5 Common Rows (And How To Diffuse Them)

Its your turn to take out the bin. No, its yours. Why do we keep on having the same old arguments? We ask four experts to help us achieve a more harmonious household.

It may be about who picks up the shopping after work. Perhaps it’s a spat about the pub lunch you’ve arranged at the weekend, or why one of you is never in the mood for sex. Whatever the subject, it feels like you’re fighting again about the same old issue that never gets resolved.

If this sounds familiar, take heart. Recurring arguments account for 69 per cent of marital conflicts. And, although the most common flashpoints are about mundane details of daily life, it’s their subtext that causes them to flare up again and again.

An argument over whose turn it is to put the bins out is rarely actually about that, says couples’ therapist Andrew G Marshall, author of Resolve Your Differences. So if you want to stamp out these arguments once and for all, you need to identify the SUBTEXT to the tension between you, and then find a way to DEFUSE it. Partnerships is the constant negotiation that couples have to have over the division of their resources, such as money, time, sex, or energy, says psychotherapist, Prof. Janet Reibsten. ‘The flashpoints occur over who makes the decision about how those resources are divided and whether each person in the relationship believes that division is fair,’ she says.

ROWS ABOUT GOING OUT

It’s Friday night and you’re looking forward to a fun weekend, catching up with friends and family. You suggest lunch with mates on Saturday, then a birthday party in the evening, then popping over to your sister’s on Sunday. After all, isn’t that the weekends are for? Well no actually, not for him – he has other plans. Or perhaps that should be no plans, because you’re arguing, again, over his objection to the fact you treat the weekend as a social whirl, when all he wants to do is to chill out at home.

The Subtext