this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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I actually learned the opposite in my experiences. When I tried to avoid fights and keep the peace, my relationships always failed. But when I stopped being a "yes man" and spoke up about important subjects of conflict, it gave us time to discuss, and I found my bond with my significant other to be much stronger afterward.
Yes, sometimes it would start with a fight, but we learned how to argue like mature, responsible adults and not bicker like children. It might get passionate and angry, but we always apologized for the elevated emotion when we calmed down. We always made sure to fight about the conflicting situation and not directly attack the person. Sometimes this was a learned behavior through trial and error; we'd have to apologize after the fact for getting angry at the person and not the situation. But after a while, we learned how to argue productively.
Nowadays, my spouse and I don't get into real fights anymore. We might have heated discussions, but we don't yell and scream at each other. We acknowledge good points on both sides, even if it's contradictory to our viewpoint in the discussion. We point out where feelings got hurt during the debate and we're both quick to apologize for letting emotions get away from us in the heat of the moment. Again, keeping the debate focused on the topic of disagreement and not on attacking each other has helped us to be productive in our arguments.
And because we've learned this advanced way of debating and arguing, we can speak openly with one another without fear of ruining our relationship over a disagreement. We accept that we don't have to agree on everything, and we do our best to state our case on the things we feel we need to be in agreement about.
In my experience, putting in the serious work and learning how to have healthy disagreements, even if they're not perfect every time, has only made my relationships better. If I never got into a fight with my spouse, they'd probably always get their way and walk all over me, and I'd never be happy in my relationships.
Maybe I take our personalities for granted. We do have heated arguments but we have never yelled at eachother (large distance communication excluded). We still get pissed over small things at times as we both have things that annoy us very hard but we acknowledge that these are very small issues and its nothing serious. Those cases are also very rare. One important thing is not to take your frustrations out on the person you love. I just get mad at people on the internet.