How Conflict Avoidance Quietly Kills Your Relationship

What conflict avoidance looks like

Ok everybody, I want you to raise your hand if you’ve ever proclaimed that for your next birthday, all you really want is some gnarly conflict with your partner! Now let’s see here, how many hands do I see in the air…none!? I’m shocked!

I know conflict is nobody’s favourite pastime, especially with their better half. And why? Because it makes you feel all the feelings that aren’t any fun at all, and it leads to the most frustrating arguments that seem impossible to resolve. Why on earth would you run head first into that bullsh!t? So when your partner does something that hurts your feelings or irritates the sh!t out of you, you find ways to tune out the emotion and dodge the conflict like a ninja.

Maybe you pick up your phone and start scrolling, dive back into our videogame, have a glass of wine, or take a massive hit from that ice bong. After all, your feelings are probably just stupid or wrong, and bringing issues up with your better half will only cause problems, because it’s not like you’re fighting right now.

Maybe you've tried to address it with your partner before and they were defensive or invalidating. Maybe they dismissed you and left you feeling insecure in the relationship. Or worse, started raging at you for daring to express a little frustration.

Whatever your experience has been, you’ve got your reasons to avoid talking about your difficult feelings. And we get it, who wants a fight every time they’re a little irked or frustrated in their relationship?!

But then you start to figure out that your avoidance strategy isn’t the life hack you wish it was. You may not be fighting, but there’s this tension that you just can’t shake. It feels like you’re walking on eggshells and all your interactions are weird and awkward, and you’re getting mad and having stupid fights about things that really don’t seem like a big deal on the surface.

So is the avoidance worth it? I think we both know the answer to that question, and I’m going to explain how and why conflict avoidance actually leads to more fighting. I’ve also got some therapist-approved strategies to avoid those stupid fights, and if you read until the end I’ll tell you how to get your hands on our exclusive cheat sheet to help you face conflict in your relationship fearlessly.

How I learned that conflict avoidance doesn’t work

Not to brag, but I used to be the queen of avoidance. Any time I had a difficult feeling, especially in a relationship, I would do everything in my power to stuff it down into that overcrowded cavern we stick our feelings in. And it wasn't until I was in a relationship with Will that I came to realize that suppressing my feelings wasn't working all that well for me. I can remember the exact moment when I truly had to confront my way of communicating. We were doing our regular grocery shop and I cannot remember for the life of me why I was upset with Will, but I was. And so I did what I always did up to that point: I went silent. And I was so, so, soooo good at the silent treatment that Will finally had enough. He made it clear that if I was unwilling to be forthcoming about how I was feeling and express it to him, that he wasn't going to be able to continue in the relationship with me.

I was terrified. I valued our relationship so deeply, in no way did I want to be hurting him or punishing him with silence, but I felt frozen in those moments. It almost felt like it was impossible for me to speak because the fear was so intense. Fear that I wouldn't be understood, fear that my feelings were stupid and that I shouldn't be feeling this way to begin with, fear that my feelings would push Will away and ruin our relationship. But ironically, that’s also what avoidance was doing. While I was experiencing this fear, I also knew that I had to challenge myself to do things differently because avoidance was causing way bigger issues than the initial problem itself. Like a baby deer learning to walk, I very slowly, and with a lil trepidation, I began to express my feelings. Will was amazingly patient with me and was an incredible listener. He helped me to see that my feelings were actually valid and that it made sense why I was upset about whatever it was I was upset with - even if it was about him.

This was a massive turning point for me and our relationship. Over the past 10 years I’ve worked really hard at facing conflict like a warrior queen, and guess what? I’ve made conflict my bitch. By no means is it something I do for fun, but I recognize that it can actually be a safe, healthy, and productive process that makes things better in my life.

I want you to hear this piece - learning to be able to express my hard ass feelings has been one of the most freeing, empowering changes I’ve made in my life. And I’m not a unicorn. The exact same thing is true about the clients we’ve helped learn to stop avoiding conflict and start facing it with constructive courage.

How to stop avoiding conflict with your partner

Ok, so talking takes work, and if your lives are anything like ours, the last thing you have is energy in the tank for more goddamn work.

It would be so nice if you could put your relationship on autopilot and cruise through life without any bumps or detours while keeping the love bubble that started on your first date fully inflated. But if you're watching this right now, you’ve probably already figured out that the less open you are about the good, the bad, and the ugly, the more disconnected you feel in your relationship. And disconnection feels really, really shitty. This is where you start to feel more like roommates than romantic partners, and that’s just depressing. And if that isn’t the kicker, it’s not like you actually successfully avoid conflict while carrying on like this. You exist in a state of tension until someone gets fed up with something and loses their shit, and then you go at each other like two rabid hyenas. It’s not a pretty sight.

How conflict avoidance keeps problems unresolved

Be real with your girl for a minute: what do you think is easier, doing the work now and having some tough, but important conversations to work through your issues, or letting things fester until it feels like there’s not a single square inch of floor space covered with eggshells? If you said, “The first one”, you would be right. One big reason why conflict avoidance doesn’t work is because it leaves you with a way bigger, nastier mess to clean up later.

If you really want to understand something, do you tend to want more or less information on the subject? What a stupid, cheeky question that is, of course you want more information, because more information leads to a better understanding. The inverse is also true: having less information leads to a worse understanding, or dare I say, mis-understanding.

Your relationship and the stuff you have conflict about is no exception to this. And guess what rare and unexpected gift conflict offers you: the opportunity to gather useful information that could very well help resolve a fight - or even prevent future ones! Think of conflict as the process of working through a problem, and when you avoid it, you close the door to that opportunity. This leaves you stuck with assumptions that are probably not super warm and fuzzy toward your better half, and probably not entirely accurate. So if you like feeling stuck, resentful and perpetually a lil to a lot angry, avoiding conflict is a super effective way of keeping you there.

How conflict avoidance hurts your romantic connection

I could probably rattle off 100 more reasons why avoiding conflict screws over your relationship, but the last big one we’re going to cover in this video is the fact that it murders your connection. If you think of the problems in your relationship like junk, and conflict as the process of cleaning that shit up, the more you avoid dealing with issues, the more shit piles up. That shit takes up space, and over time it ends up displacing the good in your relationship, like feelings of fondness and care for one another (or hot, sexy attraction). This leaves you with a pile of stank ass resentment a mile high, and like I said earlier, that’s adding crap to the original issue, making it that much harder to work through.

Now here’s another cheeky little question for you: when you’re carrying around resentment, do you think that makes you more chill and easy going or more of a snapcase? If you guessed option B, you’re a goddamn genius! There’s a direct pipeline that runs from conflict avoidance, to resentment, to freaking out over small stuff because you feel so fucking pissed off inside all the time. Want to break free from that miserable cycle? There’s only one way: You both need to be willing to put it all on the table in a healthy, constructive way, and work through your shit.

If you’re sitting there like, “Throw us a bone, Laura! How the hell do we actually do that without the conversation devolving into a dumpster fire?” We got you! Check out our awesome online course SMART Conflict for Couples. Starting with the basics of healthy communication, Will and I walk you through everything you need to deal with conflict like pros, and nothing that you don’t.

I know conflict is hard and totally not fun, but a tense, mediocre relationship is worse. Tell me in the comments if I’m wrong!