Conflict in Relationships: Why It’s UNHEALTHY to Avoid Conflict in Your Relationship + FREE Relationship Conflict Decoder

It’s never fun when conflict arises in your relationship. It feels unpleasant, it can be uncomfortable, and it can make you worry about the future of your relationship or your bond with your partner.

Plus, as I shared in my last post, conflict can negatively affect you and your relationship in a number of ways.

That’s why you might try to avoid conflict in your relationship.

For example, instead of having a conversation with your partner after they forgot to do the laundry yet again, you might just keep your mouth shut and do it yourself.

Or when your partner asks if their friends can come over on Sunday for the fourth week in a row, you might agree even though you were really looking forward to enjoying some time just as a couple.

Initially, avoiding conflict can seem like a good strategy. Because on the surface, it might seem like everything is a-okay between you and your partner. After all, there are no overt arguments, disagreements, or emotionally charged conversations.

But below the surface, it might be a different story.

Because avoiding conflict doesn’t make the underlying issue go away. It just ensures that the conflict continues to simmer at a low level and that your needs continue to go unmet.

What’s more, though, is that avoiding conflict can also set the stage for MORE conflict in your relationship.

How?

That’s exactly what I’m going to dive into in this blog post.

Keep reading below to learn WHY avoiding conflict with your partner is bad for your relationship.

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What Is Conflict Avoidance?

Before we talk about the dangers of avoiding conflict in your relationship, let’s chat about what it actually means to do it.

When you avoid conflict in your relationship, it means that you respond to a problem or issue in your relationship by deciding to NOT deal with it.

Here are some common ways that you might avoid conflict in your relationship:

• ignoring the problem: you pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and avoid discussing it so that you don’t have to deal with it.
• changing the subject: when your partner initiates a conversation about an issue or problem, you change the subject of the conversation.
• shutting down or stonewalling: you end any conversation about conflict by either refusing to respond or walking away.

Avoiding conflict can help you escape uncomfortable feelings or fear about conflict in the short term.

But over time, avoiding conflict can negatively affect the health of your relationship in a number of ways.

Here’s how:

It Creates Resentment

Let’s go back to that example of your partner forgetting to do the laundry again. If you decide not to have a conversation with your partner about it, you’ll be left in a situation where your partner might continue to forget to do the laundry each week. And you’ll have to keep doing it for them, even though your plate is already full of household chores.

Initially, it might truly feel easier to just keep your mouth shut and do the laundry yourself without saying anything to your partner. But over time, there’s a good chance that you’ll start to feel resentful. You’ll continuously think about how you have so much on your plate and barely any free time as a result. And despite this, your partner isn’t pulling their weight by doing one of the household chores that they agreed to do. To put it simply, your need to have a fair division of labor at home isn’t being met.

The problem with resentment is that it doesn’t just make you bitter about the primary issue at hand—the fact that your partner doesn’t pull their weight by remembering to do the laundry. It can affect your perception of your partner and relationship in general and make you focus on all of the things that your partner “does wrong.”

As you can imagine, focusing on all of the ways that your partner disappoints you isn’t exactly a recipe for a happy, healthy relationship. And over time, it can make you feel unfulfilled in the relationship and disconnected from your partner.

It Strains Communication

Avoiding conflict can also weaken your relationship by straining communication between you and your partner.

For example, if you’re resentful that you keep having to do the laundry for your partner, you might avoid conversations with them in general.

Why?

Because you might worry that you won’t be able to hide how bitter you feel—even if the two of you talk about something unrelated. And if you can’t hide how bitter you feel and your partner realizes that you’re angry, that’s going to create conflict, which is the very thing that you’re trying to avoid!

In addition, if you get to the point where you’re chronically annoyed with your partner, you might feel unmotivated or uninterested in talking to them in general. Depending on how annoyed or resentful you feel, you might even avoid being around your partner because you can’t stand being in the same space as them.

It Weakens Intimacy

As I mentioned in my post on how to tell if your relationship has emotional intimacy, intimacy is when you truly feel seen by your partner and truly see them in return. The only way that you and your partner can feel seen by one another is if you open up to each other on a regular basis and communicate about your needs, passions, dreams, and concerns.

How does avoiding conflict fit into this?

If you’re not openly discussing your concerns about your relationship with your partner, your partner isn’t going to be able to truly know you and see you. Your partner won’t really know how you’re feeling, what’s on your mind, and how you’d like things to be different in the relationship. Similarly, you won’t know how your partner feels, how they see a particular situation, and what they would like to be different in the relationship.

It’s hard to truly be close to someone if you spend most of your time discussing superficial topics with them instead of the things that are important to them and critical for meeting their needs and helping them be healthy and happy. So by avoiding conflict in your relationship, you also limit the intimacy in your relationship.

As I mentioned above, conflict avoidance sets the stage for feelings of resentment and poorer communication between you and your partner. And as I’m sure you can guess, it’s tough to build or maintain a close, loving relationship with someone when you feel bitter toward them or aren’t communicating with them openly and frequently.

It Leads to Loneliness

When intimacy is limited or missing from your relationship because of conflict avoidance, it doesn’t just weaken your bond with your partner. It can also leave you feeling lonely.

In a relationship, you feel loved and satisfied when you feel heard, understood, cared for, and closely bonded to someone. So when you don’t open up to your partner about what’s bothering you and what your concerns are about your relationship, it can leave you feeling lonely. You might feel that your partner doesn’t “get” you or know what you’re struggling with. And you might feel distant or detached from them.

When you feel detached from your partner, it can only make connecting with them feel even harder. After all, it’s tough to feel safe and comfortable about opening up to someone that you feel increasingly disconnected from. And, of course, the more you feel disconnected from your partner and potentially withdraw from them, the weaker your bond will get and the lonelier you may feel.

It Creates Unhealthy Relationship Patterns

Lastly, avoiding conflict can create an unhealthy dynamic in your relationship, especially the pursue-withdraw pattern.

The pursue-withdraw pattern develops when you and your partner have incompatible ways of approaching conflict. Specifically, one of you deals with conflict by trying to connect and communicate whereas the other tries to deal with conflict by withdrawing to protect the relationship (avoidance).

The problem is that the more the withdrawer retreats and avoids communication, the more desperate the pursuer becomes to connect. Of course, this desperation to connect only triggers more distress in the withdrawer, who simply pulls away further in response.

As you can see, this relationship dynamic creates a vicious cycle that can cause conflict to spiral out of control. It only amplifies the stress that you and your partner experience in the face of conflict and makes it harder to address the conflict in a way that allows both of you to meet your needs.

Learn to Manage Conflict Instead

You don’t ever have to get to the point where conflict feels completely comfortable in your relationship.

But because trying to steer clear of conflict can weaken your bond with your partner, make it harder to get your needs met, and set the stage for MORE conflict, it’s important to NOT avoid it.

So what should you do instead?

Learn how to manage conflict effectively.

One of the big reasons why people try to avoid conflict is because they’re worried that addressing conflict means that they have to be confrontational with their partner.

But you know what?

Communicating with your partner to address a conflict doesn’t have to mean being confrontational.

In From Conflict to Ultimate Love, my 6-week online program, I teach you how to manage conflict from a place of love and understanding WITHOUT being bossy or confrontational.

The result?

You can put an end to the constant bickering, frustration, or resentment in your relationship and spend more time enjoying each other’s company and the life you’re building together.

To get the complete road map for managing triggers and conflict in your relationship with less stress and more success, join me inside From Conflict to Ultimate Love.

Unsure about how much you might be approaching conflict in your relationship in unhealthy ways?

Fill out my FREE Relationship Conflict Decoder.

It’ll help you understand whether you and your partner typically approach conflict in ways that can strengthen your relationship or in ways that can push the two of you apart.

And finally, if you haven’t done so already, follow me on my Facebook page Vera Velini – The Assertive Happiness Coach. That way, you’ll be among the first to hear about new blog posts, resources, and courses.  

Until next time!

Vera

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