Fights, accusations and hostility in a close relationship are mostly the result of misunderstanding. If you had clashing personalities or bad chemistry you would not have been in a close relationship. If you realize that you will get much further in any close relationship. This is important so I wil try to explain it in another way as well.
We all know the fights that come from bad chemistry. You meet someone and for some incomprehensible reason you just do not get along. Whatever you try, it just doesn’t work. The person doesn’t believe you, doesn’t respect you, doesn’t like you and you feel like a total asshole in their presence. The next time you try even harder not to look like an asshole and the result is that you are so afraid of saying and doing the wrong thing that you make it even worse than the fist time around. That is bad chemistry and the solution is to give up and go on with your life. St Paul said you should live in peace with everybody but I can assure you that the only way of living in peace with such people are to avoid them altogether. This is not the kind of hostility, misunderstanding and tension I am referring to. What I am referring to is the same problem in a close relationship because you can work with those; you can work with them because the right chemistry is there.
In a relationship with bad chemistry you give up and go on with your life but in a relationship where the chemistry is right you have to work on the communication. We’ve talked about good communication, the importance of good listening and expressing yourself clearly and understandable, but there is still something missing. .
I am sure that most of you went through some kind of communication course. Courses like that teach you active listening, asking questions, paraphrasing, testing your assumptions and it is rather fun to take a test-drive with your new communication skills. It’s normally fun if there is no conflict, but the moment there is conflict you forget all about your new skills and you fight like before. If you have experienced this you are among the 99% of the population who realized that theory and practice are worlds apart. All the communication skills in the world won’t help you if you are in the middle of a fight..........they will help you later on when you try to puzzle out what happened. Communication skills do not help you to prevent fights; they help you to understand why there was a fight and how to deal with the fight. Communication skills help you understand one another when there is peace between you.
If you want to prevent fights you will have to live alone on an island because dealing with people will always lead to some kind of fight; if not now then without a doubt in future. Relationships is like riding a horse if you do not want to fall off then you should not get on and if you don’t fall a few times you will never learn how to ride. Apart from that I also want to share another piece of bad news about relationships; the stuff you fought about at the beginning is exactly the same as the stuff you will fight about for the rest of the relationship. Do you remember the fights your parents had; do you remember what they fought about? If you think back you will realize that they fought about the same things over and over again. A relationship is not working because there is no fights; it is working because you learn to deal with the fights. Show me a relationship without fights and I will show you a relationship that is doomed to failure. Because if they do not fight it is because one of the partners decided to give up and the next step after giving up is breaking up.
A successful relationship is not one without fights; it is one without communication and communication is by definition prone to misunderstanding, wrong presumptions, bad listening, poor expression and deep emotional combat. The trick is to know how to end a fight and how to make up, but that trick is a topic on its own.
This week's Cobrabite
by Brand Doubell
Brand Doubell
Cobrabites 
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