10 tips to heal and move forward in your relationship after a fight.
No two human beings are wired exactly the same and that is why it is completely normal for people in relationships of all kinds to disagree, argue, and fight. In fact, research indicates that regular arguments are a recipe for a stronger emotional intimacy.
The survey done to make this conclusion included several couples who have been married for several decades and they concur that disagreeing from time to time has helped them to straighten out issues before they become compound.
This means that while you may have found your soul mate, a smooth-sailing relationship with no arguments or disagreements could be a ticking bomb waiting to go off.
That said, the survey also stresses that how you handle your fights as a couple is equally important. ‘Good fighting’ is constructive and it works towards building a healthy relationship while ‘bad fighting’ can make things worse.
Sometimes though, you may find yourself in that nasty fight that can shake your own resolve to work things out to the core. This shouldn’t deter you from trying.
If you still want to repair your relationship after a fight. Below is all the information you need to nudge you in the right direction.
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Can A Relationship Get Back To Normal After A Bad Fight?
A relationship can recover from a big fight as long as both parties are willing to acknowledge their role in the fight and work towards finding a solution.
Depending on the severity of the cause of the fight and how soon it is addressed, the time it takes for relationships to resume normalcy after fighting can vary from one couple to another.
Notably, fighting is a sign that you care enough to want to be heard, understood, and probably come to a place where the two of you see eye to eye.
What to Avoid After a Heated Argument
After a serious argument, the last thing you want to do is make things worse if you have the slightest hope of healing your relationship. While you are allowed to feel everything from anger, guilt, and disappointment, here are a few things you should avoid to ensure that you and your partner don’t drift even further apart.
Bringing Up Past fights
Did you know that you are more likely to focus more on negative emotions than positive ones? According to Psychologist Rick Hanson, the tendency to dwell more on negative experiences is ‘built-in’ in humans since time immemorial. This is referred to as negativity bias
In relationships, negativity bias can prompt you to keep bringing up past fights you have had with your partner every time you disagree. This brings another emotional load into the current argument, sparks negative memories, and can blow the fight out of proportion.
Resentment is also common in such a situation where you resent your partner for repeatedly offending you and they resent you for holding onto past mistakes. This is hardly the motivation for making up.
In order to keep moving forward, work towards solving one issue at a time and in this case, the issue at hand.
Making Threats
If you have decided that you’ve had enough of the relationship after a big fight, then you should probably end things.
However, if what you are looking for is to be felt, heard, and understood with the hope of a better relationship, threatening your partner with breaking up, divorce, withholding sex, or moving out among other threats every time you fight does not help in healing the relationship.
On the contrary, you might just have opened your relationship to insecurity, emotional abuse, loss of credibility, mistrust, and miscommunication.
Inviting a Third Party without your Partner’s Consent
The expression that 3 is a crowd is right at home when it comes to relationships, and even worse when a big fight is involved.
There’s, of course, a chance that sharing your relationship woes with a trusted friend, a family member, or a colleague can help you figure things out but remember these people are most likely loyal to you and can be partial in offering you relationship advice.
Further, trust can be broken and you can’t be so sure of the motive behind a third party. According to Psychologist Roni Beth Tower, engaging a third party in your relationship might be opening it to betrayal, misguidance, conflict, doubt, competition, and public exposure, not to mention how your significant other may react upon finding out.
Tips to Heal a Relationship after a Terrible Fight
As earlier stated, how you handle things greatly determines what happens to a relationship after a fight. There’s no magical pill to make it all go away but if you are willing to reconcile with your significant other and repair your relationship, the tips below are a good place to start.
1- Take a Breather
Immediately after a nasty fight, you are probably raging with anger, hurt, and other negative emotions. Sometimes, name-calling and other heat-of-the-moment utterances are involved which can make you feel regret or guilt.
In this state, you cannot see things clearly or even think rationally which is why a break for both of you is a good idea. It helps you to calm down, organize your own thoughts, and be in the right place to have an objective conversation.
The breather is also a good time to reflect on yourself, your reaction, and things within you that could have triggered or escalated the fight. This break shouldn’t take long; anything from a few minutes to a day or two should suffice to avoid giving each other the silent treatment.
2- Give your Relationship Priority
Giving yourselves space shouldn’t transform into neglect of your relationship. For this reason, it is important to show your partner just how important they are to you and how willing you are to work out issues between the two of you sooner rather than later.
My point? Don’t use the time after the fight to take the long-overdue holiday to the Bahamas or to pick an extra shift at work in the name of giving yourself space! This might give your partner the impression that you don’t care.
Don’t get me wrong here; you don’t have to walk on eggshells around your partner or stop living on their account. You just need to make a little effort to show that regardless of what you are going through, the relationship still matters.
3- Express Your Feelings Honestly
Once you are calm, you can now engage in a reconciliation talk. Extend an olive branch by inviting your partner to talk. Notably, making the first move doesn’t make you the weaker or guilty person; it is an expression that you care and are willing to mend things.
Being careful not to restart the argument or place blame, express your feelings about your partner’s actions before, during, and after the argument to help your partner understand where you are coming from. It also helps to express what you would rather they do instead.
4- Actively Listen and Try to get the other person’s Perspective
Active listening requires more than hearing what your partner is saying. It involves paying attention to both verbal and non-verbal expressions, reflecting their sentiments to make them feel heard and understood, being patient, and withholding judgment to encourage them to speak out.
This will open you to your partner’s feelings as well as help you see things from their perspective rather than dismissing them. In addition, your partner opening up can help you realize your role in the argument.
5- Acknowledge your Contribution to the Fight and Apologize
This is a great step towards rebuilding your emotional connection. What did you gather from speaking out and listening to your partner? Did you start the fight? Even if you didn’t, did you probably react in a way that further aggravated the fight? What if you didn’t lash out?
All these questions point to one thing; it takes two to tango and whether and you started the fight or not, both of you are responsible in one way or another. So, can you accept responsibility for the part that you played and apologize?
This is not the easiest part of the conflict! And research published by the European Journal of Social Psychology explains why. Apparently, refusing to apologize makes people feel greater self-esteem and heightens their sense of power and control
Further research, however, indicates that this is a short-term benefit that is also detrimental to reconciliation efforts. To your partner though, acknowledging mistakes and apologizing projects you as just human and a person not only prone to mistakes but also ready to make amends.
6- Forgive
Forgiveness works for you as an individual and for your relationship after a fight. It improves your health emotionally, physically, and psychologically. When there is forgiveness in a relationship, emotions start changing from negative to positive.
It is worth noting that forgiving your partner doesn’t mean approving or excusing their wrongdoing. You won’t forget how much they hurt you either. It just means you are willing to let go of the offenses and focus on rebuilding your relationship.
There’s more; forgiveness is a gradual process so don’t expect to feel instantaneously great the moment you forgive.
7- Get to The Core of the Fight
More often than not, a big fight is a symptom of a bigger issue like our fear, insecurity, perspective, and opinion about certain aspects of life and our relationship. Some of these can be sentiments you brought with you into the relationship. If you make up after this one fight without going to the core, you have just postponed the problem for another day.
For example, are you really mad that your boyfriend is spending too much time out with the boys or is it a controlling behavior on your part? Do you really feel like your partner puts their work before you or are you craving more intimacy?
Identifying and addressing the main issues will help you see eye to eye, appreciate your differences, create a deeper connection, and reduce the chances of fighting over the same issue in the future.
8- Come up With A Solution
Getting to the core of your argument is a good doorway to discovering things you might not have known or realized about each other. Acknowledging that you are two independent and different people who have chosen to beat the odds to be together can help you chart the way forward.
Relationship Consultant James Creighton recommends a 5-step solution that entails:
- Agreement by both parties to solve the issue
- Coming up with several solutions
- Concurring on solutions that favor both parties
- Agreeing on how to execute the solution
- Settling on a way to assess the success of the solution
That said, some solutions will work while others may not. If yours fails to work, the advice is to go back to the drawing board and to come up with a new one.
9- Try to Keep Doing Things you Do As a Couple
Every couple has their rituals or things they do together, whether it is working out, grocery shopping, having meals, or eating out. However, it is perfectly understandable if you don’t instantly fall into your old self after the fight and you shouldn’t have to pretend if you still feel some residual emotions.
Nevertheless, this shouldn’t warrant a significant change in your usual couple rituals. To avoid projecting a cold shoulder treatment, let your partner know how you feel. This way, you can work together towards getting your relationship on track at an agreeable pace.
In reality, the things that you do together will serve as a reminder of what really defines your relationship and help you reconnect.
10- Get Help
If you have trouble making headway despite trying several solutions, or you keep arguing about the same or new issues, you should consider getting help from someone outside the marriage. Preferably, a professional who specializes in relationship issues.
Marriage counseling or relationship therapy allows you to get help from someone who can maintain an impartial stance while providing you with the tools that you need to achieve a healthy relationship.
Conclusion
Most couples fight from time to time and so do people in other kinds of relationships. However, not every relationship recovers from a big fight. Recovery requires parties involved to acknowledge both the conflict and their role in it in order to start the healing process without further escalating the fight.
Combined with willpower, the tips above give you a good shot at being on the same page with your significant other, healing your relationship, and rekindling your intimacy.