Why Relationships Matter

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Irreconcilable differences can’t be solved, only managed, and empathy is more useful than problem-solving.

Couples don’t fight about certain things, but for certain things. Find out what they are.

Balancing differences enriches relationships, fostering mutual growth and resilience.

According to decades of research by psychologist John Gottman, a whopping 69% of relationship conflicts are “unresolvable.”

What this means is that over two-thirds of the problems in relationships are due to irreconcilable differences in personality, parenting styles, political beliefs, core values, and patterns of behaviors that are likely to change around the same time the cows come home. Introverts and extroverts, morning people and night people, impulsives and planners, spenders and savers, adventure-seekers and security-seekers, dog people and cat people, bad boys and good girls. These are differences that can’t be solved, only managed, and trying to solve them only leads to frustration and gridlock.

Relationships don’t start out this way, of course. Opposites famously attract, drawing you toward people who challenge or complement your dominant habits, thereby injecting balance, chemistry, novelty, and a kind of psychological adventure into your life.

Under the influence of infatuation, even profound differences are of little concern, and for a period of time before the spell dissolves, you know you’re going to be adored, all your shortcomings magically recast as charming eccentricities. As a character in the movie Closer says, “We’re in the first flush. It’s paradise. All my nasty habits amuse her.”

But dopamine levels inevitably drop back to baseline, hidden agendas come out of hiding, power struggles begin, and you start to admit that your partner’s charming eccentricities are actually kind of annoying now that you think about it.

But the problem isn’t the differences themselves. It’s how you react to them, and what they trigger in you—anger, frustration, judgement, self-righteousness, moral superiority, and fear for your relationship.

What’s required, says Gottman in What Makes Love Last, is an attempt to understand and empathize with one another’s differences, not try to dicker or debate them into oblivion. Compatibility doesn’t mean similarity, and irreconcilable differences aren’t necessarily fatal to love.

But choose your battles. Know which are solvable problems and which are not. Who takes out the trash is a solvable problem. Changing a slob into a neat-freak is not.

So move on from the right/wrong debate—neither side is right or wrong; it’s just preference and personality—and begin striking treaties that work for both of you. Maybe you clean up after the slob, and the slob does the grocery shopping. Maybe you both chip in for a housekeeper twice a month. If you prefer doing the dishes immediately after dinner and your partner prefers waiting til tomorrow, maybe agree to use paper plates on the nights your partner is on dish duty.

And while the waters are calm, explore the genealogy of your respective positions: why you each hold the stance you do, what your emotional logic is, what propels your arguments and urgencies, and what feels threatened when your stance is challenged.

Empathy and perspective are more useful than problem-solving that doesn’t ever solve the problem—“We’ve gone over this a thousand times.” And sitting on the same side of the table looking at a mutual problem is more productive, more inviting, than sitting on opposite sides of the table looking at each other as the problem.

Back in our twenties, my twin brother and I got into a fight about….flossing habits. Seriously. I don’t recall what the fight was really about, but afterward—and ever since—we came up with a shorthand way of alerting ourselves when we’re likely arguing about something deeper and older than the topic at hand. “Dental floss!” one or the other of us will suddenly say in mid-feud, which reminds us to step back and reset the conversation, pointing it toward what’s really going on—a hidden agenda, a deep-seated story about an issue, an unresolved gripe or anxiety that’s getting triggered in the present but has its roots in the past, maybe even in another relationship altogether. “Couples aren’t so much fighting about certain things,” says relationship psychologist Esther Perel, “but for certain things,” like control, connection or trust. Find out what your partner is fighting for.

Why Relationships Matter

Take our Can You Spot Red Flags In A Relationship?

Find a therapist to strengthen relationships

Arguments about household chores might actually be about feeling overloaded, your time and contribution not being valued. Fights about your partner’s workaholic tendencies might be about loneliness and the fear of losing connection. Anger about sarcastic comments your partner makes about you in front of friends might be about needing to feel that your partner respects you and has your back. Arguments about money might trigger childhood shame around scarcity.

Studies tell us that positive stress is enlivening—meeting new people, giving a speech, learning a new skill—and likewise, the differences we encounter in relationships can help us grow, variety being the spice of life and all. But it’s one thing to wish devoutly for someone to complement or challenge your inbuilt habits and beliefs, and another to get it.

For instance, my partner’s extroversion and sociability are part of what attracted me to her, but yikes. I didn’t count on what a regular challenge it would present to my inner introvert, my threshold for socializing, my love of solitude, and how often I’d be called upon to step beyond my comfort zone in the name of togetherness. “The gods have two ways of dealing harshly with us,” Oscar Wilde once said. “The first is to deny us our dreams, and the second is to grant them.”

This difference in our tolerance for socializing is rife with the possibility—the inevitability—of conflict, but it’s also rich with opportunities for growth and the enlivening challenge of moving into one another’s worlds, accommodating their needs and values without compromising our own. I’ve come to enjoy socializing and community-building more than I used to, and become bolder in speaking up for my boundaries and limitations, and she enjoys downtime and solitude more than she used to.

The ability to tolerate the tension between competing needs and values—to hold paradox—also builds tremendous resilience into people’s partnerships and diplomacies. The ability to stretch yourself wide enough to encompass contradictory approaches to life mitigates against a kind of tyranny that can creep into relationships—one side elevated at the expense of the other—allowing them to inform and educate each another, leaving elbowroom room for different perspectives and preferences in a way that doesn’t judge or pathologize.

The psychologist Robert Johnson even considers this skill a kind of religious experience, in the sense that re-ligare means to re-bond, to bind together opposites and restore them to each other. He speaks of the ground between conflicting forces as a holy place, and in his book Transformation, claims that it’s precisely here that one will grow. “Conflict to paradox to revelation: this is the divine progression.”

“We are both of us walking through fire,” the writer P.L. Travers once wrote about holding paradox and managing differences. “One single flame enfolds us both. So let us together proceed with our burning. Arms wide, we bend toward each other, and a passing angel pauses for a moment, standing imponderably on the air, to witness our embrace.”

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