How well do you and your partner understand each other? Can you share beliefs and ideas about sensitive subjects without getting upset? Do your fights tend to stay calm or are they more likely to end with one or both of you getting hurt?

Finding the time to have regular conversations and/or maintaining healthy communication during disagreements is a challenge for most couples, at least some of the time. Sharing your thoughts, dreams, concerns, and anything you want with your partner, as well as being confident that you can disagree and have challenging discussions without them leading to a damaging fight, is necessary for having a healthy, enjoyable and secure relationship.

It’s unavoidable that partners will occasionally find it difficult to make time for each other and conflicts will become heated, but ideally these types of incidences will be the exception.

Fortunately, it’s possible for even very distant and antagonistic couples to establish routines of communicating with each other, break habits that undermine healthy communication, and develop skills that help prevent fights from becoming too negative.

The value of healthy communication

What do you think of as communication between partners? How do you and your partner tend to treat each other during disagreements and fights? Are you curious about your partner and want to make them happy?

Effective and healthy communication is essential to relationships. Without it, you can’t know who your partner is or how to meet their needs and make them happy. And if you can’t keep communication healthy during conflicts, then fights are likely to be painful experiences that take a very long time to recover from.

When couples regularly make time to talk to each other, express a genuine interest in what the other has to say, and maintain respect for each other’s emotions even when discussions become tense, they’re practicing healthy communication.

Communication requires talking AND listening, not just one or the other. So if you aren’t listening to someone or they aren’t listening to you, then communication isn’t taking place, even though a conversation is.

However, communication isn’t all that’s required for a healthy relationship. Couples must also show respect, trust each other, and treat one another as equals.

• If you don’t respect each other, you’re unlikely to be willing to put in the effort it can take to listen to your partner when you’re not interested in what they’re saying or to be kind during conflicts, which is almost always challenging. And if you feel that your partner isn’t being respectful, you’re less likely to show respect to them and maintain healthy communication yourself.
• Without trust, partners are likely to worry that what they share could be told to others, their partner won’t be sensitive if they become emotional, or vulnerabilities they share will be used against them. If you don’t feel safe or comfortable being open, honest, and vulnerable with your partner, then your relationship likely isn’t healthy and you’re unable to enjoy some of the most rewarding moments couples can share.
• And if equality is lacking, one partner can expect the other to listen rather than speak and believe that they have the right to get angry and show their feelings during fights while it’s their partner’s responsibility to keep the peace and make them happy.This usually means the relationship will only be satisfying for one partner, without being a true partnership.

Without respect, trust, and equality, relationships are unlikely to be healthy and enjoyable for both partners, even if they do make time to talk to each other.

When these qualities are lacking, the relationship is likely to be negative.

All relationships can be ranked on a scale of positivity and negativity. The more positive a relationship is, the more enjoyable it tends to be. How partners communicate to each other – when they’re calm and during conflicts – tends to impact their levels of positivity and negativity more than anything else in the relationship.

Having enjoyable conversations with your partner where you tell stories, hear about their experiences, and reconnect often bring positivity to the relationship by nurturing your friendship.

Unhealthy fights are typically the source of a great deal of negativity; they can overwhelm a relationship and make couples think badly of each other, even when they aren’t fighting, because they’re so often in the process of getting over the last fight while waiting for the next one to happen.

If you think negatively of your partner, you’re more likely to react harshly whenever they do something you dislike, perceive neutral comments as hostile, and minimise or ignore their attempts at kindness. Your partner asking where you put the remote can feel like an insult because you assume they’re accusing you of being irresponsible and losing it or that they’re too lazy to bother finding it without your help.

But if you generally think positively of your partner, you can be far more forgiving and optimistic about their intentions. Instead of getting upset at your partner for forgetting to pick up an ingredient for dinner on their way home, you can be annoyed but remind yourself that they had a busy day and are rarely forgetful. Or if your partner snaps at you, you could ask what’s wrong and find out if something is bothering them instead of having a fight.

Making a relationship more positive requires increasing the number of enjoyable interactions you have while reducing the amount of negativity. This can be challenging if you and your partner have the habit of thinking badly of each other, but as you move away from negativity, how you feel about your partner and how rewarding you think your relationship is can improve. Conversations are often excellent opportunities for positive interactions because sharing stories, thoughts, and feelings with someone while they do the same in a safe and trusting environment is usually an enjoyable experience.

Having meaningful conversations and reducing the negativity caused by damaging fights can help you build respect, trust, and equality. But if these qualities are lacking in your relationship, you’ll likely need to do more than improve your communication.

However, for many couples, addressing a lack of healthy communication is the best place to start improving the relationship as it brings them closer together, makes the relationship more enjoyable, and removes a great deal of negativity. It’s likely that there will be than communication to address, especially if there have been significant challenges or betrayals in your relationship, but by beginning to reconnect, you and your partner can feel more empowered and motivated to continue working together to make the relationship closer and more satisfying.

By understanding the benefits of healthy communication, as well as the potential consequences of unhealthy communication, you can feel motivated to make more time for reconnecting and invest the energy that is often needed to break harmful habits.

How to improve communication

For relationships to be healthy and rewarding, it’s important for couples to have conversations with each other AND use healthy communication skills during fights and disagreements.

When you and your partner are talking to each other, it’s important that both of you stay present and engaged. Ideally, these conversations will become an enjoyable part of your routine. You don’t have to discuss remarkable topics, reveal important information, or talk very long for them to be meaningful and bring you closer together. As little as 20 minutes a day discussing whatever comes to mind can make a significant difference in how well couples know each other.

These conversations have the best chance of being enjoyable if you believe that you and your partner have plenty to learn from one another. Especially if they’ve been in a long-term relationship, partners can think there’s nothing their partner can teach them. But thinking this can make conversations unhealthy because it can prevent you from listening to your partner and cause you to make assumptions about them. People grow and change throughout their lives, so without the opportunity to share their new thoughts, ideas, and ambitions with their partners, they can grow apart.

Your conversations can be even more beneficial if you and your partner use them as opportunities to discover how to make each other feel loved and special.

A common reason that relationships become distant and negative is one or both partners feeling that their needs aren’t being met. When someone feels that their partner is unable, or worse – unwilling – to meet their needs, the relationship is unlikely to be healthy or enjoyable because it’s painful to think that your partner is either withholding support and affection or is incapable of providing it.

But if you each have the goal of learning how to make your partner happy while sharing how they can do this for you, then the relationship can be more rewarding. For example, if your partner mentions a new restaurant they want to visit, you could make a reservation. Or if they say they have a busy week coming up, you could consider how to help them feel less stressed.

The more positive interactions you and your partner share, the easier it can be to recover from negative experiences. Positivity can build up and be drawn from when you need it, such as after an upsetting fight, because you have so many positive memories of your partner and what they’ve done for you, so forgiving and moving on is much easier.

However, gaining a positive perspective of your partner and the relationship will be very difficult, if not impossible, if you regularly have unhealthy fights that bring a high amount of negativity to the relationship.

When conflicts become too escalated, people can go into survival mode and respond with one or a combination of the four survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. This translates to them aggressively embracing conflict, doing anything to end the fight (even if there will be consequences and/or resentment later), or withdrawing into themselves and doing nothing.

When someone is emotionally overwhelmed, they’re likely to behave in ways that are almost guaranteed to make the fight unhealthy. The most damaging are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and shutting down (ignoring your partner and refusing to interact with or acknowledge them).

Some people struggle not to behave in unhealthy ways when they get upset, which is why it’s important to learn about and practice tools to prevent conflicts from escalating to the point where you lose self-control.

Although your most effective techniques for keeping fights healthy and staying in control will depend on you and your partner’s personalities, the majority of people can benefit from practicing the following:

1) Learn the signs that getting overwhelmed

It’s not always obvious when you’re going into survival mode – where you can’t think logically and are at a high risk of saying something that will make the fight worse and you’ll regret later.

If you can’t recognise your body’s signals that you’re feeling overwhelmed, you won’t take measures to calm yourself down, which is often necessary to keeping conflicts healthy.

2) Take breaks from fights

Because it’s impossible to have a healthy or productive discussion when you or your partner are too upset, it’s highly valuable to incorporate taking breaks into how you approach disagreements.  

Although it can feel rude to abruptly leave a conversation or to have your partner make this request, it’s healthy as it can prevent you or your partner from saying something hurtful you may regret later. Taking a break isn’t storming out or coldly walking away; it’s telling your partner that you need a few minutes to calm down and that you’ll return to finish the conversation as soon as you’re able.

During a break, you don’t ruminate – you find something soothing to do so you can return to the discussion in a better state of mind. If you’re not sure what calms you down, you can experiment with different techniques to discover which is the most effective. Some people enjoy laying down and listening to relaxing music, while others prefer doing something active to burn off excess energy.

3) Remind yourself of who your partner usually is

When you’re fighting with partner, it can be automatic to start thinking of them as your enemy and reminding yourself of all their bad habits, past mistakes, and ways you believe they make life more difficult for you. Even if there’s some truth to your thoughts, your partner likely has more that you love about them than things you dislike. By choosing to think about why you care for your partner, it can be easier to be kind and considerate, even when you’re having a challenging disagreement. 

4) Adopt a neutral third-party perspective

If you’re struggling to remain calm and receptive, ask yourself what someone who doesn’t know either of you would think about what you and your partner are saying and how you’re behaving. How reasonable or demanding are each of you being? Are you working together or attacking one another? Are there potential solutions either of you are refusing to consider?

Doing this can help you move away from potentially polarised ways of thinking (usually a version of ‘my partner is wrong and I’m right’) which rarely helps resolve disagreements and can make you more combative and closed-minded.

Practicing this technique may require taking a break from the conversation so you’re not distracted and can still listen to your partner.

5) Be willing to compromise or change your mind

In order for disagreements to be productive – you learn what each of you wants so you can work together to resolve the differences that are causing your disagreements – you and your partner should both be willing to at least partially accept the other’s position and find a way of accommodating what each of you want. This can be challenging and you might struggle to find a solution that makes both of you happy. The ability to compromise is a skill that takes practice to develop, but the more you work on it, the easier it can be to find solutions both of you can accept.

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While conflict is unavoidable in relationships, unhealthy fights aren’t. You can’t expect to never hurt each other, but you can aim to reduce the frequency of these types of fights as much as possible by quitting damaging communication habits and replacing them with healthier ones.

Building these skills takes time and practice, and it can require learning new techniques and ways of thinking that you’re unfamiliar with. Although it’s not always necessary, some couples find it much easier to work with a professional. A mental health professional can help you and your partner identify your most damaging habits, recognise take advantage of your strengths, and provide accountability. Making personal changes, even with help, is almost always challenging, but a professional can save you a great deal of time and eliminate guesswork by giving you a clearer path of how you and your partner can improve your treatment of each other.

Practicing healthy communication can enable you and your partner to learn more about each other, teach you how to make one another feel special and loved, and allow problems and differences feel solvable, while reducing how painful and damaging many fights become.

Healthy communication alone can’t resolve all of the difficulties partners can face, but it can serve as incredibly valuable tool that gives you ways to reduce distance and feel more capable of taking on other, potentially greater, challenges in your relationship.

Communication that is open, honest and safe is essential to healthy relationships. If partners are unable to share their thoughts and feelings while being mindful of not hurting each other, then the relationship can’t be healthy.

Healthy communication is enjoyable, productive and reciprocal. It connects you and your partner while providing the tools to disagree without hurting each other and finding ways of accommodating your different wants and needs, which makes the relationship more secure and rewarding.