The 6 Signs Your Fights Have Become Unhealthy

Identifying these patterns is not about assigning blame. Often, these behaviors are learned responses from our past or desperate attempts to feel heard. The power comes from naming the pattern and then choosing a different, more connecting response. Here are six common signs that your arguments may be causing more harm than good.

Sign 1: Criticism and Contempt Have Replaced Complaints

A complaint is a specific statement about an action and its impact on you. A criticism is a global attack on your partner’s character. It often involves words like “you always” or “you never.”

A complaint sounds like: “I felt worried and a little forgotten when you didn’t text me that you were running late.”

A criticism sounds like: “You’re so selfish. You never think about how your actions affect me.”

Worse than criticism is contempt. This is criticism mixed with disgust, superiority, and disrespect. It can manifest as sarcasm, mockery, eye-rolling, or name-calling. Relationship research consistently shows that contempt is one of the most significant predictors of relationship breakdown. It communicates a deep-seated negativity that poisons the well of your connection.

Practical Step: Use Gentle “I-Statements.” Instead of launching an attack, frame your concern from your own perspective. This invites empathy rather than defensiveness. A simple formula is: “I feel [your emotion] when [specific, observable behavior] because [the impact on you or your need].” For example: “I feel anxious when the credit card bill is left unopened because I worry about our financial stability.”

Sign 2: Defensiveness Is Your Default Response

Defensiveness is an understandable reaction to feeling attacked. It’s a way to protect ourselves. However, in a conversation, it acts as an accelerant. When one partner is defensive, they are essentially saying, “The problem isn’t me, it’s you.” This can sound like making excuses, cross-complaining (“Well, you didn’t take out the trash!”), or playing the victim.

While it feels self-protective, defensiveness blocks all paths to resolution. It prevents you from hearing your partner’s perspective and invalidates their feelings, signaling that their concerns are not legitimate. It immediately turns the conversation into a battle where both sides are building walls instead of bridges.

Practical Step: Practice Reflective Listening. The antidote to defensiveness is to try to understand before trying to be understood. This doesn’t mean you have to agree. It simply means showing your partner you are hearing them. Try saying, “What I’m hearing you say is that you’re feeling overwhelmed and unsupported with the housework. Is that right?” This simple act can de-escalate tension and validate your partner’s experience, making space for a real conversation.

Sign 3: Stonewalling Shuts Down the Conversation

This sign directly addresses the common question, what is stonewalling in a relationship? Stonewalling is when one partner emotionally or physically withdraws from the interaction. It can look like giving the silent treatment, physically leaving the room without warning, or engaging in distracting activities like looking at a phone or turning on the TV during a difficult conversation. It’s a complete shutdown.

Often, the person stonewalling is experiencing extreme emotional flooding. They withdraw not to punish their partner, but because they are so overwhelmed they feel incapable of continuing. However, for the other partner, being stonewalled feels like hitting a brick wall. It’s profoundly invalidating and can feel like abandonment or a lack of care. This often causes them to escalate their bids for connection—talking louder, following the stonewaller—which in turn makes the flooded partner withdraw even more, creating a vicious cycle.

Practical Step: A Mutually Agreed-Upon “Time-Out.” A structured pause is completely different from stonewalling. It’s a collaborative tool for self-regulation. Agree on a signal—a word like “pause” or a simple hand gesture. The person calling the pause must promise to re-engage later. For example: “I am feeling too overwhelmed to talk about this productively. I need to take a 20-minute break to calm down. I promise we can come back to this at 8 PM tonight.” During the break, do something that soothes your nervous system: listen to music, take a short walk, or splash water on your face. This isn’t about avoidance; it’s about responsible de-escalation.

Sign 4: You Engage in “Kitchen-Sinking” and Scorekeeping

Does a small disagreement about who will walk the dog suddenly become a fight about every grievance from the past six months? That’s “kitchen-sinking”—throwing everything but the kitchen sink into one argument. It derails the conversation and makes the problem feel impossibly large and unsolvable. It’s overwhelming and ensures that nothing gets resolved.

Scorekeeping is its close cousin. This is when partners keep a mental tally of past wrongs, mistakes, and sacrifices. These “points” are then used as ammunition in future fights to prove who is more wronged, more tired, or more justified. It turns the relationship into a competition instead of a collaboration.

Practical Step: Practice “Topic Scoping.” Agree to stay on one specific topic at a time. If other issues come up, gently put them in a “parking lot” to discuss later. You can say, “That’s an important point, and I want to discuss it. But for the next 15 minutes, can we please focus only on making a plan for the weekend?” This discipline makes problems feel manageable and increases your chances of finding a solution for at least one thing.

Sign 5: There’s No Real Repair After the Fight

Even the healthiest couples have arguments that get out of hand. The difference is their ability to make a repair attempt. A repair attempt is any action that works to de-escalate tension and reconnect. It can be a genuine apology, a moment of humor that breaks the tension, a reassuring touch, or simply saying, “We’re getting off track. Let’s start over.”

In unhealthy cycles, arguments often don’t truly end. They just stop. This can lead to hours or days of cold silence, lingering resentment, or one person prematurely “giving in” just to end the hostility. Without a genuine repair, the emotional wound from the fight never heals, and the resentment builds, making the next conflict even more volatile.

Practical Step: Create a Repair Ritual. You don’t have to fully resolve the issue to repair the connection. Create a simple, low-pressure ritual to signal that despite the disagreement, you are still a team. It could be as simple as agreeing to hold hands for 60 seconds after a fight, or saying, “I know we’re still upset, but I love you.” The goal is to reaffirm the safety of the bond, even when a problem remains unsolved.

Sign 6: The Fights Are About Winning, Not Understanding

When you enter a disagreement, what is your primary goal? Is it to understand your partner’s perspective and find a mutually agreeable path forward? Or is it to prove that you are right and they are wrong? When fights become about winning, you both lose. Your partner is framed as an opponent to be defeated, not a teammate to collaborate with.

This mindset is often fueled by cognitive traps like mind reading (assuming you know your partner’s intentions) and all-or-nothing language (“You always do this!”). It prevents curiosity and empathy. This is where the concept of differentiation in relationships becomes crucial. Differentiation is the ability to hold onto your own sense of self, your own feelings, and your own perspective while staying emotionally connected to your partner, who has their own separate self, feelings, and perspective. Fights focused on “winning” destroy differentiation by demanding that one person’s reality must erase the other’s.

Practical Step: Use a “Needs vs. Offers” Framework. Shift from arguing over positions to uncovering underlying needs. Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left, each of you writes your core need in this situation (e.g., “To feel respected,” “To have more unstructured time”). On the right, write what you are willing to offer to help meet your partner’s need. This reframes the conflict from a battle to a collaborative problem-solving session.