Conflict styles in relationships: which pairings clash

Hannah wants it settled right now. Daniel glances at his phone, says "I am not discussing this while you are this worked up" and goes out to put the bins away. He comes back twenty minutes later. She has assembled three more arguments in the meantime and he has decided not to answer a single one.

From the outside it looks like a row about the washing-up, about money, or about a visit from his parents. Underneath it runs something far more regular. Hannah pushes because Daniel goes quiet. Daniel goes quiet because Hannah pushes. Each of them knows only their own half of the loop, and inside that half they both have perfectly sensible reasons.

The demand-withdraw pattern: something you both build

The American psychologist Andrew Christensen described this pattern and, together with Christopher Heavey, began measuring it systematically in real couples in the nineties. It carries the name demand-withdraw, and the mechanics are uncomfortably simple. One partner opens the topic, asks for a change, presses or criticises. The other closes the topic, changes the subject, soothes, or stops talking altogether.

The more doggedly one keeps pressing, the more reliably the other retreats. And the deeper the second one retreats, the more urgently the first one presses. Neither of those two moves is illogical. Hannah raises her voice because she reads silence as proof that the other person does not care. Daniel walks off because he reads a raised voice as the opening of something that will not end well.

Here is the part couples usually miss: the pattern is a property of the pair, not a fault in one of you. If Hannah lived with someone who brought up hard topics unprompted, she would never have learned to press. If Daniel lived with someone who let things slide, he would have no reason to disappear into the garage. Research on this pattern has long linked it to lower relationship satisfaction, and that holds for both partners, not only for the one complaining out loud.

Christensen and his colleagues also showed that the roles are not nailed down. The demanding position usually falls to whoever wants the current state of things to change, because the other one has no reason to raise the subject at all. Once the conversation moves to something he wants changed, the positions often swap, and the one who was pressing last time is suddenly the one backing away. In other words, silence need not be a character trait. It is often a response to whatever is on the table right now.

Who occupies which position more often also matters. John Gottman, watching couples in his research, described the withdrawal he calls stonewalling as a move men reached for more readily. That is far from universal, and there are plenty of relationships where the woman leaves the room and the man keeps pressing. Can you recall the last argument at your house that never reached an ending? Who pushed, and who backed off?

Why what draws us in later wears us down

Early in a relationship this very difference tends to be an asset. What Hannah liked about Daniel was that nothing rattled him, that next to him she felt the world would not collapse over one misunderstanding. What drew Daniel in was that Hannah named things out loud and let nothing sit and fester.

A few years later the same sentences read differently. "He is so calm" turns into "nothing gets through to him". "She is so alive" turns into "she always has something to discuss". The behaviour has stayed exactly the same. What changed is the label you put on it.

The reason is mundane. Until you share a mortgage, a child and a division of the housework, there is nothing to hold difficult conversations about, so the differing styles have nowhere to show up. As soon as decisions arrive that cannot be postponed, each of you reaches for what you know. One reaches for pressure, the other for the door.

Different styles do not break a relationship on their own. Trouble starts when they harden into roles nobody steps out of, and when the way you fight becomes so fixed that both of you can play it out in advance. What separates ordinary arguments in a relationship from the ones that genuinely damage it is a subject of its own.

Conflict styles in a couple: which combinations grind

The ways people handle a dispute can be described with two questions. How hard do you push for what you want (assertiveness) and how much do you take the other person's needs into account (cooperativeness). That layout produces the dual-concern model, sketched out in management psychology by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton and developed later by Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin. Five positions come out of it: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating.

None of those five is a personality label. They are ways of behaving that shift with the situation, with the other party, and with how tired you are. You probably behave differently with your boss than you do at home. A closer description of how the individual conflict resolution styles show up and when each one earns its place is in a separate guide.

In a couple, though, the combination is more interesting than any single style. The overview below covers the four that counsellors run into most often.

Collaborating and compromising are missing from that table on purpose. Those two positions cause no trouble in a couple by themselves. The trouble comes from pairing them with the extremes. Anyone looking for a compromise with a partner who competes soon works out that "half and half" means their own half every time. And anyone who wants a thorough joint conversation about every topic with someone who avoids will mostly get a nod and a quick move to another activity.

Most people, on top of that, do not have one style but a primary and a secondary one. The second shows up under pressure: someone who normally looks for a compromise may drop into competing when exhausted, or into silence instead. This is exactly why couples often cannot even agree on a description of their own argument. Each of them mainly remembers what the other one did.

When your partner avoids conflict and will not change anything

The ideal scenario has the two of you sitting down and agreeing on a new approach. Reality tends to look different. One of you reads about relationships, the other refuses to discuss it because "there is no problem". The good news is that the spiral needs both sides in order to keep spinning. Change one of them and the other has nothing to grip.

If you are the one pressing

Your job is not to give up the topic. It is to swap pressure for time and safety, because a withdrawing partner is not responding to the content but to the intensity. A few things that work more often than repeating your argument at higher volume:

• flag the topic in advance and let the other person pick when you sit down to it
• one topic per conversation, even when five of them are on offer
• start with what you need instead of listing what the other one got wrong
• give the conversation an end point you both know about, half an hour say
• a break is not a refusal as long as it comes with an agreed return

The hardest part is usually sitting through the silence that follows your sentence. A withdrawing partner needs a longer run-up before starting to speak, and if you fill it with another argument, you confirm that speaking is pointless.

If you are the one withdrawing

Walking away from an escalating row is a legitimate move. The body switches to alert at moments like that, and in that state arguments are not heard, only deflected. A break lasting a few dozen minutes often does more than an hour of wrangling.

The difference between a healthy break and an escape is a single piece of information: when, not whether. "There is no point talking about this" spins the spiral up. "I cannot handle it right now, let us sit down to it at nine" stops it, but only if nine actually happens. Miss the slot twice and the other side will stop believing you faster than you would expect.

When a partner refuses to argue and still expects things to sort themselves out, indifference is rarely what lies behind it. It is usually a defence learned back when conflict in their surroundings did not end well. That does not make it work, but it does change how it can be handled.

What to avoid on both sides

One trap lies in wait for readers of texts like this one. Naming the pattern is an invitation to use it as ammunition: "that is exactly the withdrawing I was reading about". At that moment a description turns into an accusation, and the other side rejects it along with the whole idea. Talking about your own half is more useful, because you can admit to that without losing anything.

The second trap is timing. The pattern cannot be dissected in the middle of a row, when you are both fired up and mostly hearing tone. A quiet evening, a walk or a drive somewhere work better than attempting a conversation about the conversation ten minutes after a slammed door.

How to find out which styles you have at home

Guessing your partner's style from memory is unreliable. We recall our own behaviour with its reasons attached and the other person's behaviour without them, so they come out looking worse than they actually were. Putting two independent views side by side is more useful.

That is what our conflict style test is for: 30 questions, around four minutes, and the outcome is a primary and a secondary style plus a position on the assertiveness by cooperativeness map. Each of you can take it separately and compare the results afterwards. What tends to matter more than the results themselves is the conversation over them, above all the question of whether you recognise yourself in the description even when you are worn out.

There is one thing not to expect from it: a verdict on which of you is doing it wrong. What comes out is two different strategies that fit together in some situations and set each other off in others. The value only appears once you both name your own half of the spiral.

Daniel and Hannah did not agree to swap temperaments. They agreed on one sentence that either of them is allowed to use: "I want to talk about this, but not now. Nine o'clock?" For twelve years of shared life that sounds almost comically small. So far it is holding.