What makes us squabble

A negative episode

When it comes to human and romantic relationships, there is a major cause for mundane quarrels and daily little conflicts. It has nothing to do with real world reasons for concern. It has everything to do with our emotional attitude and our automatic behavioral responses.

I had to find it out myself. I’ve been on holiday in Croatia and one morning I found myself in a confrontational talk with my wife about breakfast. Each of us expected something different from the morning. She wanted to head straight for the beach. I wanted to take a shortcut to a nearby restaurant for breakfast. The result: she didn’t get any meal, and I had mine eating alone and frustrated in a gorgeous Croatian bay, sulking and wondering about what has just happened.

Irrational layer of human mind

I could write a lot about personal desires, expectations and intentions, but what I discovered from this small, silly episode is that there is a true emotional layer in human mind which is utterly irrational and represents the real cause for most of our inner suffering and stupidity. People’s miserable behaviour and reactions have everything to do with feelings, and nearly nothing with rational thought. In fact, afterthoughts give our emotional actions in the moment a retrospective rational disguise which isn’t real after all. We just end up rationalizing our negative emotional experience to a point of exaggeration, blaming others for our state of the mind, instead of focusing on our own inner constitution. Does it sound familiar?

Dynamics of a quarrel

The real reason why couples struggle and face conflicts with each other is negative emotionality that rolls over us like an avalanche from time to time when some unimportant annoyance or discomfort overcomes us in a moment we least expect it. The experience that follows is not rational, but almost entirely emotional, meaning that you don’t have a particular logical reason for that irritation. The fact that a negative feeling crept into our mind is the reason why the conflict escalates and continues to persist. Any attempt to rationalize a quarrel is an unadmitted failure that makes things only worse - it hardens the positions and feeds the mutual accusations.

That’s why couples end up “talking out” the issues while diving ever deeper into the blaming trap. Everyone feels right in the end which is a dead end resulting in unnecessary suffering that we occasionally cause to each other.

Solution to an argument

So, what’s the right way to handle an interpersonal conflict? What’s the right way of dissolving confrontations - or at least trying not to prolong them?

Step one is to acknowledge that a quarrel is for the most part an emotional phenomenon, not a logical one. Pure emotionality is irrational - which is the reason why we end up quarreling about silly things in the first place. A truly logical, rational thinking would never lead to such emotional escalations.

Step two is to gain personal inner strength to quietly sit through an inner emotional tension without adding to it. If we feel any negativity, feel the impulse to escalate an argument, to make accusations and “talk things out“, the best thing you can really do is to just shut up and immediately let the emotions calm down first. However, and this needs to be admitted, to do that requires real personal strength to remain calm and quiet in a heated moment. It takes a good half an hour for the emotions to cool down before any rational conversation is even possible. That’s why you need to wait out that inner grace period before you can effect any genuine resolution.

By now it should become clear that when you’re confronted with any negative feeling for no particular reason, the best thing to do is to remain calm and say as little as possible. You don’t even believe half the things you would say under such negative pressure, so again: shut up and keep calm. After a short while you’ll start realizing that remaining silent only adds to your strength and integrity and completely starves out the undesired, negative emotion. That will make you feel even better because now you know that you haven’t added extra suffering to your partner whom you love after all.

Any negativity evaporates within less than an hour, just because you decide to remain silent and strong on the inside. In this way you’ll create more space in your mind for compassion, love and more understanding.

Practice of inner calmness

Next time when you find yourself in a mundane quarrel with your partner, just remind yourself that the reason for your negative reaction is an emotional impulse on your part and that any attempt to rationalize that to your partner and yourself only takes you further down on the path of self-delusion, making things only worse.

Secondly, and that’s the most important lesson here: practise inner calmness to endure negative vibrations in your mind until the fog of anger and fear lifts, making space for a nobler feeling and a clearer thought that you can show to your partner with your love, empathy and peace. That’s what you want to feel and express in the end, anyway. So, stop playing the accuser/victim role and empower yourself to be your better self.

Now, go and quarrel with each other with much peace, joy and love.