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Avoiding all disagreements often signals a lack of authenticity rather than true relationship harmony.

Couples who never fight may be unconsciously sacrificing individual needs to maintain a fragile, false peace.

Intimacy often requires friction. Connection comes from "rupture and repair."

Over the last 15 years in the chair, I've sat across from hundreds of couples. Some come in mid-explosion: voices raised, grievances stacked like laundry ignored for months. Those couples can be tricky to treat, but I'm rarely unnerved by them.

The couples that can stop me cold? The ones who (sometimes lightly smiling) say, "We actually never fight. We're just compatible." I say this not to be contrarian, but because after years of doing this work (I’ve extensively trained in emotionally focused therapy since 2013 and I’ve supervised clinicians learning EFT couple therapy since 2020), I've come to see conflict-free relationships less as a relationship achievement and more as a potential warning sign. One key reason is that the more honest, authentic, and vulnerable we are with our partners (which is what really builds the bond), the more differences we are likely to find. After all, you didn’t marry yourself! So, if partners are not discussing these differences, the odds are that these differences are living latently, but powerfully, behind the scenes.

The Science Isn't Subtle

In a landmark 1989 study, John Gottman and Lowell Krokoff found that conflict engagement, not avoidance, predicted long-term relationship satisfaction. This means that partners who’ve faced difficult topics, even messily, tended to fare better over time than those who consistently eschewed or withdrew from disagreement. This is one of the studies that proved crucial to the Gottman Method of couple therapy. Professionals before then equivocally used to think that any negative interaction would strongly predict marital dissatisfaction.

More recently, Bretaña and colleagues (2022) found avoidant attachment to be strongly linked to withdrawal patterns in conflict, and that those patterns robustly predicted relationship dissatisfaction. So when partners chronically pull away from or eschew disagreement, the relationship tends to quietly and gradually deteriorate (“death by hundreds of cuts"), even when things look calm (often deceptively) on the........

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