How to avoid conflicts with your partner?

Understanding love is key to avoid tensions with your romantic partner.

"Love is an activity, not a passive affection; it is a continuous being, not a sudden outburst" says Erich Fromm in his book The Art of Loving.

This definition is only an example of what we can understand by love, because there are many ways to understand a phenomenon as complex as this and it is not something easy to specify. In addition, each person will have his or her particular vision of love according to his or her past experiences.

In the face of this fact, however, the fact that couple's conflicts seem to be not uncommonAlthough their origins may be diverse depending on each case, their consequences are usually very negative for most of the people who experience them.

The origin of love

To understand the nature of love conflicts, we must first ask ourselves the following questions how love is born. Given the overwhelming number of interpretations on the subject, here we are going to focus, above all, on an approach of current psychology through which we will answer the question of how love arises and evolves, why couple problems arise and what we can do to increase satisfaction with our relationship.

First of all, we have to ask ourselves what is it that makes us suddenly become so attached to that person, why we can't stop smiling when we think about them and everything around us seems to turn rosy.. In those initial phases we are in a state of continuous activation, attentive to every sigh of the loved one and continuously thinking about them and everything that reminds us of them. This makes us feel like we are in a cloud of perpetual happiness.

Well, we can divide this activation that we experience in the stage of falling in love into two types.

1. The Biological root

On the one hand, we feel a great physiological activation due to the impulse of diverse chemical substances that our organism produces and that could well be called "drugs of happiness", since several studies reveal that being madly in love activates the same areas of the brain as cocaine addiction..

Some of these substances are: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, estrogen and testosterone, each with a specific function in love.

2. The cognitive and emotional part

On the other hand, there is also a cognitive-emotional activation. That is to say, obsessive thoughts of the type: "I like him/her", "I love him/her", "he/she is for me" are produced at this stage and various feelings such as interest and fear of rejection are mixed.

This aspect of infatuation, however, technically also belongs to the realm of the biological, since what happens in it is due to physical and chemical processes. However, it is easier to describe it in psychological terms.

How to deal with the problem of couple conflicts?

This initial phase of falling in love wears out as the months go by. This means that over the years it is no longer as obsessive in nature as it was at the beginning, which is completely adaptive, since otherwise we would not be able to take care of our children or attend to our responsibilities by having our partner in mind 24 hours a day, without worrying about anything else.

The love that appears after this phase is a love that is linked to an increase in the degree of long-term commitment.. This phase of falling in love has a strong cultural component and is affected by the customs and habits of the area in which one lives, but also by the daily habits of the partners and the commitments and "contracts" they establish between them. It is, let's say, a more relaxed emotion and not for that reason worse than the previous one.

The confrontation stage?

It is in this second stage where couple conflicts tend to surface more easily..

Many times, the germ of these problems is found in certain preconceived ideas that people have about relationships that are totally irrational. For example:

1. "Love is a feeling that is born or dies without us being able to do anything about it. It doesn't matter what we do". This belief can be combated from the point of view that love is not something that comes and goes by magic, but rather that is something that we ourselves build day by day with each of our actions..

2. "Opposites attract". On the contrary, there are studies that indicate that the similarity between the members of the couple is a predictor of success for the couple..

3. "If he loves me, he should accept me as I am, without trying to change me". It is clear that when we fall in love with someone we fall in love with the person he or she is at that moment, not the person we could become (otherwise it would be problematic). However, tt does not mean, however, that we cannot help our partner to improve as a person and to iron out those aspects of his or her personality and iron out those aspects of the personality that do not please either of us.

4. "If he/she doesn't attend to my needs, it is because he/she is selfish". If he/she does not attend to your needs it could be because of many things, for example that you have never told him/her what your needs are or that the other person has not learned to understand them. Believing that the other person must be there to provide us with what we need at all times only prepares the ground for love conflicts to appear.

5. "In order for a couple to get along, you have to give up taking care of your own needs and individuality". This is not true and giving up our individuality (for example by abandoning our old friendships) is much more harmful than beneficial, both for the couple and for each individual.

6. "We should never argue". On this subject we will also refer to the findings of certain studies. These indicate that couples who show greater satisfaction are not those who argue the least (because those who do not argue (since normally those who do not argue is because they keep things to themselves) and neither are those who argue excessively. The happiest couples are those who argue in the middle ground.

7. "Living together implies sharing absolutely every aspect of our life". Here again we allude to the fact that it is necessary for both partners to maintain their individuality. that it is necessary for both partners to maintain their individuality.. For example, it is not necessary that both have identical hobbies: on Saturday mornings he can go to martial arts class and while she goes to yoga class, or vice versa.

Extra keys to keep crises at bay

The above are some of the many irrational ideas you may have about what a couple should be and that hinder the normal course of it.

But in addition to banishing these myths, there are many more things we can do to maintain love and not fall into the continuous couple conflicts.. They are details that apparently seem very simple and common sense (and they really are), but that many times in the day to day are not so easy to identify and put into practice. Let's see what they are.

1. Dialogue

A fundamental element for a couple's relationship to prosper properly is communication. communication. We must use a precise vocabulary to express what we like and what we do not like, since it is a mistake to wait for the other person to guess what we need.

In order to express these negative aspects that we dislike about our partner we can start by saying something positive firstWe can then go on to state very specifically what the problem is and express our feelings about it, admitting our role in the problem. In this way, reaching an agreement will be easier.

2. Externalizing love

It is also important to to give and ask for demonstrations of affection. Normally with the passage of time we tend to think that our partner already knows that we love her, but apart from showing it in the day to day it is elementary to express it with words: to say "I love you".

3. Change of scenery

Some couple conflicts are the result of the embodiment of dynamics and routines that are harmful to both partners, for example poor management of the time available to devote to the couple..

Therefore, another thing that helps to increase satisfaction is to escape from routine by making room for leisure activities, both as a couple to increase complicity and separately to maintain other social relationships and not lose our individuality.

Summarizing

Fundamentally we can say that love relationships always require attention and care, not only in the initial stagesnot only in the initial phases in which it is easier due to the intense physiological, cognitive and emotional activation that we mentioned at the beginning. But if we know how to take proper care of the aspects mentioned here and those that the couple considers more relevant, the happiness we will obtain will far exceed the effort invested in it.