Can you both tell, inside the first few sentences, which fight this is?
One of you says something about the roof. A few minutes in, you’re somewhere else entirely. Neither of you can point to the sentence where the turn happened. It’s the same somewhere you landed last week, and the week before that.
From where you’re sitting, the silence is the dangerous part. You’d take the argument over the quiet that follows it.
So you press. You ask again, you follow it into the next room, you keep it open well past the point where it’s doing either of you any good. What you’re defending is worth defending. Proof that you still matter to this person.
From where your partner is sitting, the pressing is the dangerous part. Every question you ask lands like evidence being collected for a case they’re already losing.
So they go quiet, because going quiet is how you keep a bad night from becoming the worst one you’ve had. They’re defending something worth defending too. Most of the time it’s the relationship itself.
Neither defense was ever really about the roof.
I’ll ask each of you to own your own responsibility in the relationship, and I’ll ask it of you before I ask it of your partner. Yours is the only side of this you can move. Working it gets you further than waiting for your partner to go first.
I use Emotionally Focused Therapy for this. Under an argument that keeps coming back sits a question about whether the other person is still there for you.
There’s one subject the two of you have quietly learned to steer around, and it’s the one I want first, because you’ve each been having it alone. Once each of you can hear what the other one is defending, you’re finally arguing about the elephant in the room.
Trust has somewhere to start from.
Bring that subject to a free consultation, with the softening left off.
My favorite day in your therapy is the day you tell me you don’t need me anymore. I’m aiming at it from the first session.
You’ll get a therapist who says the hard thing instead of waiting for you to find it yourself. What I ask back is short, and none of it is easy.
Do that, and you get to find out which parts of this life you’d pick.
