How to stop arguing with your wife about everything.

Marcus is thirty-six and has been in Singapore for three years. On Thursday night the argument is about the dishwasher. On Friday it is about his mother’s visit. On Saturday it is about the fact he checked his phone while she was talking. By Sunday they are arguing about how much they argue.

He says she is never happy. She says he never listens. Both are describing the same fifteen minutes from opposite ends.

The people here are composites, not clients. The pattern is the most common one I see in couples abroad, where two people with no family nearby and long working days become each other’s only witness, and every small failure lands with nobody else to absorb it.

01The dishwasher

The answer she gets, when you explain why the dishwasher was loaded correctly, is no. Not because you said no. Because you answered the subject and walked past the question.

02The one argument you keep having

Most couples have a single argument with a hundred subjects. Sue Johnson, whose work on couples underpins much of mine, describes it as a pursue-and-withdraw dance. One partner, often the wife, raises something because she wants contact and does not know how else to get it. The other, often the husband, hears criticism and defends, fixes, or goes quiet. She raises her voice to be heard. He withdraws further to keep the peace. Each is responding to the other’s worst moment and neither is getting what they came for.

Four things which get said in the kitchen, and the question underneath each one. Tap a card to turn it.

03The four moves which make it worse

04The ninety-second way to stop an argument

You will not stop arguments by never disagreeing. You stop them by changing what happens in the first ninety seconds, before either of you is fully in the dance.

Notice the heat. Jaw, chest, the urge to explain. This is the moment. Ten seconds later it is gone.

Say the real subject out loud. “I think we are about to have the dishwasher argument, and I do not think it is about the dishwasher.” Naming the dance interrupts it.

Ask what she needed. “What did you want from me when you said it?” Then wait. Do not fill the gap.

Repeat it back, without a but. “You wanted me to see how much you did today and I walked past it.” No defence, no explanation, no “but I…”.

Offer one thing. Not a plan. One thing, tonight. “Sit down. I will do the kitchen and then tell me about the call with your mum.”

Repeating what she said, accurately, without adding your side, is the one move which has no counter. There is nothing in it to argue with.

Kita Tabachka, relational therapist

05When you did not manage it: repair after

You will fail at this. Everyone does. The measure of a marriage is not how few fights it has but how quickly and how well the two people come back afterwards. John Gottman’s research on thousands of couples found repair attempts, not the absence of conflict, were the strongest predictor of couples who stayed together and stayed close.

“I went into defending last night and I did not hear you. Will you tell me again?” Make it the same day where possible, the next morning otherwise, and never in a text.

06When the subject is money, family, sex or the move

The last one deserves a whole conversation of its own rather than a hundred small ones. The page on expat relationship problems is where to start, and cross-cultural couples therapy covers families in two countries.

07When to get help

If you have both tried and the dance restarts within a day, if contempt has crept in on either side, sneering, eye-rolling, mockery, if one of you has stopped bothering to argue, or if the arguments have started to frighten either of you or the children, the pattern has outgrown a technique. Couples therapy for this is practical: we slow one argument down enough to see the dance, and we practise the ninety seconds in a room where nobody has to win.

I am trained in the Gottman approach and work mostly with couples and men abroad, in Dubai, Riyadh, Singapore and London. Couples join from the same sofa or from two countries. Couples online sessions in English cost £100 for 70 minutes. Individual sessions, if you want to work on your side of the dance first, cost £70 for 50 minutes.

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Written by

Kita Tabachka

I am a BACP-registered relational therapist. I work with individuals and couples, many of them living far from where they began, on relationship anxiety, attachment, intimacy and the strange business of building a self in a new country. The stories here are composites. The patterns are real. My writing is a door into the work, never a substitute for it.

More about my practice