They don’t tell you this, but (non-abusive) fighting and rough patches in the context of a committed relationship where neither person is afraid that the other person is going to reject them or leave are SO much better than the serial monogamy dating roller coaster
Looking back I don’t know how anyone gets anything done when they’re spending their 20s and 30s with zero relationship security. Some people are probably wired to tolerate this better than others, but geez, it just consumes so much human compute
I’m pretty convinced that individual personality factors and attachment dynamics are only part of the story, and people just fight and recover differently when they know they’re not going to leave and neither will their partner. The “win” condition is just unavoidably different
If you know that you are NOT going to break up, the core of a fight/recovery is simple: at least one of you is unhappy and unless that gets fixed home life is going to suck. It doesn’t really matter who is at fault or who has leverage, it’s still going to suck until it gets fixed
Once you get enough practice with it, you stop playing all the games that just extend the period where one or both people are unhappy, because there are no bonus points or prizes for anything other than solving the problem. Punishing the other person is just punishing yourself
The big caveat here is that none of this works in a truly abusive relationship or a relationship with a genuinely sociopathic person, because it relies on both people being fundamentally NOT OKAY with the other person’s persistent unhappiness
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