Why You Need to Fight Better, Not Less | 392

Do you know how to fight well? Do you think that having relationship without conflict means that everything is just fine? In this episode we’re going to talk about why conflict can be a good and necessary thing, and how to fight well. “Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” — Mohandas K. Gandhi The Problem There's a version of "peace" in a relationship that isn't peace at all. It's just two people who've agreed, without ever explicitly saying so, not to bring things up. You know the feeling. Something your partner did bothers you, but it's small, so you let it go. Then it happens again. You let that go too. Weeks later you're annoyed by the way they load the dishwasher, when in reality, it has nothing to do with the dishwasher. That's not peace. That’s a volcano simmering under the surface. That’s pressure building, and that pressure needs a release valve. The other day I was listening an episode of The Interview podcast and they had Priya Parker on as a guest. Parker works as a conflict mediator and is the author of the book The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict. In the interview she frames fighting well as a way to build connection, rather than it being a point of rupture. As someone that has long been conflict avoidant I was intrigued by how to argue better. Parker poses the idea that we as a society have become conflict avoidant in our personal and professional relationships to the point that it’s become unhealthy. Our misplaced desire for peace means that important things are often never addressed then we wonder why relationships fall apart. She proposes that rather than avoiding conflict, we need to lean into it. Conflict itself isn’t the problem, but the way that we handle it is. Leaning in to conflict may not seem very Stoic. The traditional image of a Stoic is someone that doesn’t let things get to them. That they’re impassive. But that’s not true. A Stoic doesn’t let things get to them that are unimportant, but there’s a difference between being patient with the unimportant and avoiding things that are hard. We tend to think there are two ways to handle disagreement: avoid it, or blow up over it. Most people have picked a side. Conflict-avoidant, or conflict-prone. And each side thinks the other one has the problem. Here's the uncomfortable part: they're the same problem. Both are what happens when nobody's built the skill of disagreeing well. The person that avoids never practices it, so when it finally surfaces, it comes out as sarcasm, distance, or the silent treatment. The person that blows-up never practices it either, so it comes out as an explosion instead of a conversation. And it's not just at home. The same thing happens on at work. The meeting where everyone nods, and the actual disagreement happens in Slack DMs an hour later. A team that "never fights" looks healthy on paper, but it usually isn't. It just means nobody's said the hard thing yet. Unresolved conflict doesn't stay contained. It leaks out. It shows up as resentment, as withdrawal, as the passive dig — everywhere except the one place it needs to show up, which is the actual conversation. We've confused peace with the absence of conflict. They are not the same. Peace has to be actively worked for. The absence of conflict is a symptom of avoidance and constricted communication. I grew up in a home where we had no idea how to argue well. My example came from my parent where my dad would bully us into submission, often turning violent, while my mother would fall into passive resignation to avoid his wrath. Rather than being a safe space to be able to talk about hard things, we learned to bury how we felt and avoid conflict as much as possible. I’ve made the mistake of confusing peace and the absence of conflict in the past and it cost me. I would avoid conflict at almost every turn because it’s how I had survived. In my marriage, it got so bad that at one point my ex-wife asked my opinion about something and I froze, trying to think of the “right” answer. She got frustrated with me and said, “I want YOUR opinion, not the answer you think I want!” Now, when I say that I was conflict avoidant, I would avoid things until I didn’t. The resentments would pile up until I’d exploded at the wrong time and in the wrong way. A disagreement about chores would turn into a litigation of all the frustrations that built up over the last month. The volcano would explode leaving a disaster that would take weeks to clean up. And even after things were more or less back to normal, there was always lasting damage. Relationships would cool, leaving both sides walking on eggshells trying to avoid another explosion. It wasn’t safe. I wasn’t safe. All because I didn’t know how to fight well. Because I didn’t know how to fight well, this same pattern showed