Fighting well.

Every couple disagrees, and mostly about the same few things. What you can change is how you get into a fight, how you treat each other inside it, and how you get out again.

The problem is how you fight

Tatkin starts flatly: no relationship is free of conflict. Most couples argue about money, time, sex, mess or children, and those subjects never go away. So the subject is not what worries him, and neither is the disagreement. What decides whether a fight does damage is how you move in and out of it: whether you stay friendly, whether either of you becomes threatening, and how fast you offer each other relief.

The play mat

His image is the rubber mat under a climbing frame in a school playground. A child who falls on it is not badly hurt. Couples who handle conflict well have a large play mat: they can tussle and argue hard, and there is still something of a game in it. Once someone gets hurt it is no longer play. It is war.

He does not want you to fear conflict, or anything else with each other. The real danger in his view is avoidance. Couples who stop raising things because they dread what follows are worse off than couples who argue.

Watch the face, stay friendly

For a difficult subject, sit facing each other, near enough to see each other's pupils, and keep looking at your partner's face even when you would sooner look at the floor. Tatkin calls this keeping your eye on the ball.

He gives two reasons. Partners slip and correct each other very quickly, and the signs are all in the face, so if you look away you miss the moment when a small change would have helped. And with your eyes elsewhere you are arguing with a picture in your head: an old, fixed image of your partner, rarely a kind one.

Watching the face makes mutual distress relief possible. A fight, he says, has two purposes: making your point, and tracking your partner's distress. If they look trapped, or their face falls, stop and check on them. His reason is the window of tolerance. Pushed outside it, a person loses the slow, thoughtful part of the brain, which he says runs short of fuel under stress, and is left with the fast part that repeats what it has always done.

One way to keep each other inside the window is what he calls waving the flag of friendliness. In mid-argument you admire your partner's shoes, then go back to arguing. Or you say that you love them and will never leave, add that they are being impossible, and carry on. A smile, a kinder tone or a compliment does the same job: it reminds your partner that you are not a threat.

You are lovers, not enemies, and you share one home. Make it dangerous for your partner and you have made it dangerous for yourself.

Tension and release

Couples who fight well, Tatkin says, have a rhythm he calls tense and relax: into the hard material, out of it, and in again. He compares it to the rhythmic squeezing of the stomach during digestion. If it stops, the food stays put and you become ill. Couples who tense and never relax wear themselves out and turn threatening.

Both partners carry this. Picture the two of you in a small boat: if one tips over, both end up in the water.

A short fight is a skill

He asks whether the two of you could start a fight and finish it in three or four minutes, because you are expected at dinner, and both leave in good shape. Nothing is settled. You have wrapped it up for now and will return to it.

Read this as an ability worth having, not as a time limit on every disagreement. His point is that no fight should wreck an evening, never mind a whole day. Putting a subject down is not surrender, he adds.

Short visits, no warnings

For the same reason he is wary of long sit-down talks. A talk that feels like a trip to the dentist is one your partner will dread next time. So visit a hard subject briefly and often, and do come back to it: parking a subject for good is avoidance. Each of you has to trust that you will not be trapped or flattened.

Do not announce a hard talk either. Saying that you have something to raise and that your partner will not like it gives their arousal time to climb, so they arrive ready for war. Begin with the issue itself.

The fog of war

Push each other outside the window and you fall off the mat, into what Tatkin calls the fog of war. You are still fighting, but neither of you knows where it is going. The aim has shrunk to surviving and being right.

Two signs give it away:

• Nothing new happens. You run on the fast, automatic brain, so both of you repeat the lines you always use and neither can think of a different move.
• Little is remembered. He says the hippocampus, which records events, stops working properly in this state, so afterwards neither of you can rebuild what happened.

What keeps you out of the fog is repair while the fight is still going. Tatkin says he is willing to admit, many times in one argument, that the other person is right and he was wrong. It brings relief at once and lets the argument go on. Couples who refuse stay in rising tension until someone threatens the relationship or walks out.

Perception counts, first complaint first

Two rules of procedure keep a fight from spreading.

The one who perceives it wins

When your partner says that your look was sarcastic or your voice harsh, the urge is to deny it. Tatkin's rule is that you do not get to. What counts is how your partner experienced it, not what you intended and not who is right. You cannot see your own face, and you would not win that argument anyway.

He grants that people who are worked up sometimes misread a face. His advice is still to assume your partner saw correctly. As we read it, the rule covers the hurt of that moment (a look, a tone, a remark) and not the outcome of the disagreement itself.

The first complaint comes first

Whoever raises a complaint first gets the attention, all of it, until the matter is put right. Answering that you are upset too is how couples end up at war. Your own complaint waits.

The reason is arousal. A partner who feels wronged is waiting for repair, and the longer it takes, the more worked up they become. So repair fast and in very few words: you are sorry, they are right, you were wrong. Explaining what you really meant only makes them wait longer.

A note from us: Tatkin states these rules without exceptions. They assume two people who are safe with each other. Coercion, control or violence call for safety planning and qualified help, not for accepting a partner's version of events.

Dangerous faces, sounds and words

You cannot see or hear yourself as your partner does, so here too you take their word. Tatkin's explanation is that the amygdala, the brain's fast threat detector, scans for danger and reacts before any thought about what was meant.

• Faces. Expressions that read as contempt, disgust or dismissal, and rolling the eyes.
• Sounds. Loud noises, and the small noises that tell a partner they are being stupid.
• Movements. He says the amygdala cannot tell an excited gesture from a blow that is coming, so sharp, jerky movements register as danger whatever you intend.

Words that land as threats

Threats to the relationship itself are off limits. If you can stop yourself from killing someone, he says, you can stop yourself from saying this. Statements that you do not want this, do not like your partner or are no longer in love are plainly dangerous too.

Rough language is not the point: some couples can tell each other to shut up and no harm is done. What matters is what your partner experiences as a threat. Even an ordinary word can become one. His example is egg, said so often in a threatening setting that the partner now reacts to the word alone. Nobody can be argued out of feeling threatened, he says. You can only stop being threatening.

Harder to spot are small hedges inside kind sentences: a but after telling someone you love them, or an I think before saying you are fine with them. He says the brain scans for danger and stores it, so your partner remembers only that word. It is not spite.

How each style fights

Islands, waves and anchors fight in different and predictable ways, which Tatkin says makes them easier to handle.