You’ve probably heard all about the five love languages (Chapman, 2015) and you may even know the five types of attraction. But if it’s possible to count the ways in which people show love for each other, perhaps it’s also possible to understand conflict—the ways in which people clash—in the same manner. In other words, is there a small, knowable number of styles that people resort to when they argue? The question has been studied in a number of ways, from popular to experimental to psychoanalytic. You won’t have any trouble finding a variety of answers with Google: people have divided the most common “fighting styles”—not to be confused with the 16 basic types of martial arts—into four, or five, or six, or even more. These patterns of behavior, however, come down to four main responses to interpersonal challenge: aggression, avoidance, appeasement, and alliance.

1. Aggression
I’ll start with the aggressor, whom you’ll recognize as a person whose first instinct is to argue—the one with a very short fuse, who immediately fights back and ratchets up the stakes. Aggressors come to be seen as hot-headed, sensitive, or easily triggered to anger. In the best-case scenario, they’re competitive and assertive, although they don’t easily cooperate. An aggressor may speak up impulsively and quickly resort to anger—in a frightening way, some of the time—or may even try so hard to win a fight that they’ll dispense with fairness and say things they do not mean. What an aggressor says in the heat of the moment may cause long-term damage to the bonds between friends or family. Inside, though, aggressive people may be terrified. Even if they want an argument resolved, they still must struggle with an upwelling of inner feelings that they can’t easily express. They may be exquisitely aware of their own vulnerability; they may believe, at some level, that if they do not win an argument then their internal fragility will be revealed. This creates a chronic sense of anxiety and a quick, defensive........

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