Category: Relationships

Conflict is not the problem in a relationship — how you handle conflict is. After years of sitting with couples online, I keep seeing the same handful of patterns repeat. Here is how to name yours.

The three familiar patterns

• Pursue and retreat. One person pushes for resolution while the other withdraws into silence. The harder one pursues, the further the other backs away.
• Attack and defend. Criticism meets defensiveness, and both partners leave the room more hurt than they arrived.
• Mutual avoidance. Nothing is ever said, so nothing ever changes — but the resentment quietly compounds.

Why you keep repeating yours

These patterns are learned. You watched your parents do something similar, or you developed a strategy that once protected you. What keeps it alive is not stubbornness — it is that the pattern feels familiar and therefore “normal”.

Healing a conflict pattern is not about winning the argument. It is about slowing the loop long enough to see each other again.

Breaking the loop

Name the pattern out loud, in a calm moment: “I think we do the pursue-and-retreat dance.” Naming it removes its power. Then agree on a timeout signal that both of you honour, and come back within thirty minutes.

If the pattern has been running for years, it will not dissolve overnight. That is exactly what couples counselling — in person or online — is designed to help with.

Almost every couple argues about money at some point. But in my sessions, the money conversation is almost never about the numbers — it is about safety, respect, power and fear. When you understand that, the fight changes shape.

What the argument is really about

For one partner, spending feels like care; for the other, saving feels like safety. Neither is wrong. The tension appears when each person’s way of protecting the family quietly frightens the other person’s way of protecting the family.

• Different histories. How we grew up around money shapes how we react to it today.
• Different definitions of respect. Being asked before spending can feel caring to one and controlling to another.
• Hidden fears. Beneath the raised voices is often a quieter worry: “Will we be okay?”

Three practical shifts

Start with a calm, scheduled, fifteen-minute money date — not during a crisis. Ask each other: “What did money mean in your home growing up?” Then listen without fixing.

You do not need to agree about everything. You need to understand each other well enough to stop being enemies about it.

Finally, agree on the rules of engagement: no money conversations when you are both tired, no name-calling, and one of you always has permission to pause the conversation and return to it later.

When to get help

If the same fight keeps returning, or if money is being hidden or used as control, professional support can help you rebuild a shared sense of safety. Online relationship counselling can create that space from the privacy of your home.