If your wife or partner won’t let things go and insists on hounding you down until you relent and continue to talk through your fight, here’s some good news: They may look like they’re out to hurt you, but they might be fighting for your relationship.
This is the irony of fighting in a couple. The enemy is the one you love the most. And winning means winning back that enemy you’ve been fighting with. Weird, huh? If you encounter someone in the grocery store that’s particularly rude, you can avoid them. If you have co-workers you’re fighting with, you still need to deal with them, and it can be difficult, but there are ways you can communicate through email or in meetings that keep the risk lower. But fighting with a partner or spouse is harder because of one thing: attachment, or more simply: love.
We’re Wired To Be Together
Our physiology is geared towards pair bonding. Everything from our mirror neurons which allow us to “feel how someone else might feel,” to our limbic system, which is our emotional center, to the release of bonding hormones like oxytocin. So when something disrupts the bonding that we’re naturally designed to seek, and keeps us centered, things can go off the rails for us.
What’s at stake here is the very thing that holds your relationship together - love. It’s that force that binds us to our special someone, and when it’s threatened, it can send us all into a tailspin. For your partner, yelling or getting really intense can be a way that they are trying to get your attention so they don’t actually lose you. Because to a person who pursues, going a way, or going “silent” feels like you’ve left.
You Have Different Conflict Resolution Strategies
If your wife hounds you with arguments and you seem to get tongue tied or you’re fuming and just want to get away, you likely have two different strategies to resolve conflict. She’s what therapists call a “Pursuer” and you may be a “Withdrawer.” Don’t let the words fool you. Neither is better or worse. Both are strategies designed to reduce conflict. For your wife or partner, following you around the house while trying to make their argument is a method to resolve the fight sooner, so both of you can get back to better harmony sooner. You, on the other hand, may see the conflict coming and might be saying something like,”If we can just pause the conversation and stop talking, maybe calmer heads can prevail and the conflict will just die down.
While neither strategy is bad, when both of you use your go-to strategy to resolve conflict, it can trigger the other person to turn their behavior up to “11.” So you start having this endless strategy of escalation, where your partner increases the intensity of their pursuit, while you increase the avoidance or silence you use to compensate. This in turn can drive them crazy and increase their volume/cadence/intensity. Then on and on you go.
Ironically, this is all in service of saving the relationship that your wife is behaving this way. She’s yelling or dogging you to get your attention so that you both can heal the wound. It’s just that you’ve probably got a cycle where each of you hits the emotional ping pong and the energy goes up and up until you both either yell at each other or give each other the silent treatment.
So What Do We Do?
First is to acknowledge that the other person is trying to resolve things with their go-to behavior. Here’s an example:
“I know you just want to come to a conclusion with our arguments, but I get overwhelmed and I don’t know what to do.” Can be a way you communicate what is going on for you.
Modify it as you like with your own circumstances, but while you’re modifying it, remember that the pursuit, or “hounding” is really a method to resolve differences, not a personal attack on you. This can be really hard because by the time the verbal ping-pong has gone back and forth between you two several times, your partner can be angry at you. But see what happens when you’re able to say the above statement. Does this statement shift them in unexpected ways? Do you see a sense of relief? Do you see a “Well, it’s about time you recognized me!” Either of these indicates you’re going the right direction.
If this feels really hard, let me normalize this for you: it is hard. 85% of heterosexual couples encounter this dynamic, and when the intensity goes up, it becomes harder to recover on your own. Feel free to peruse my blog for other “skills” based pieces. If you want to look at some ways I think of marriage counseling, please visit my marriage counseling page.
If you’re in the Minneapolis area and are looking for help with a hurtful dynamic in your marriage, I can help. You can send me an email via my webform. You can click on the button below to schedule a free 15-minute phone conversation with me to understand if I’m a fit. Or you can call me at 612.230.7171. I’d love to know how I can help.
Take good care.