Keeping Your Marriage Healthy

    Is the cause of failed relationships the fighting or the way we do it? Experts say learning how to listen to your partner's complaints -- learning how to fight -- can help improve a relationship. "...There is no proper way to fight with a spouse, but there are proper ways to disagree with a spouse," says James Smith, a social worker with Wolfleg Counseling in Iowa City, Iowa.

In a letter to his parishioners available online, the Rev. Canon Gray Temple Jr. of St. Patrick's Episcopal Church in Dunwoody, Ga., said most people argue about money and sex. And the key to keeping your relationship on track is learning how to argue fairly. "The key to successful communication is knowing how to fight. Most people seem not to know that. If you can fight, you can talk straight, without fear of where the talk is drifting. If you cannot fight, any conversation which begins to drift towards conflict will scare you...," Temple wrote.  

Smith said a partner's reaction to a complaint also can cause problems in the relationship."We can clam up, act out in a passive aggressive manner, become physically aggressive and exhibit many other negative behaviors," he said.

Roger Gerwe, a social worker who runs Family Health Counseling in Cincinnati, Ohio, thinks unlocking the key to the way we fight requires looking back to childhood. "In picking our spouses, we may pick someone who is similar to somebody we love, like a parent," he said. And spouses respond differently when resolving arugments. 

To change the behavior, people must first realize it is hurting their partner, Smith said, and they must "be willing to accept responsibility for changing negative behaviors." Gerwe said sometimes the change is as simple as "teaching people to effectively listen to each other" and "how they can address and solve conflict."  

Smith says that the solution is to try to see the other person's side. "It basically comes down to a couple of things. People are looking to be treated with dignity and respect, not having other things involved in the argument, like name calling, using derogatory words to name call or using words like 'stupid,'" Gerwe says.   

The best way to resolve fighting is to limit it. Listen to your spouse, and vice versa, remembering that it won't be easy. "This takes deep listening, respect for each other and the ability to seek clarification," says Smith.  

According to Gerwe, if you and your spouse try to end the fighting, you will notice a payoff. "If we get people to start to do that, and we're looking to communication solving, we can see dramatic changes quickly," Gerwe says.  

Rev. Temple told parishioners that the worst thing to do is pretend conflict doesn't exist. "Joking about a problem without dealing with it is a form of denial," he wrote. "In denying a conflict, one maintains a state of undischarged tension in oneself and in one's partner..."