Want to fight less with your spouse? Then don’t be yourself! It’s only natural for there to be disagreement from time to time between any two people in a relationship. How you work things out (or don’t) has a great impact on your day to day life and on your marriage overall. So, how do you and your spouse go about fighting or disagreeing?

Do you do what you have always done or are you thinking of trying something different? How you choose to fight or try to settle disagreements has an enormous impact on the quality of your day to day life together. Couples often fall into a repetitive pattern of behavior when conflict rears its ugly head. This pattern may be undetectable to the spouses who are enacting it, but a studied, objective eye can be helpful in spotting the types of thinking, feelings, and behaviors are getting repeated. Here are a few examples of the unhelpful patterns that couples can fall into when each person is just acting as they always act and being “themselves”: Read more