Do you find yourself fighting and fighting, but never making progress? Maybe you even look back and make the painful discovery: you are just repeating the same argument.
If so, you aren’t using conflict to get anywhere. You are just trying to win. Conflict is better used when it moves you toward progress. It can serve to solve. Or it can serve to wound.
Unfortunately, if a couple can’t make the shift, the wounds and hurts add up. Until one or the other (or both) call it quits. They give up, tired of the conflict. Some leave. Others stay, but refuse to communicate. Either way, the connection suffers.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Conflict can serve to move you toward a better relationship. But only when you use it to solve.