How to Resolve Conflict
While It Is Still Happening

It's twenty past nine on a Tuesday, it's already happening, and both of you have said something you didn't plan to say. Advice about conflict is mostly written for before and after: how to raise things well, how to repair things later. Both useful, and neither of them any help right now.

This page is about those twenty minutes.

The framing that helps most: you aren't trying to win it and you're probably not going to resolve it tonight either. You're trying to end it well. A fight that ends well costs the marriage almost nothing. A fight that ends badly costs more than whatever it was about, and the two of you will be paying it off for a week.

One thing worth having in place first, because it changes how the twenty minutes go: regular hours in the week where nobody is negotiating anything. That's a large part of why Date Nights Dancing works for couples who argue more than they would like: easy swing dance moves taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you working on the same moves from the first video on. No dance experience required.

A Fight Is Remembered by Its Worst Moment and Its Ending

In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe how people score any experience: "we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions." Apply that to an argument and you get something useful. Neither of you will remember the middle. You'll both remember the worst thing that got said and how it finished.

You can't always prevent the worst moment. You can almost always engineer the ending, and knowing how to end one makes you less frightened of starting one.

One visitor to my site named the missing piece exactly:

trying something new together Still unresolved: lack of conflict skills

A skill, not goodwill. That's the right diagnosis, and it's the more hopeful one, because a skill is something you can carry into the room.

Five Things to Do While It Is Happening

1. Run the flooding check. Before anything else, notice your own body: heart rate up, hands unsteady, a hot feeling in the face, the sense that you already know what she is about to say. If two of those are true you're past the point where anything you say will be accurate. George J. Thompson, in Verbal Judo, gives the rule for exactly this state: "Never use it when people are upset. First calm them, then try logic." That applies to you as much as to her.

2. Say the one-issue sentence. Fights spread. Whatever it started as, by minute six it has collected two other things and something from March. Say it out where she can hear it: "Can we stay on the thing about Saturday, because I've lost the thread." That isn't a tactic, it's genuinely what has happened.

3. Don't use the sentence that arrived by itself. This is the single highest-value discipline available in an argument. Thompson again: "Never use words that rise readily to your lips, or you’ll make the greatest speech you’ll ever live to regret". The line that arrives fully formed and feels devastating is the one you are still paying for two weeks later.

4. Say one of the five. Have these ready, because inventing them at the time doesn't work. Each one de-escalates without conceding anything:

• "I don't want to be doing this with you."
• "Say that again, I want to make sure I've got it."
• "You're right about that part."
• "I need a minute, and I'm coming back."
• "What would you like me to do?"

5. Take the break properly if you take one. Twenty minutes minimum, and say when you're coming back before you go. A break with a stated return is a de-escalation. A break without one is a walkout, and she'll file it as one.

Defensiveness Is the Accelerant

A visitor to my site described the pattern that turns a normal disagreement into a fight, from the other side of the table:

Dealing with conflict. He takes everything defensively and as an attack.

Defensiveness is the accelerant. Raised as a topic, received as an accusation, answered as a defense, escalated. If you recognize yourself there, the useful move isn't to stop feeling defensive; it's to say the second of those five lines, which forces a beat between the feeling and the reply.

Another visitor named the volume problem rather than the topic problem:

Fun has almost always taken a back seat. Still unresolved: How to handle excessive emotions and anger.

How to handle excessive emotion. Not how to be right. That's the same request the flooding check answers.

End It Well Even If You Did Not Resolve It

The ending is the piece you can control and it's the piece that's easiest to leave to chance. Three things make an ending good, and none of them requires the issue to be settled.

Say what you're taking away. "So the thing you want is for me to tell you before I say yes to my brother." Even if you disagree with it, saying it back proves the twenty minutes weren't wasted.

Name the next step or park it out where you can both see it. "Can we come back to this on Sunday" is a complete ending. An unfinished fight with a date on it stops being an open wound.

Then close the physical distance. A hand, sitting down on the same piece of furniture, making the coffee. Somebody left this under one of my ads about their own marriage:

we can go from fighting to laughing and loving

That transition is real, and it's far easier to start with a hand than with a sentence.

It's easier still in a marriage where the two of you already touch each other for ordinary reasons, and easier again if you have something you do together, badly and cheerfully.

Review It Two Days Later, Never That Night

Don't analyze the fight in the hour after it. Both of you are still hot, and a review at that point becomes the second half of the same argument.

Forty-eight hours later, when it's genuinely cold, one question each is plenty: what would you want me to do differently next time. One answer each, no rebuttals. That is the entire review, and it does more than any conversation held at the time.

This Is the Wrong Tool for Some Houses

If arguments in your house involve anything frightening, if there's contempt that won't break, or if either of you is dealing with untreated depression, none of this is the right tool and a counselor is. That's a match between a problem and a tool.

If the frequency is the problem rather than the individual fights, how to stop fighting with your wife maps the recurring scripts. If the trouble is the hours afterward, how to fix a relationship after a fight is the aftermath piece. And if what's underneath is a sediment rather than an argument, how to fix resentment in a relationship is that.

Pick Two of the Five Lines and Know Them Cold

You won't remember a list at twenty past nine. Pick two lines, say them to yourself a few times this week, and have them available.

You don't win fights. You end them, and the ending is the part your marriage remembers.