For much of my life, I thought a healthy relationship was one absent of conflict. “We’ve never fought,” I might say about a boyfriend or close friend, using this as a euphemism for a “good” relationship. What I didn’t know is that the lack of conflict in my life wasn’t an accident: It was because I was always working really, really hard to make sure that there wasn’t any. I just had no idea I was doing it.

“What I didn’t know is that the lack of conflict in my life wasn’t an accident: It was because I was always working really, really hard to make sure that there wasn’t any.”

My mom has told me since I was young that she doesn’t worry about me. “You always bloom where you’re planted.” I liked this characterization of myself, and fully embraced it as an ethos. Over the years people would tell me how they appreciated my flexibility, resilience, and adaptability. I was willing to compromise! I was agreeable! A real problem-solver! And because it felt so important to me to be all these things, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t always easy for me to be so easygoing. And it didn’t always come for free.

Many (many, many, many!) times, I’d choose to shrug and let a sticky moment go as a way of sidestepping the discomfort of addressing it. Addressing it, after all, wasn’t chill or laid back — it was being difficult, picky, or high maintenance. From moments as small as agreeing to go for pizza when I really wanted a salad (Don’t want to be a bummer!), to laughing off a backhanded or even outright hurtful comment (I’m sure they didn’t mean it like that!), I developed a strong impulse to swallow whatever I was feeling rather than say it out loud and suffer the unknown consequences. It’s fine, I’d think. I can handle it. These were my mantras, helping me to absorb any distress so I could just move on and focus on nicer things, and continue to be known as the agreeable, easy-to-please person I’d come to believe was integral to my worth.

“I developed a strong impulse to swallow whatever I was feeling rather than say it out loud and suffer the unknown consequences.”

But sometimes, it wouldn’t work. I’d start feeling bulldozed and overlooked, having had to eat yet another heavy meal I didn’t want or laugh off another “joke” about something that, sure, wasn’t a big deal, but also didn’t make me feel great. I’d start stewing over the incident, feeling an internal indignation begin to kindle.

This wasn’t the first time this happened, I’d think, suddenly aware of a whole list of personal insults and slights I’d endured from someone. There was a threshold to my ability to give people a pass when my feelings were hurt, and once crossed, I’d enter into silent, one-sided combat. On a run, in the shower, or while driving to work, I’d find myself ranting in an imaginary confrontation, my gaze staring blankly ahead while my heart pounded and I crafted the perfect, high-road truth bomb that would eviscerate the offending party to their core. You’ve never respected me or anybody else, I’d imagine saying. And I’m not going to waste another moment fighting for something you only deign to bestow upon yourself. (The fact that I thought this was a mic drop is really saying something about me lol.)

“There was a threshold to my ability to give people a pass when my feelings were hurt, and once crossed, I’d enter into silent, one-sided combat.”

Once I’d entered into this mentality, the relationship was irrevocably compromised, on the road to one of two inevitabilities: Either the fight would need to come to the surface in the real world, or the relationship would end completely. (It is pretty hard for me to maintain my self-righteous anger and pretend like everything is fine — I don’t have the poker face for it.)

But anything — anything— was preferable to me over having an uncomfortable conversation. After all, it was a huge risk to tell someone that I disagreed or was even hurt by something they said — what if they doubled down? What if they brushed me off? What if they told me I was too sensitive, or decided I was too prickly and difficult? Would I even have any close relationships anymore if everyone found out I wasn’t actually as flexible and easygoing as they thought I was?

Conflict or combat

While it seems quite clear to me now (and likely to you, dear reader!) that I was letting myself be led by fear, but I was actually surprised when a therapist asked me when I remembered first feeling afraid of conflict. When I looked confused, she rephrased. “Do you remember a time when you were comfortable with conflict?”

“I was letting myself be led by fear, but I was actually surprised when a therapist asked me when I remembered first feeling afraid of conflict.”

I grew even more confused, and then I laughed. “Is anyone comfortable with conflict?” She gave me one of those nondescript smiles that meant she would wait for me to answer the question. But as I thought about it, I realized it was not applicable. “I don’t really fight with anyone,” I said, expecting her to be impressed. She was not.

“What about your family?” she asked. “Parents, siblings?”

My brother and sister and I fought like normal kids, I think, for most of our childhood. But we lived in different states now, and we weren’t really close — our relationships often filled with long stretches of silences, sometimes marked with a low key anger about something that would probably never be addressed. But that’s just what siblings are like! We get annoyed with each other; it’s not worth it to bicker and squabble all the time! My parents and I didn’t fight, but I hadn’t lived in the same time zone as them for more than a decade. They argued a lot when I was a teenager, and I remember participating in many of these with the characteristic mix of passion and disdain emblematic of that age. That seemed normal, right?

“I hear you using the word ‘fight’ a lot,” my therapist said. “Do you think of conflict as combative?”

“I knew, even before I voiced the question aloud, that there was some way to process tension, discomfort, and friction with others without fighting, but I had never seen it.”

Well… yes. If it wasn’t combative, then was it conflict? I knew, even before I voiced the question aloud, that there was some way to process tension, discomfort, and friction with others without fighting, but I had never seen it. If I could sense disagreement, my automatic response was to try to head it off at the pass by making myself smaller or more amiable. And if I couldn’t do that, if I’d gone to whatever well supplied that sort of approach too many times and found that it was dry, I’d enter a state of defensiveness that would guarantee enough distance in the relationship to avoid getting hurt any further. It didn’t matter to me at that point if this distancing hurt the other person, because in my mind, we’d been fighting for so long that it was easy enough to call the relationship “toxic” and justify just walking away. It had already cost me so much. Which was their fault. Right?

Even as I was speaking, I realized that what I was saying, well … it didn’t sound great. But surely I wasn’t damaging perfectly good relationships just because I was scared?

I thought about all my close friends, examining when and how we’d handled friction over the years. My relationships tend to be concentrated and intense, burning bright under specific circumstances (like in school, at a job) before fizzling out naturally as our lives moved on, or otherwise getting fanned into a low, steady, and everlasting flame. I do not ease in, testing the waters with small talk and safe topics before getting into the heavy stuff, and my people are the ones who aren’t put off by that. My college roommate told me once that she always knew I was really having a good time at a party if she saw me planted in a corner for hours, deep in conversation with someone I’d just met. And hey — I am still friends with my college roommate! And we fought! …once. But it was a knockdown drag out screaming match, a real doozy. It was preceded by nearly a full semester of unspoken tension that we communicated exclusively through rearranging the items in our mini fridge and not making eye contact, but!

Okay, so that’s not the best example.

“Question,” I texted my best friend of nearly 30 years. “Have we ever had a fight?”

“Can there be real peace if beneath it, one person is silently at war? Is it really peace if the cost is someone’s honesty?”

“I think probably but like more of a misunderstanding than actually being mad?” she wrote back. I could think of three or so sort of “sticky” instances, only one of them openly addressed (in an email… that we may not have ever actually discussed). Years ago, I’d take this as a sign of a healthy relationship: total agreement at all times, conflict-free. This is peace, right? Peace is good! But can there be real peace if beneath it, one person is silently at war? Is it really peace if the cost is someone’s honesty?

As I’m nearing 40, I’ve started to take a different view. If I’m hiding all the times I’m hurt or uncomfortable, or ignoring the signs that someone else is, I am practicing a kind of dishonesty in our relationship. And this costs me more than just my peace; it compromises the relationship. As someone who is not interested in superficial relationships, I felt disturbed to imagine that I’ve been unintentionally limiting the growth and development of my lifelong relationships like this. After all, growth and truth are two of my core values.

“Do we need to work on having healthy conflict!?” I texted my best friend. A few minutes passed, and when she hadn’t responded, I started to laugh. “OMG is this stressing you out? I can feel this stressing you out.”

“Bahaha, YES! NOW WE’RE IN CONFLICT!!!”

Reframing conflict

As I continued to examine my history with and feelings about conflict, I realized that there is one place in my life where I not only don’t automatically avoid all conflict — I even actively work on improving how to do it better: my marriage.

My spouse is also conflict avoidant, our attempts to “keep the peace” over the years producing various results. He also has a habit of making himself as easygoing and agreeable as possible to avoid possible tensions, but he does this for a lot (a LOT) longer than I do before reaching the point of no return. Once he’s been to his own well too many times and he can no longer pretend he isn’t upset about something, he fights his corner — and he fights hard. He goes into a mode I can only describe as “I’m not only going to die on this hill, but I’m taking you with me,” backed by an invisible list of hurts from every time he swallowed his own preferences, feelings, or ideas that sometimes went back months.

“It took us some time (and lots of couples therapy) to figure out how to reframe conflict as something with the capacity to enrich our marriage and rather than a threat that would destroy it.”

Here’s where we diverge in our habits: While he thinks an argument is about standing your ground, I think an argument is about finding a middle one. Because we only fought when pushed to the absolute limit (which translated to just a few times a year), it took us some time (and lots of couples therapy) to figure out how to reframe conflict as something with the capacity to enrich our marriage and rather than a threat that would destroy it.

Because here’s what I didn’t understand when I thought that a relationship without conflict was a “good” one: Conflict is an unavoidable inevitability of human relationships. It’s simply what happens when multiple desires, needs, values, or preferences aren’t aligned. Conflict isn’t inherently good or bad as a concept, but morally neutral. Which is why my therapist was so interested in drawing my attention to language evoking violence — because while conflict is inevitable, combat is a choice.

“Conflict isn’t inherently good or bad as a concept, but morally neutral.”

Like all multifaceted, complicated humans, both my husband and I have taken the many experiences, relationships, and exposures in our lives to shape and influence our worldviews. We each learned to fear and avoid conflict for different reasons, and we were both willing to live with certain discomforts rather than risk facing our fears. But in our marriage, we are aligned in our one vow to choose each other every day and every time the choice is offered. And it was clear that maintaining a facade of “peace” at the expense of one or both of us secretly feeling upset about something wasn’t prioritizing our marriage at all. It was prioritizing fear.

“Maintaining a facade of ‘peace’ at the expense of one or both of us secretly feeling upset about something wasn’t prioritizing our marriage at all. It was prioritizing fear.”

So we put in the dedicated time, effort, and money to figure out how to make conflict less of a threat and more of an expected and low stakes occurences in our lives. And we’ve made incredible progress. We not only feel closer than ever, but we can argue or disagree in ways that aren’t only productive and helpful, but actually feel loving and kind. We are, after all, intentionally engaging with each other as a tangible investment in our relationship: Learning to listen and communicate better through discomfort and friction no longer feels like a fight at all, but like an essential part of choosing to keep our marriage healthy and thriving.

But this is a marriage, not a friendship! The contract of a marriage is a formal, elective relationship with actual rules, promises, and stakes. Is it possible to approach conflict in friendship the same way? Or is the more organic, informal nature of friendship at odds with such a method?

The cost of engaging

Unlike a marriage, which is a formal and legal contract that must be broken deliberately and publicly, our other relationships live in more liminal spaces, aided or hindered by proximity, personal goals, life circumstances, and more. When we are in really different stages of life or growth journeys than our friends, these experiences can sometimes make it hard to be close to each other. We can accidentally hurt one another with words said or withheld, or by things we did or didn’t do. Sometimes confronting these moments of misalignment can deepen a relationship, and sometimes it can damage it. We are all on individual and unique growth journeys, and rather than finding the perfect way to handle every facet of every relationship at every stage of life, sometimes the question of whether to engage in conflict just comes down to whether the cost of maintaining the relationship is something both people are still willing and able to pay.

“Sometimes the question of whether to engage in conflict just comes down to whether the cost of maintaining the relationship is something both both people are still willing and able to pay.”

There were times in my life when I didn’t have the capacity to engage in conflict in a healthy or productive way. It can be easy to feel shame about those times now, but the truth is that I hadn’t yet experienced the things that would make it possible for me to make different choices.

Here’s an example: I once ghosted a friend I thought I’d have for life. I grappled with this at the time and still do periodically — there is something inherently cowardly in disappearing on someone like this. I won’t dig into all my reasons (or excuses, however you might see it) but I will say that every time I go over it, I have a hard time imagining how the person I was then could have done anything differently. The trust in that relationship was broken. The few times conflict had arisen always resulted in combat, which could only be resolved by my continued willingness to swallow my true feelings in order to uphold theirs. I didn’t want to fight anymore — not for my voice to matter, nor for our friendship to continue. I wasn’t prepared to have to say this, to make a case for why I felt the way that I did, because our history had shown that they weren’t necessarily doing anything to me — they weren’t trying to hurt me or harm me. But what they wanted from me wasn’t something I could give anymore. It became clear to me that the cost of this relationship was too high, and even a “break up” conversation had a price I’d need to pay. So I chose the path that most people would uniformly consider Very Bad: I ghosted.

Would I handle things differently now? Of course! I am an older person, with more experiences that have reshaped and expanded my landscape of possible solutions. But the kind of hindsight that makes better answers so clear now comes from a hard-earned perspective that I didn’t yet possess. It was necessary for me to make those questionable and even poor choices to gain the very ability to see another way — so that I could do better next time. It was only a few short years before I learned what it was like on the other side.

“They weren’t necessarily doing anything to me — they weren’t trying to hurt me or harm me. But what they wanted from me wasn’t something I could give anymore.”

One of my closest friends and I had a quiet falling out that resulted in our not speaking for over a year. Nothing had *happened* and yet the tension and sense that something was wrong between us was palpable. I often felt like I was doing something wrong, or like my very presence was causing her pain, but in my typical way, I didn’t ask. I was too afraid. So even though she was going through a hard time, I stopped reaching out. I was motivated by fear, but I also knew I wasn’t the right person to talk to her then. Eventually she moved abroad, and I saw that she’d removed me from her friends list on Instagram. Even though I wasn’t surprised, I was still devastated. But I also remember feeling a certain amount of understanding — she wasn’t willing or able to invest in our relationship at that time. It was costing her something that she could no longer afford to pay.

I had this insight because of the way things had happened for me in my other relationship. Because I took it seriously, and still wrestled with my decision to ghost them, I had considered such a situation from enough angles to be able to access a perspective beyond my own pain. We were going through different stages in our lives that were not entirely compatible, and some of my circumstances were not in alignment with hers. So I didn’t send her frantic emails, or try to figure out “what went wrong.” I gave it time, and hoped that one day things might be different enough that we could reconnect.

After my daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, she emailed me. Her partner had seen my stories on Instagram, and even though we hadn’t had any contact for over a year, she felt moved to reach out. She acknowledged her disappearance, and said she knew she owed me an explanation, but she also wanted to send her love and let us know she was thinking of us.

I wrote back almost immediately. I told her that I was so happy to hear from her. “You don’t owe me anything,” I wrote, and I meant it. “If you ever want to talk about it, consider this an open invitation. But I don’t need an explanation. I’m just so glad to be back in touch.” Maybe it was because we’d just been through one of the most isolating and difficult years of our lives, or maybe it was because I’d grown and changed in a way that she had too, or maybe it was just because I missed her, and I still felt the same love that compelled her to reach out to me after all that time. Maybe it’s just as simple as the fact that going through a life changing, hard thing makes previously hard things seem far less so. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t afraid of having that conversation anymore. And I knew that if she wanted to have it, it would be an investment to heal our past so that our future could be stronger.

“A willingness to have difficult conversations is an act of trust. It requires us to risk exposing our most vulnerable selves, hoping that we will be received with care.”

A willingness to have difficult conversations is an act of trust. It requires us to risk exposing our most vulnerable selves, hoping that we will be received with care. It’s a way to understand each other better, a chance to broaden our perspectives and compassion for others. In any relationship, choosing to engage in conflict that is a constructive act of care requires both people to see it that way.

For me, reframing conflict as investment expands my own capacity for giving grace, kindness, and love, even when I am feeling hurt. “Can we talk about something hard?” is just another way of telling someone they matter to you. “Of course, I’m listening,” is just another way of saying I’m here, and This matters and You are important to me, too.

And that doesn’t sound like the kind of stuff I want to avoid anymore at all.

Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she writes about motherhood, artmaking, and work culture. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.