Why Couples Fight the Way They Do

Part I of III

Why do you fight the way you do? Where do your beliefs about conflict come from? What’s your “fighting style,” and how does it mesh (or not) with your partner’s? A lot of couples who come to us for help in their relationships arrive without ever having been asked these questions—or asking themselves. They haven’t looked closely at the beliefs about conflict they inherited from their parents or the culture in which they were raised. They haven’t evaluated the impact of past relationships and how that’s shaped the way they approach and respond to conflict.

Take Tyler and Noah. These mid-thirties, urban professionals share many overlapping interests in art, film, and food. Outside of work, they spend a lot of time together visiting museums and galleries and exploring new restaurants, and recently they had a great experience taking a couples’ cooking class. When they’re out and about doing something together, everything seems to flow smoothly. But whenever they try to have a simple conversation about an issue that’s come up, Tyler quickly defaults to raising his voice when he gets frustrated or even just wants to emphasize a point. In response, Noah shuts down, stops talking, or even bails out completely— overwhelmed by the interaction, he’ll just walk out of the room in the middle of the conversation, leaving Tyler stunned and deeply hurt. Clearly, he thinks, Noah doesn’t care about his needs or feelings. His coldness, his selfishness, feels like a slap in the face.

Noah, meanwhile, is feeling fatalistic—it’s impossible to communicate with Tyler, there’s no way to respond to him that won’t result in more yelling. Every fight feels like a room with no doors: there’s no way out.

With this couple, there’s no one particular issue that’s causing strife. Their recent fights have ranged from where to go to dinner to whether they have (or will ever have) the financial bandwidth to have a child via surrogate. It’s not about the topic—what’s causing a widening rift between Tyler and Noah, who do love each other and want to stay together, is that they have deeply divergent beliefs about conflict—beliefs they take for granted and are barely aware of. They have different conflict styles.

The 3 Main Conflict Styles: Which Type Are You?

There are three possible “conflict styles” within a healthy (emphasis on healthy) partnership:avoiding, validating, and volatile. These each exist as points on a spectrum, rather than absolutes—we are not all 100 percent one of these three but may fall somewhere in between two, trending in one direction or another. As you read the traits and tendencies of each, you’ll likely be able to place yourself along this spectrum, and figuring out which style you most closely identify with will help you nail down how you tend to behave in conflict, and why.

To give you a quick overview of each: Conflict-avoidant couples tend not to have conflictual discussions at all, preferring to “agree to disagree” and keep the peace rather than get mired in a potentially upsetting conversation. Validators fight, but they fight politely, discussing issues collaboratively, and are interested in finding a compromise (though whether they’re able to is another story, and something we’ll talk about later). And finally, volatile couples erupt into conflict more frequently, burn hotter, and are generally more intense and dramatic.

You might recognize yourself and your partner right off the bat just by those one-sentence descriptions, but let’s take a closer look at the tendencies and behaviors of each.

The Conflict-Avoidant Couple

Avoiders shy away from active conflict. They just don’t see the point. They tend to focus on what’s working well about their relationship and choose not to bring up issues that might threaten that stability and equilibrium. In our studies in the lab, the patterns we saw with conflict-avoidant couples was that it was hard to even get them going on a conflict discussion—they would quickly pivot to emphasizing their areas of common ground and talking about all the good things in their relationship. Avoidant couples tend to say, “We enjoy each other’s company, we get along most of the time—so what if we do some things differently? Why rock the boat?”

Within conflict-avoidant couples, though, we see two distinct types. The first type rarely talks at all about points of disagreement. They think, Okay, we don’t agree on this at all, so let’s not waste any time talking about it, and immediately drop the topic. These couples have the most trouble with the “conflict task” in the Love Lab. The instructions for this are pretty simple: We bring a couple in, hook them up to our monitors so we can track their physiology (heart rate, etc.), flip on our recording equipment so we can code everything later, and then give them the instructions: “Choose a recent or recurring conflict in your relationship and discuss it—you have fifteen minutes.”

Volatile couples have no trouble doing this. Neither do valida- tors, usually. But this type of avoidant couple struggles to come up with anything at all. We have to press them to come up with an “area of stress” to help them arrive at a topic. Then, even if they do manage to land on a topic, they can’t manage to fill the fifteen minutes! We have to butt in, nudge, and prod them to get more specific. And with our prodding, they quickly get uncomfortable and then flooded (physiologically overwhelmed). They aren’t used to fighting; it feels very artificial for them.

This type of couple often has a bit more division in their lives— certain rooms or areas in the house become the “territory” of one partner or the other—and they can tend to take on more defined roles domestically, which often (but not always) fall along traditional gender stereotypes: he makes the decisions and she defers; he deals with the finances and she deals with the kids. Julie’s parents were a classic example of this type of couple. He was a physician, a cardiologist—he was out all day saving lives. Her mother worked part-time but mostly stayed home with the three kids. Each spouse had their separate spheres. When he came home, he’d read the paper and she’d cook dinner. At the table the family would talk animatedly about politics and watch the news; the discussion would swirl around world events like the Vietnam War. Julie never once saw them fight. They loved each other, but they didn’t interact all that much, and tensions went unspoken and unaddressed, hanging in the air like smoke.

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This type of avoidant couple can risk becoming lonely and isolated from each other, but they can also lead very stable lives. They tend to be low-risk takers, content with what they have.

The second type of avoidant couple presents a bit differently. They’re very interested in each other. They spend time together. They do talk about feelings. But then . . . they just leave it at that. One person feels one way about a situation, the other feels quite differently; they both express it, and then—well, that’s it! They move on.

This type of avoidant couple tends to be the happiest couples, across all types, that we see in the lab. They aren’t quite as stereotyped, in terms of gender roles, as the other type; there’s more mixing in terms of household roles. But they still don’t know how to accept influence from each other. If they have big differences, they just live with it.

With avoiders in general: if nothing rocks their boat, they might cruise along on calm waters just fine, with no real issues.

Part I of III: See part II for other fighting styles