How to Stop Fixing a Relationship That's Not Working

Before I describe what I believe is the most important shift we can make when dealing with a partner’s defensiveness and anger, I want to remind us of the strong conditioning we receive as women in our culture—what we’ve been taught to believe and, thus, the soil within which this shift must grow and be trusted.

From the time we're born, women are taught that our job is to take care of other people; our value and worth rest on our capacity to be helpful, selfless, and kind—in short, to make other people happy. We’re raised to feel responsible for everyone else’s okayness, and guilty if we can’t meet others' wants and needs. At the same time, we’re taught to be peacemakers and empaths, to smooth choppy relational waters, and keep everyone pleased.

This conditioning plays a strong part in why women respond to a partner’s anger the way we do. When our partner refuses to “hear” us, to empathize with the pain they’ve caused us, when they blame us for our experience, and emotionally attack us for “aggressing” them with our pain, our first instinct, often, is to (immediately) make everything OK, “win them back,” and, essentially, convince our partner that he should still love us—we won’t be “bad” again, won’t accuse him of doing something that wasn’t OK—for us. Our first response is usually to try to restore the bond no matter what, get things back to OK, no matter what the cost to ourselves. And so we bury our pain, abandon ourselves—our focus narrows and becomes singular: to scrub all conflict from the relational space.

The Role of Survival Instincts in Relationship Conflict

But underneath this behavior is profound fear, deeply wired into our nervous system. When we launch into “fawning” behavior, making things nice (when they're not nice), we’re operating from our deepest instinct—the survival instinct—and therefore must approach this tendency and all attempts to change it with great compassion. There’s nothing light or, to some degree, optional about our need to restore the bond in situations when a partner is angry at us, even if their anger is irrational. Regardless of what we know intellectually, and whether we even like our partner or want to be with them, still, we kick into a kind of emergency gear in conflict: the front brain is entirely bypassed, and we’ll do whatever it takes to get the relationship back on track. We’ll deal with higher-level concerns like self-empowerment and authenticity when things are smooth again. Because, right now, we’ve got to take care of our most basic need: survival. The fact is, many women equate conflict in their primary relationship with death.

The root of this unhelpful (to ourselves) response lies in our fundamental conditioning as women: We’ve been taught that the way to be loved, to matter and belong, is to be liked, wanted, and pleasing. And that if we don’t belong, we're not safe and will be left behind by the herd—to die. Anything that disturbs the security of the connection—an unwanted truth, conflict, or negative experience—threatens our fundamental ground. It is not an exaggeration to say that the prospect of someone important not liking us, being displeased with us, even temporarily, stirs a kind of primal terror.

Throughout history, on a practical level, women also needed their partner to survive. The demands of pregnancy and child-rearing, and the limited educational and professional possibilities, made it impossible for women to be safe unless someone chose them and continued to choose them. We just recently achieved the opportunity and freedom to support ourselves and exist independently from a partner’s financial support.

While this situation of dependency and powerlessness may no longer be true, our generational nervous system has not caught up with our new reality. We still fear for our basic survival should our partner’s love be withdrawn.

Women are also profoundly attuned to the emotional weather in relationships in a way that’s different from men. Our brains are wired to detect any potential disruptions in harmony, no matter how minute; we’re always attending to the state of the bond. In fact, it’s hard for many women to be “OK” when the relationship is not “OK”; inner peace relies on relational peace.

Simultaneously, because women have traditionally been in charge of taking care of the children and home, the emotional well-being and stability of the family is something to which we’re highly attuned. Keeping the family environment harmonious is our responsibility, and we worry deeply about the consequences that relational conflict might cause to our children.

Numerous other factors make conflict and specifically anger in our relationships feel so threatening and trigger a response of “fawning” in whatever form it takes. At the root, however, is a primal fear: If the relationship is in danger, we’re not safe and will die. Whether it makes “sense” to the intellectual mind, which it often doesn’t, the body is still acting from that fear.

Relationships Essential Reads

Two Exercises to Strengthen Your Relationship

What Your Partner Needs (Isn't What You'd Need)

How to Begin Breaking the Habit of "Winning Him Back"

With this as our starting place, breaking our habit to “win him back” can feel scary and ridiculously hard. Still, it changes us and frees us from the enabling and unhealthy behavior that keeps us stuck, disconnected from ourselves, and deeply unsatisfied. The first step on the path to freedom is simply (but not easily) to resist the urge to immediately make your partner OK when conflict arises. It is to stop trying to fix his discomfort or unhappiness, to literally and figuratively sit on your hands and close your mouth. There is such a thing as healthy conflict—sometimes conflict has to be allowed in the relationship to move the dial forward and make things better, to change what isn’t working. If your partner’s done something to upset you, it’s OK to bring it into the light and let it sit out there, unfixed and without a follow-up apology. It’s OK and, in fact, necessary to refrain from rushing in to take away the bad feelings your truth might bring up in him.

By immediately making things “nice” again, smoothing the waters and reassuring him with your words and behavior that all is well in the relationship and with you, that you’re not upset with him, even though he hurt you, shouted at you, withheld empathy and treated you unkindly, you’re effectively removing any need for responsibility on his part. At the same time, you’re protecting him from having to see and feel the wound he opened in you. And most importantly, you’re anesthetizing any need or incentive for him to change his behavior in the future. Without meaning to, you’re communicating that he can keep doing what he’s doing—you’re fine and, in fact, are even more committed to him. There are no consequences—he’s free to continue behaving (and hurting you) in the same way.

In the next part of this series, I’ll bring some examples of what it looks like to allow healthy conflict to stand, to catch your impulse to immediately reset the apple cart that he knocked over—ultimately, to transform your behavior when it comes to this instinct to keep yourself safe by “making it work” and restoring “peace” at all costs. This process is no small affair and requires an emotional warrior’s strength—we know how to make things OK, and we're good at it, but not making things OK is new; it feels scary and unnatural, counterintuitive at every level. It’s not how we naturally roll as women. And yet, it “works” in the long run; it will change your relationship—and you.