Just as connection and chemistry are an integral part of any relationship, it’s inevitable that conflicts are as well – it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to point that one out. I guess my experiences and conversations with people, as well as having had the pleasure of being surrounded by some of the most amazing and compatible couples has provided me with credibility of asserting that conflicts are a part of life but are not insurmountable. Some of you may be expecting more than mediocrity out of your relationships, and others may be looking to weatherproof their relationships while in the midst of a storm. After the last entry on love I thought that this entry is relevant to increasing awareness, and shedding light for those who could use a little insight. Has your love evolved for the better after a conflict or is it adding to your dissatisfaction?
I feel that conflicts are inevitable because for those of you who have been in significant long term relationships, are aware that conflicts come as a part of the package deal. It’s like the friction that starts to occur ones the honeymoon - impress each other phase starts to wane. I also believe that they are important because they help us learn about one another. Imagine two people who come from two sets of worldviews, with separate value sets, and personality quirks trying to merge into unit while still trying to maintain and embrace their individuality. Do you remember how the simplest things caused the biggest arguments such as: “why is the toilet seat left up”, “why is the toilet paper roll facing backwards”, “did you just check that girl out in front of me”, “why don’t you want to spend more time with me”, “why don’t we have as much sex as we used to”, “why don’t you do chores like you did” etc. etc. And remember how you felt once the conflict was dealt with? For some, those memories are long repressed and they are exhibited at other times in dysfunctional ways, i.e. they never get resolved and the same things keep coming up. While for others, those mistakes are never repeated again. The distinction lies in how those conflicts got resolved!
In the world where sometimes I believe that ‘communication’ seems such an obvious answer to some of these issues I see that the smartest people are unable or unequipped to resolve through some of these
crises. Communication seems like such an important commodity and yet so sparsely used. Yes I am going to be a bit obvious with this and point out some of the factors that occur when people fight/disagree/argue, whichever term one prefers. I also want to make an effort to equip you with tools that might help you through some of your disagreements. I must warn you that the use of these tools is not a cure-all. The most important factor in creating and maintaining a healthy bond is not that the fighting stops, but rather how and what two people are left with once it’s done. Do you fight to resolve and grow or do you fight to win?
I believe that the concept of two bodies merging to be one soul concept only occurs in the movies. The relationships that I have seen be healthy and work long term are the ones that have managed to work through crisis (because as we all know they sure do occur no matter how ‘happily in a relationship’ ones relationship seems to appear). I think the its this ability to work through crises appears to set the distinguishing characteristic, setting the healthy and wholesome relationship apart from the unhealthy junk food equivalent of a relationship.
Kinds of conflict
(Summarized from a book that I absolutely recommend to everyone who wishes to keepin’ it spicy in their relationships: NY BESTSELLER ‘Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work’ – Dr. Gottman. He writes that in his lifetime he has had an experience of working with so many couples that within the first few minutes of watching them he can tell whether the relationship is headed the spicy gourmet direction or the other way. But I think the insight below could apply to any long term relationships, to me the word Marriage and long term relationship are interchangeable).
(Summarized from a book that I absolutely recommend to everyone who wishes to keepin’ it spicy in their relationships: NY BESTSELLER ‘Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work’ – Dr. Gottman. He writes that in his lifetime he has had an experience of working with so many couples that within the first few minutes of watching them he can tell whether the relationship is headed the spicy gourmet direction or the other way. But I think the insight below could apply to any long term relationships, to me the word Marriage and long term relationship are interchangeable).
The author here talks about how all marital conflicts whether they are little life annoyances that couples deal with or out right wars that people get into. He distinguishes the conflicts by placing them into two different categories, saying some "can be resolved" "and some are perpetual, which means they will be a part of your lives in some form or the other". He states that unfortunately most conflicts fall into the perpetual category – "69% to be exact." For example: do you remember the last time you disagreed with your partner and you started off arguing about little trivial details and ended up with "I can’t do this anymore!"
He talks about perpetual problems ending up in grid locks that makes solving them more difficult because there are other underlying issues that need to be resolved. Most peoples emotional intelligence or lack their of does not allow them to even think deeper which adds up over time. He mentions that one way to identify solvable problems is that they seem less painful, gut-wrenching, or intense than perpetual gridlocked arguments.
Signs of Gridlock:
- The conflict makes you feel rejected by your partner
- You keep talking about it but make no headway
- You become entrenched in your positions and are unwilling to budge (we have all been there
- When you discuss the subject, you end up feeling more frustrated and hurt.
- Your conversations about the problem are devoid of humor, amusement, or affection.
- You become even more unbudgeable over time, which leads you to vilify each other during these conversations.
- This vilification makes you all the more rooted in your position and polarized, more extreme in your views, and all the less willing to COMPROMISE.
- Eventually you disengage from each other emotionally!
So to avoid getting to the last stage by rescuing the relationship, so to speak, some of the things he emphasizes include starting off a disagreement softer rather than harsher to still maintain respect for one another, to play fair and not hit below the belt. If this is supposedly the person you are in LOVE with how do you use your emotional intelligence and focus on yourself as supposed to blaming the issues on them. What responsibility do you take for the disagreement, do you compromise or do you keep scores of who won? What method do you have in place to become more tolerant of your partner?
When I read the article below I found it very fascinating because it aligned with my beliefs of optimism and looking at things from the ‘glass half full’ perspective. I believe that relationships like life can be successful depending on ones ability to be solution oriented rather than problem focused! As discussed under "blog review," the purpose of this blog is to create more relationships where partners are not just complaisant. The aim is to expect more out of yourself and your partner while keeping it spicy. So I found this author’s perspective quite intriguing because he addresses some of the issues discussed earlier on this topic– do you fight to fight? I read somewhere that people who tend to follow a 5 positives to every negative rule, have more sustaining and harmonious relationships over time than people who focus on the negatives, which is similar to what the author of the article below suggests.
Restoring Love versus Resolving Conflicts
Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D
Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D
Before I discuss with you some of the details of a well-conceived plan to resolve conflicts and restore your love for each other, I will focus attention on the highest priority of such a plan -- restoring love.
I know of no marriage, including my own, that is free of conflict. That's because every couple is made up of two distinctly different people, with different experiences, interests and emotional predispositions. Regardless of the compatibility a couple creates in marriage, a husband and wife will always have somewhat different perspectives, and those differences will create conflict. Conflicts over money, careers, in-laws, sex, child rearing, and a host of other common marital issues are part of the experience of being married.
Some couples feel that if they could only rid themselves of certain conflicts, they would be happy together. But I've discovered that marriages can be terrific in spite of conflicts, even when some of them are never fully resolved. The difference between couples who live in marital bliss and those who regret ever having met each other is not found in whether or not they are free of conflict -- it's found in whether or not they are in love with each other.
From my years of experience trying to save marriages, I have come to the conclusion that the goal of restoring and sustaining love in marriage is much more important than the goal of resolving conflicts. Ultimately, of course, both goals are important, but by making love my highest priority, I found myself rejecting many popular approaches to conflict resolution because they tend to sacrifice a couple's love for each other. The way I now encourage couples to resolve their conflicts is to only use procedures that will also build their love.
Most marriage counselors are so focused on conflict resolution that they forget about building a couple's love for each other. But it's easy to understand why they tend to ignore the feelings of love -- the couples they see usually want help in resolving their conflicts, not restoring their love. It's the couples themselves that usually fail to see the importance of being in love. This just reiterates the point further, that why is it that when we first meet our connection with our partner grows due to the common interests, goals and attraction that we share. We are willing to put in all the hard work and dedication to make love happen if we really end up caring for the person. But as the relationship grows we get into the life happens mentality and forget to put in the work that we did to impress each other in the beginning. And when the loss of love really is the issue, couples rarely believe it can be restored, at least to the level it once was. They think that if their conflicts are resolved, and they are given the freedom to create independent lifestyles, they will be able to survive their marriage. They feel that all marriages eventually lose passion, but when that happens a husband and wife can still remain married if they are "mature" enough.
If you have seen a marriage counselor, and have been disappointed with the results, it's probably because you've spent all of your time trying to resolve your marital conflicts instead of restoring your love for each other. Even if you made progress in resolving some of your conflicts, you still may have been unhappy with your marriage. I receive letters regularly from those who find that they want to divorce in spite of a peaceful relationship. Even when a husband and wife are each other's best friends, they often divorce when the passion is gone. In relationships that I have seen evolve for the better over the years I believe that the couples have developed emotional intelligence over the years and through their conflicts to making an effort to evolving their relationship by revisiting issues that caused the spark in the first place.
That's one of the most confusing aspects of popular approaches to martial therapy, and it should raise a red flag to those who use them. When the goals of conflict resolution are achieved in counseling, why does the couple often divorce anyway? There seems to be something more to marriage than just resolving conflicts successfully. Don't get me wrong, though. I believe that conflict resolution is important in marriage, and I go to a great deal of trouble to help couples resolve their conflicts. But couples who are happily married do more than resolve their conflicts, they also preserve their feeling of love for each other. And without being in love, marriage just doesn't seem right.
When a couple asks me to help them with their marriage, unresolved conflicts usually abound. And they present their marital problems to me as a litany of failures to resolve those conflicts. But as I probe the depth of their despair, conflicts are not usually the greatest source of their hopelessness. One spouse, and sometimes both of them, tell me that it is their lost feeling of love and passion for the other that bothers them the most. They don't believe that feeling will ever return, and without that feeling, they do not want to be married to their spouse. Their greatest feeling of hopelessness is about their lost love, not their inability to resolve conflicts.
That's why I learned early in my experience as a marriage counselor that restoring the feeling of love was far more important than resolving marital conflicts. In order to be completely happy with their marriage, the couple must find the love for each other that they lost. Since the approaches to conflict resolution I was taught actually caused a loss of love, I had to reject most of the training I had received as a marriage counselor, and create an entirely new system, one that would resolve conflicts and restore love at the same time.
The core concept of my new system was the "Love Bank." It helped me show the couples I counseled how their love for each other was created and destroyed. This is how I explained this important concept to these couples:
Each of us has a Love Bank and everyone we know has a separate account. It's the way our emotions keep track of the way people treat us. When treated well by someone, and we associate that person with good feelings, love units are deposited into his or her account in our Love Bank. But when treated badly by that person, love units are withdrawn from the Love Bank. When a person's balance is high, we like that person. But if a person withdraws more love units than he or she deposits, and the balance is in the red, we dislike that person.
The feeling of love is experienced when the Love Bank balance reaches a certain threshold. When enough love units are deposited to break through that threshold (I call it the "romantic love" threshold), we are in love with whoever holds that account in our Love Bank. But when the balance falls below that threshold, the feeling of being "in love" is lost. And when the Love Bank withdrawals exceed deposits enough to break through a certain negative threshold, we hate the person holding that account.
Our emotional reactions to people -- liking and disliking, loving and hating -- are not determined by will, they are determined by Love Bank balances. And Love Bank balances are determined by the way people treat us. Do you treat your partner the way you want to be treated, especially when you disagree? Do you continue to mentally stimulate them to keep the relationship spicy? Do you expect passion out of your relationship? Do you expect your partner to fulfill ALL your needs? Do you give your partner freedom to be themselves?
Once you understand the role of the Love Bank in determining your feelings for each other in marriage, you become aware of the fact that your spouse's feelings for you are determined by how you have been treating your spouse. If you want your spouse to be in love with you, you must deposit enough love units to break through the romantic love threshold. If your spouse wants you to be in love with him or her, your spouse must deposit enough love units into your Love Bank.
Almost everything that you and your spouse do is either depositing or withdrawing love units. Since most of what you do is by habit, repeated again and again, your habits either deposit love units continually, or they withdraw them continually. That's why your habits play such a crucial role in the creation or destruction of your love for each other. I believe that a habit takes 21 days to make or break, your relationship could still have a glimmer of hope to turn around but is that your common goal that you are both willing to put in the work in terms of discipline, self-control and focus that it needs!
So the feeling of love can last a lifetime for a couple if they apply two lessons: 1) avoid withdrawing love units and 2) keep depositing them. It's just that simple. All it takes is maintaining Love Bank balances above the romantic love threshold.
So stay tuned for the follow up on this topic on “what are some tools (I prefer the term as supposed to weapons) that one can use in fair fighting”…till then hoping that you are making love happen (pun intended)!!!!
Disclaimer: I claim to be no expert in relationships, but my views and thoughts are based upon professional and personal experiences, and research so feel free to disagree and share some of your thoughts on this matter via 'comments'
