side of the same coin. True not caring about another person is indifference. If your partner doesn’t care enough to fight with you, they are finished.
• Schedule the fights. Then yell out a number or name of the fight topic and begin. Just like boxing matches, the fight is scheduled and conducted according to rules and procedures. Have a set number of rounds. When the bell sounds, that’s the end of that round. Take a break and go at it again for the pre-determined time a round is to last: not too short, not too long. If you reach the set number of rounds, that’s the end of that match. Go back to your regular lives, looking forward to the next major, scheduled heavy weight bout.
  By all means, do not ambush each other with unscheduled fights. Not fair.
• Fight fair, by the rules. Here are my rules for fair fighting:

Understand and accept the role your fights play in the relationship. That acceptance allows you to manage the fight rather than let the fights run the relationship.

Like any good tennis match, you want a worthy opponent on the other side of the net. Not only does that give you a good work out (in the case of relationship fights, it’s an emotional workout) but the Familiar Fights will help you maintain respect and appreciation for your partner as an equal.