I often hear people say "we are fighting almost all the time." For couples that perceive that they are fighting all the time, they feel very low relationship satisfaction. If I ask a different question how many fights do you have in a week, they may say something like two or three. The actual time that they are spent arguing, is normally somewhere around five minutes to 45 minutes. If we say they fight three times a week for 45 minutes, that actually only works out to two hours and 15 minutes of their week that they spend arguing, which is much less than the total hours in a week. The reason why they perceived that they are fighting all the time is because of how long it takes them to recover from an argument. This causes the effects of the argument last days, which normally spills over into the next argument, and this is where real relationship dissatisfaction comes from. So a goal to improve relationship satisfaction, is helping the couple recover faster from the arguments. Here's a simple technique that can help couples recover from an argument faster.
Technique: when a couple is not fighting it is helpful to talk about how they can recover from the argument sooner, and if they commit to one another to be able to give a statement that shows love and wanting this argument to not cause problems between them. This statement is given about 45 minutes after an argument finishes, which allows for both partners to come down from the argument and calm down by themselves. During that 45 minutes rather than thinking and dwelling upon who is right why one position is more important than the other, rather trying to work through the emotions, identifying how the other partner might feel the way they do, and how they could resolve the argument. After 45 minutes the statement that is given is a repair attempt. The repair attempt should be short, and not emphasize why you might feel justified for what happened, rather it should focus on conveying love and giving a statement such as "I don't like it when we argue, I love you and I want things to be better between us. I still feel angry, but I'm trying to work through these things. Above all else I love you and that's the most important thing of all."
At this time after such a statement has been given, each partner may feel prepared to talk through their feelings to come to a better resolve concerning the argument. If both people are prepared to talk about it at this time, they may want to do an activity together, which may not require much interaction like watching a movie, but by doing something together, it says that your partner is more important, then the issues you argue about. This also helps both partners to calm down and be more receptive to resolving the problem at another time if the problem needs to be resolved.
