Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: Over the weekend, I spoke to a friend of a friend – a wife who was at the end of her rope. She told me that she and her husband were only interacting these days by fighting. She said that she honestly felt like she was living in a “war zone.” She worried about the effect of this fighting on her kids. She did not want to continue to live this way.

Still, she had to admit that she still loved her husband, and she felt pretty strongly that he still loved her. They were sometimes affectionate with each other when they “made up” after their fights. But, there was no doubt that there was way too much tension in the air. The wife wanted to know if I thought she should divorce her husband to put a stop to all of the fighting and tension. I’ll share my thoughts in the following article.

Getting A Divorce Versus Fighting All The Time: To start the discussion off, I asked the wife very directly if she wanted a divorce. She did not even have to think about it. She gave me a very definitive “no,” but then quickly prefaced it with “But I don’t want to continue to live with all of this fighting either.”

There’s no denying that constant fighting is a very detrimental environment in which to raise a family. This sort of pressure cooker environment is not conducive to anyone’s mental health. Plus, the children are growing up witnessing a relationship in which arguing, belittling, and raising voices is the way that folks work out their problems. 

This was certainly not the example that the wife wanted to set. She wanted to show her children a positive way to get their points across and to negotiate their wants and needs. And, she was very upset to see her children exhibiting aggressive and angry behavior.

So, it’s pretty clear that constant fighting is detrimental to everyone in the house. No one can deny this. But, having divorced parents is not always a great alternative either. The wife’s parents were divorced, and she still felt the void and the sadness that followed her parents’ divorce, even as a grown woman. She told me that seeing her father’s truck drive away from her family home is probably the most persuasive memory that she has from her childhood, and it saddened her to think that she might be headed to a similar place with her own children. But, she could not see a way out of either problem.

Stopping The Cycle Of Fighting To Prevent The Impending Divorce: I asked her whether she had ever focused on trying to improve the fighting or the combative way that the two of them interacted. She told me that she had and that sometimes things got briefly better, but they almost always reverted back to their old ways eventually.

After discussing this for a little while, it became pretty clear that the two of them were mostly fighting over the same few topics over and over again. And, because nothing ever got solved for good, both parties were becoming increasingly frustrated and hopeless. So the fights escalated and took on a more negative tone over time.

Another factor in this cycle of behavior was that the fights were becoming very commonplace in their home. This had become the normal way that they interacted and expressed their feelings. Eventually, they both almost begin to feed off of this. It became part of their routine that one person would push, and then the other would push back, and so on over and over again.

Obviously, the first step toward breaking this cycle was to change the way that the wife responded to the husband’s little barbs and pushes. See, I’ve learned from my own experience that the wife had to accept that she could not control her husband’s behavior. She could not really shame, force, or guilt him into changing. This decision had to come solely from him. This decision was much more likely to come if the environment began to become more supportive and less combative.

The wife felt very strongly that if the two of them could solve the issues that were coming up over and over again, then the fighting would become less common. This was certainly possible, but here are some flaws with that thinking. 

First, they had tried to work through these issues for years, so what was going to be so different this time? Second, even if they did “solve” these hot-button issues, other stressors would always come up. This is just real life. So, they likely needed to learn new ways to negotiate and compromise to ensure long-term success – and the wife could begin this process by focusing on herself.

There were many considerations to this, but it helps to break it into smaller chunks. First, it helps to break up the cycle that the fighting would typically take. When you feel the urge to lash out, instead take out a pad of paper and write down the issue in one sentence. 

The tendency of many couples is to “pile on” the complaints when they become angry at each other so that one issue would give rise to several issues.

Give yourself at least an hour from when you write down the issue to when you bring it up. This would give things time to calm down and it forces you to focus on the most important issue.

Next, you can change the way you set up when you’re going to talk about. The next time your husband wants to start the same old fight, calmly and directly say that this topic often got them into trouble and started a cycle of fighting. Try to delay it. Ask if you can discuss it when the kids are in bed. This allows things to be more calm due to the delay. 

When it’s time to discuss it, lay your cards on the table and remember that one sentence. There is nothing wrong with telling him that you are troubled by the fighting and want to stop this. You are not denying the problems, but trying to break the destructive cycle so that the issue becomes much more manageable as you eventually no longer have two angry and resistant people who were unable to compromise.

Focus on what you wrote and the card and only that. That way, you are able to really and truly tackle one problem at a time and will no longer have the same old fight that never gets solved.

If you solve the issues you fight over methodically, then there is no need to get a divorce because you won’t be expressing your continuous frustration in the form of fights.