Couple Disagreement Quotes

Once you understand this, you will be ready to accept one of the most surprising truths about marriage: Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind—but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage.

Couples with a strong friendship have a lot more access to their humor, affection, and the positive energy that make it possible to have disagreements or to live with them in a much more constructive and creative way. It’s about earning and building up points.

It was possible for couples to not discover that they are in profound disagreement over the very fundamentals of life until ten or twenty years of marriage.

I felt myself becoming angry too easily. I once saw a couple at a restaurant, and I could tell from their mannerisms that they were having some type of disagreement. I got mad at the guy and wanted to tell him, "Come on – appreciate your wife!

disagreement based on LEGITIMATE IJTIHAD which does not create DISCORD or DISUNITY is a BLESSING for the UMMAH and an enrichment of ISLAMIC JURISPRUDENCE. Objective disagreement in itself poses no threat if it is coupled with TOLERANCE and is free of FANATICISM, ACCUSATIONS, and NARROW-MINDEDNESS.

The differences and disagreements don’t hurt as much as the ways in which we communicate them. Ideally an argument does not have to be hurtful; instead it can simply be an engaging conversation that expresses our differences and disagreements. (Inevitably all couples will have differences and disagree at times.) But practically speaking most couples start out arguing about one thing and, within five minutes, are arguing about the way they are arguing. Unknowingly they begin hurting each other; what could have been an innocent argument, easily resolved with mutual understanding and an acceptance of differences, escalates into a battle. They refuse to accept or understand the content of their partner’s point of view because of the way they are being approached. Resolving an argument requires extending or stretching our point of view to include and integrate another point of view. To make this stretch we need to feel appreciated and respected. If our partner’s attitude is unloving, our self-esteem can actually be wounded by taking on their point of view.

Couples with children may argue more, the author suggests, because children are a reminder of just how crucial our choices are.

research suggests that rather than help couples resolve content issues, therapy should help couples develop soothing interactions and maintain emotional engagement during disagreements.

One of the most difficult challenges in our loving relationships is handling differences and disagreements. Often when couples disagree their discussions can turn into arguments and then without much warning into battles. Suddenly they stop talking in a loving manner and automatically begin hurting each other: blaming, complaining, accusing, demanding, resenting, and doubting.

Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11: I'll talk about the situation in Afghanistan.... Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide.... It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next—in the next couple of weeks.... very casually with no comment.... we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder three or four million people. Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts...') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political.

most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind—but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage. Instead, they need to understand the bottom-line difference that is causing the conflict—and to learn how to live with it by honoring and respecting each other.

PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.

The prize item of the house is Jane’s small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whispers, which is something I find the Japanese do exceptionally well. Nobody gets more out of a few low grunts and a couple of rounded vowel sounds stretched out and spoken as if in surprise or consternation. They can carry on the most complex conversations, covering the full range of human emotions—surprise, enthusiasm, hearty endorsement, bitter disagreement—in a tone that sounds awfully like someone trying to have an orgasm quietly. I followed them from room to room, enthralled by their conversation, until I realized that I was becoming part of it, and that they were casting glances at me with something like unease, so I bowed apologetically and left them to admire an old fireplace with low moans of expressive rapture.

Every relationship is like a garden and every garden has weeds. Arguments are the little weeds of our relationship that grow up around the things we intentionally plant. Some arguments don’t seem so bad and are easy to work around whenever they pop up. Others are ugly enough that you go nuclear on them. That patch of land is abandoned as scorched earth for a couple of years. Either way, the weeds always come back as reliably as the days and the seasons despite our attempt to get rid of them once and for all. This is true of the arguments we have but also the arguments we don’t have. Arguments don’t end because they have long, long roots.

Let’s take a look at one couple. Carol and Jim have a long-running quarrel over his being late to engagements. In a session in my office, Carol carps at Jim over his latest transgression: he didn’t show up on time for their scheduled movie night. “How come you are always late?” she challenges. “Doesn’t it matter to you that we have a date, that I am waiting, that you always let me down?” Jim reacts coolly: “I got held up. But if you are going to start off nagging again, maybe we should just go home and forget the date.” Carol retaliates by listing all the other times Jim has been late. Jim starts to dispute her “list,” then breaks off and retreats into stony silence. In this never-ending dispute, Jim and Carol are caught up in the content of their fights. When was the last time Jim was late? Was it only last week or was it months ago? They careen down the two dead ends of “what really happened”—whose story is more “accurate” and who is most “at fault.” They are convinced that the problem has to be either his irresponsibility or her nagging. In truth, though, it doesn’t matter what they’re fighting about. In another session in my office, Carol and Jim begin to bicker about Jim’s reluctance to talk about their relationship. “Talking about this stuff just gets us into fights,” Jim declares. “What’s the point of that? We go round and round. It just gets frustrating. And anyway, it’s all about my ‘flaws’ in the end. I feel closer when we make love.” Carol shakes her head. “I don’t want sex when we are not even talking!” What’s happened here? Carol and Jim’s attack-withdraw way of dealing with the “lateness” issue has spilled over into two more issues: “we don’t talk” and “we don’t have sex.” They’re caught in a terrible loop, their responses generating more negative responses and emotions in each other. The more Carol blames Jim, the more he withdraws. And the more he withdraws, the more frantic and cutting become her attacks. Eventually, the what of any fight won’t matter at all. When couples reach this point, their entire relationship becomes marked by resentment, caution, and distance. They will see every difference, every disagreement, through a negative filter. They will listen to idle words and hear a threat. They will see an ambiguous action and assume the worst. They will be consumed by catastrophic fears and doubts, be constantly on guard and defensive. Even if they want to come close, they can’t. Jim’s experience is defined perfectly by the title of a Notorious Cherry Bombs song, “It’s Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night that Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long.

Because [a human's] chances of surviving... are much better living in a tribe or group than alone, she's developed these beautiful, incredibly complex social tools like empathy, patience, generousity, guilt, friendship, shame, and loyalty that help hold together groups of up to a couple hundred people together even when there's internal disagreements. ...Ever so often, though, a member of [a human's] tribe is born without access to those social tools, and is thus only capable of caring about herself. The modern term is sociopath... ...All those social tools we developed only really work on the small scale, though ---it's as if we only have enough true empathy to extend to a couple hundred people at a time... ...Which is why in our modern world of free markets, [the sociopath's] lack of empathy actually makes her better at surviving...Empathy and morality are clearly vital to our species, but they're often illogical within the simple framework of free-market capitalism...Maybe [the sociopath] installs pain-medicine vending machines, or markets Oxycontin as nonaddictive, or pays her workers much, much less than what it costs to live. This is the kind of innovative thinking that makes [the sociopath] an apex predator of the free market.

The traditional Roman wedding was a splendid affair designed to dramatize the bride’s transfer from the protection of her father’s household gods to those of her husband. Originally, this literally meant that she passed from the authority of her father to her husband, but at the end of the Republic women achieved a greater degree of independence, and the bride remained formally in the care of a guardian from her blood family. In the event of financial and other disagreements, this meant that her interests were more easily protected. Divorce was easy, frequent and often consensual, although husbands were obliged to repay their wives’ dowries. The bride was dressed at home in a white tunic, gathered by a special belt which her husband would later have to untie. Over this she wore a flame-colored veil. Her hair was carefully dressed with pads of artificial hair into six tufts and held together by ribbons. The groom went to her father’s house and, taking her right hand in his, confirmed his vow of fidelity. An animal (usually a ewe or a pig) was sacrificed in the atrium or a nearby shrine and an Augur was appointed to examine the entrails and declare the auspices favorable. The couple exchanged vows after this and the marriage was complete. A wedding banquet, attended by the two families, concluded with a ritual attempt to drag the bride from her mother’s arms in a pretended abduction. A procession was then formed which led the bride to her husband’s house, holding the symbols of housewifely duty, a spindle and distaff. She took the hand of a child whose parents were living, while another child, waving a hawthorn torch, walked in front to clear the way. All those in the procession laughed and made obscene jokes at the happy couple’s expense. When the bride arrived at her new home, she smeared the front door with oil and lard and decorated it with strands of wool. Her husband, who had already arrived, was waiting inside and asked for her praenomen or first name. Because Roman women did not have one and were called only by their family name, she replied in a set phrase: “Wherever you are Caius, I will be Caia.” She was then lifted over the threshold. The husband undid the girdle of his wife’s tunic, at which point the guests discreetly withdrew. On the following morning she dressed in the traditional costume of married women and made a sacrifice to her new household gods. By the late Republic this complicated ritual had lost its appeal for sophisticated Romans and could be replaced by a much simpler ceremony, much as today many people marry in a registry office. The man asked the woman if she wished to become the mistress of a household (materfamilias), to which she answered yes. In turn, she asked him if he wished to become paterfamilias, and on his saying he did the couple became husband and wife.

Are you sure you don't remember? Your mind seems to be working just fine to me." "You know what? Just forget it. Whatever it was, I forgive you. Give me my backpack so I can go back to the office. We're about to get busted anyway, just standing here." "If you really do forgive me, then you wouldn't still be going to the office." He tightens his hold on the strap of my backpack. "Ohmysweetgoodness, Galen, why are we even having this conversation? You don't even know me. What do you care if I change my schedule?" I know I'm being rude. The guy offered to carry my things and walk me to class. And depending on which version of the story I believe, he either asked me out on Monday already, or he did it indirectly a few seconds ago. None of it makes any sense. Why me? Without any effort, I can think of at least ten girls who beat me out in looks, personality, and darker foundation. And Galen could pull any of them. "What, you don't have a question for my question?" I ask after a few seconds. "It just seems silly for you to change your schedule over a disagreement about when the Titanic-" I throw my hands up at him. "Don't you see how weird this is for me?" "I'm trying to, Emma. I really am. But I think you've had a tough couple of weeks, and it's taking a toll on you. You said every time you're around me something bad happens. But you can't really know for sure that's true, unless you spend more time with me. You should at least acknowledge that." Something is wrong with me. Those cafeteria doors must have really worked me over. Otherwise, I wouldn't be pushing Galen away like this. Not with him pleading, not with the way he's leaning toward me, not with the way he smells. "See? You're taking it personally, when there's really nothing personal about it," I whisper. "It's personal to me, Emma. It's true, I don't know you well. But there are some things I do know about you. And I'd like to know more." A glass full of ice water wouldn't cool my cheeks. "The only thing you know about me is that I'm life threatening in flip-flops." That I won't meet his eyes obviously bothers him, because he lifts my chin with the crook of his finger. "That's not all I know," he says. "I know your biggest secret." This time, unlike at the beach, I don't swat his hand away. The electric current in my feet prove that we're really standing so close to each other that our toes touch. "I don't have any secrets," I say, mesmerized." He nods. "I finally figured that out. That you don't actually know about your secret." "You're not making any sense." Or I just can't concentrate because I accidentally looked up at his lips. Maybe he did talk me into swimming... The door to the front office swings open, and Galen grabs my arm and ushers me around the corner. He continues to drag me down the hall, toward world history. "That's it?" I say, exasperated. "You're just going to leave it at that?" He stops us in front of the door. "That depends on you," he says. "Come with me to the beach after school, and I'll tell you." He reaches for the knob, but I grab his hand. "Tell me what? I already told you that I don't have any secrets. And I don't swim." He grins and opens the door. "There's plenty to do at the beach besides swim." Then he pulls me by the hand so close I think he's going to kiss me. Instead, he whispers in my ear, "I'll tell you where your eye color comes from." As I gasp, he puts a gentle hand on the small of my back and propels me into the classroom. Then he ditches me.

One evening in April a thirty-two-year-old woman, unconscious and severely injured, was admitted to the hospital in a provincial town south of Copenhagen. She had a concussion and internal bleeding, her legs and arms were broken in several places, and she had deep lesions in her face. A gas station attendant in a neighboring village, beside the bridge over the highway to Copenhagen, had seen her go the wrong way up the exit and drive at high speed into the oncoming traffic. The first three approaching cars managed to maneuver around her, but about 200 meters after the junction she collided head-on with a truck. The Dutch driver was admitted for observation but released the next day. According to his statement he started to brake a good 100 meters before the crash, while the car seemed to actually increase its speed over the last stretch. The front of the vehicle was totally crushed, part of the radiator was stuck between the road and the truck's bumper, and the woman had to be cut free. The spokesman for emergency services said it was a miracle she had survived. On arrival at the hospital the woman was in very critical condition, and it was twenty-four hours before she was out of serious danger. Her eyes were so badly damaged that she lost her sight. Her name was Lucca. Lucca Montale. Despite the name there was nothing particularly Italian about her appearance. She had auburn hair and green eyes in a narrow face with high cheek-bones. She was slim and fairly tall. It turned out she was Danish, born in Copenhagen. Her husband, Andreas Bark, arrived with their small son while she was still on the operating table. The couple's home was an isolated old farmhouse in the woods seven kilometers from the site of the accident. Andreas Bark told the police he had tried to stop his wife from driving. He thought she had just gone out for a breath of air when he heard the car start. By the time he got outside he saw it disappearing along the road. She had been drinking a lot. They had had a marital disagreement. Those were the words he used; he was not questioned further on that point. Early in the morning, when Lucca Montale was moved from the operating room into intensive care, her husband was still in the waiting room with the sleeping boy's head on his lap. He was looking out at the sky and the dark trees when Robert sat down next to him. Andreas Bark went on staring into the gray morning light with an exhausted, absent gaze. He seemed slightly younger than Robert, in his late thirties. He had dark, wavy hair and a prominent chin, his eyes were narrow and deep-set, and he was wearing a shabby leather jacket. Robert rested his hands on his knees in the green cotton trousers and looked down at the perforations in the leather uppers of his white clogs. He realized he had forgotten to take off his plastic cap after the operation. The thin plastic crackled between his hands. Andreas looked at him and Robert straightened up to meet his gaze. The boy woke.

Emotions such as anger and contempt can seem very threatening for couples. But our study suggests that if spouses, especially wives, are able to calm themselves, their marriages can continue to thrive,” Bloch said. While it is commonly held that women play the role of caretaker and peacemaker in relationships, the study is among the first to reveal this dynamic in action over a long period of time, researchers point out. Results show that the link between the wives’ ability to control emotions and higher marital satisfaction was most evident when women used “constructive communication” to temper disagreements. [UC Berkeley]

All couples have some irreconcilable differences. But when partners can’t find a way to accommodate these perpetual disagreements, the result is gridlock. When couples gridlock over issues, the image that comes to my mind is of two opposing fists. Neither can make any headway in getting the other to understand and respect their perspective, much less agree with it. As a result, they eventually view the partner as just plain selfish. Each becomes more deeply entrenched in his or her position, making compromise impossible.

She was diagnosed with leukemia when Lily was six months old.... Diana and I had looked at each other, no clue, nowhere to begin, certainly no answers, other than the largest answer, that is, the answer that emerged in how, despite or maybe in lieu of the terror of the situation, our bodies had involuntarily gravitated toward each other, how our petty grudges and growing disagreements—all the fissures and loggerheads that had been emerging in our marriage—had given way.

Once you understand this, you will be ready to accept one of the most surprising truths about marriage: most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind—but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage. Instead, they need to understand the bottom-line difference that is causing the conflict—and to learn how to live with it by honoring and respecting each other. Only then will they be able to build shared meaning and a sense of purpose into their marriage.

No relationship survives or, more accurately, survives happily without a joint commitment to the genuine happiness of the other person. We do not have to sacrifice our destiny, talents, friendships, or ambitions, but their impact on the other person has to be seriously considered. When times are uncomfortable, challenging, not what we wanted or imagined, or actively distressing, we should not revert to dishonesty, nondisclosure, or manipulation to get our own way. What good is getting our way if that way is destructive to our partner? We will end up suffering anyway from the painful demise of our relationship. A different, new, reformed way can evolve. Some things aren’t that important, and disagreement is of minimal importance. Some things have a huge impact on the life of both people, and some sort of agreement has to be earnestly sought. Compromise is not difficult when the people involved care about the other’s emotional, mental, and physical health.

Conflicts are a natural part of any relationship, but it's essential to learn how to resolve them effectively. A couples therapist can teach you and your partner conflict resolution skills that can help you navigate disagreements in a healthy and constructive way. This may include learning to approach conflicts with empathy and understanding, finding common ground, and developing solutions that work for both partners.

Demanders say: I’m dying here. I am shut down. My feelings don’t matter. It’s lonelier than living alone. By myself. Dismissed. I get no response. I’m hammering on their door. I yell to get a response — any response. We’re roommates. I don’t matter to them. Withdrawers say: I never get it right — can’t please. I give up, space out. Best to avoid a fight — try to keep things calm. I’m failing here. Paralyzed. No point. Go behind my wall. I try to fix it — but it doesn’t work. I numb out. A.R.E.: ACCESSIBILITY, RESPONSIVENESS, AND ENGAGEMENT The key question in our love relationships is, “Are you there for me?” This translates to, “Do I matter to you? Can I reach you? Are you accessible, emotionally available to me? Can I rely on you to respond when I need you? Will you engage with me, give me your attention?” “Are you there for me?” is the A.R.E. question. This key question is buried, hidden just under the surface in most recurring arguments about pragmatic issues such as chores, personality differences, sex, children, and money. If partners feel safe and loved, they can deal with differences and problems together. If not, then relationship issues and fears get channeled into endless disagreements. QUESTIONNAIRE: How A.R.E.

Are you there for me?” is the A.R.E. question. This key question is buried, hidden just under the surface in most recurring arguments about pragmatic issues such as chores, personality differences, sex, children, and money. If partners feel safe and loved, they can deal with differences and problems together. If not, then relationship issues and fears get channeled into endless disagreements.

The first is what some psychologists call “hot hate,” based on anger. Imagine yourself yelling at the television, and you get the picture. Most Americans would be ashamed to say “I hate Republicans” or “I hate Democrats.” But our market preferences tell the true story. We reward professional political pundits who say or write that the other side is evil or stupid or both. For some haters, the hot variety is a little too crude. They prefer “cool hate,” based on contempt, and express disgust for another person through sarcasm, dismissal or mockery. Cool hate can be every bit as damaging as hot hate. The social psychologist and relationship expert John Gottman was famously able to predict with up to 94 percent accuracy whether couples would divorce just by observing a brief snippet of conversation. The biggest warning signs of all were indications of contempt, such as sarcasm, sneering and hostile humor. Want to see if a couple will end up in divorce court? Watch them discuss a contentious topic — which Mr. Gottman has done thousands of times — and see if either partner rolls his or her eyes. Disagreement is normal, but dismissiveness can be deadly. As it is in love, so it is in politics. With just an ironic smile, one can dismiss an entire class of citizens as uncultured rubes or mindless theocrats. Feigning shock and dismay at the resulting indignation simply adds insult to injury. The last variety is anonymous hate.

If a couple isn’t following God’s guidelines for life or being led by the Holy Spirit, disagreements and misunderstandings skyrocket.

Although disagreements between wives and husbands may have been less common, or perhaps only less well documented, Jane and William were far from being the only married couple for whom the Revolution created political divisions that were seemingly irreconcilable.

Arrange mutually agreeable times to call, discuss everything even if it seems insignificant because in reality something a couple in the free world will not think to discuss can become the source of a major disagreement between a couple doing a bid together. I say a couple doing the bid together because let us be real, the man may be the one locked up but women also do the time with them. Women suffer just as much as they do and have lost just as much as they have. Yes, of course, women have their freedom but they don’t have the man they love living with them, eating with them, sleeping next to them, there to support their family, and to enjoy the milestones. He will inevitably become someone for whom you are unable to rely on, because how can you rely on someone that seems almost ghost-like throughout this entire time.

Pauline knew, from observing other parents, that disagreements over child rearing created some of the worst marital conflicts. They involved people’s most deeply held convictions about morals, religion, and values. They brought out the truth about whether the couple was compatible or not.

Women, on average, do not mind plunging into the unpleasantness of a marital squabble nearly so much as do the men in their lives. That conclusion, reached in a study by Robert Levenson at the University of California at Berkeley, is based on the testimony of 151 couples, all in long-lasting marriages. Levenson found that husbands uniformly found it unpleasant, even aversive, to become upset during a marital disagreement, while their wives did not mind it much. Once flooded, husbands secrete more adrenaline into their bloodstream, and the adrenaline flow is triggered by lower levels of negativity on their wife's part; it takes husbands longer to recover physiologically from flooding. This suggests the possibility that the stoic, Clint Eastwood type of male imperturbability may represent a defense against feeling emotionally overwhelmed.

PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule. CAN

Couples who have had a lot of disagreements and regularly have invalidated each other typically develop a virtually instant alert, a kind of hair-trigger sensitivity to even the possibility of the other partner invalidating them.

We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology... but when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day summit to the management of a bathroom, and positevely absurd to hire a professional mediator to help us identify the right time to leave the house to go out for dinner. Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that has forgotten where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can't be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counter- arguments or, alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character. The two parties just hope the problems - so boring to them both - will simply go away.

This is why Satan loves to see divorce among Christian couples. If he can get husbands and wives fighting each other over their disagreements and personality conflicts and preferences, then they will miss the bigger battle altogether.

A subsequent experiment took this research even further by showing that teaching couples to distance when they focused on disagreements in their relationships buffered against romantic decline. Over the course of a year, spending twenty-one minutes trying to work through their conflicts from a distanced perspective led couples to experience less unhappiness together.

But she wasn’t in love with him yet. She fell in love with her husband because of the way they disagreed with each other. “When everything’s great, it’s easy to fall in love,” she said. “But when you disagree—how you come to a consensus is very telling. My husband both met and exceeded my expectations. I have never once thought that I could have found someone better.” How different that was from our culture’s view of love, where having disagreements in the beginning of a relationship seems like the death knell. The beginning of a relationship is supposed to be like a honeymoon. A couple is supposed to feel totally in synch. Any deviation from that is a sign that you’re not compatible. But Madathil is saying it’s not whether you argue—its how you get through the arguments. And the more practice you have getting through those arguments gracefully, she told me, the less you’ll argue later.

On average, married couples experience a slow decline in the quality of their marriage as the years go by. It’s a depressing but well-established pattern. But when couples practice a version of going to the balcony, something unexpected happens. Social psychologist Eli Finkel and his colleagues directed a group of sixty married couples to spend seven minutes writing about their most recent fight from a different perspective. Specifically, “from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved.” They imagined a mediator like Gary in the room, in other words. “How might this person think about the disagreement? How might he or she find the good that could come from it?” Then they were asked to think about that person’s perspective during their next fight. Every four months, for a year, they repeated this writing exercise. The couples who did this marriage hack, reconsidering their conflicts from an imaginary third party’s point of view, reported feeling less upset about their disputes than couples who hadn’t done it. More importantly, the usual, slow loss of marital satisfaction did not happen for these couples that year. They still had conflict, but it didn’t wear on them the same way. Because it was healthy.

most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind—but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage. Instead, they need to understand the bottom-line difference that is causing the conflict—and to learn how to live with it by honoring and respecting each other. Only then will they be able to build shared meaning and a sense of purpose into their marriage.

It’s normal to have misunderstandings and disagreements, Dhruv. All couples have them.” “What do I do?” “You talk to her, Dhruv. Ask her how she’s feeling. And—most importantly—listen to what she says. Don’t be thinking of what you’re going to say to her. Especially don’t be thinking about how you’re going to try to talk her out of how she’s feeling.” “This relationship stuff is tricky.