[Anonymous]

My boyfriend and I have been dating for five years now, and are extremely serious about each other. We don’t have fights all that often, and when we do they don’t ever get heated enough for us to stop talking. But the way that we fight is what has been bothering me lately. I’m much more of a vocal person than him, and he thinks that we are an amazing couple… which makes him feel upset that we are even fighting at all.
I feel like he gets so caught up in the fact that we are in a fight at all that he doesn’t soak in what needs to be fixed or changed. I spend the majority of the conversation talking, and trying to get him to tell me what he feels about what I am saying or what he feels about the fight, but he is not the best with words so he either doesn’t have anything to say or doesn’t know how to word what he wants to say.
My problem is that I am a little too aggressive of a fighter. I need to let him get more words in, and I am hard to sway with my opinion, so he eventually gives up on saying anything because he says that I can never let him win, and it’s just pointless to even try. This makes me really upset… but the fight always ends the same. He is too concerned about just making sure the night ends on a happier note than actually fixing the problem, so if that means not listening to me and giving up the fight, that’s what happens.
Any advice?

[April Masini, your AskApril]

Men and women are different, and it’s very normal that you’re a lot more verbal and he isn’t interested in expressing himself in a fight with you. Don’t expect that to change. Accept that guys are different. But what you can change is your need to win. There’s a saying: Do you want to be right or happy? Because you can’t always be both. Make sure you’re not so invested in winning an argument that you lose sight of the bigger picture. Sometimes apologizing is the way to win. Sometimes backing down and knowing you’re right, but allowing the other person what they want instead, is winning. Look at the things you’re fighting about and decide if they’re really what’s bothering you. Sometimes a fight about who took out the garbage has nothing to do with the garbage and is really about some underlying feeling or problem.

[Member]

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