Fighting in a relationship is normal, they say. It’s healthy. To know a partner’s fighting style is to understand how they handle conflict and thereby gauge your compatibility—because when can you get a clearer sense of who someone is than when they’re least emotionally regulated?
As a culture, we’ve come to accept that confrontation is a natural part of a functional relationship. So what does it mean when a couple just doesn’t fight?
I found myself mulling that question this month when Travis Kelce said on his podcast, New Heights, that he and his fiancée, Taylor Swift, have never argued in the two and a half years that they’ve been together. The revelation quickly made headlines, and the social-media peanut gallery was sharply derisive. Most comments fell into one of four buckets, insisting that Kelce and Swift were lying either to themselves or the public; that their money insulates them from the kinds of things that normal people fight about; that it’s a red flag never to have fought; or that they’re still in their honeymoon phase—that the squabbles would come later and certainly after they had kids.
Never mind the fact that Kelce didn’t say they would never fight or that he was interviewing George Clooney, who also claims that he’s never fought with his wife—and, ahem, the mother of his two children—in more than a decade of marriage. (Amal Clooney is an internationally renowned barrister, you might say. I wouldn’t want to get into it with her either. But that’s beside the point.)
It felt strange to read those comments about Swift and Kelce, in the same way it’s strange to hear what people are saying about you behind your back. I am also engaged to someone with whom I’ve never fought, despite being together for three years—through periods of protracted unemployment, family problems, a roach and mice infestation, and even house-training a puppy.
No matter how I present that fact, it sounds like gloating, so in most scenarios, I don’t. But worse than that is the assumption that couples who don’t fight have something deeply wrong with them—not, in fact, unlike the ones who fight often. It’s a tragic paradox.
Jean Fitzpatrick, a licensed psychoanalyst and couples counselor, tells me it’s common for people to disagree on what constitutes a conflict. In her practice, she encourages couples to straighten that out early: Understanding your partner’s boundaries in that respect—and knowing when you’re crossing a line—is key to mitigating friction. “The goal is to be able to work through the conflict, not to bury it,” Fitzpatrick says.
The tabloid media, on the other hand, is not so precise in its verbiage. When Kelce said that he and Swift had never “gotten [into] an argument,” commenters seemed to understand that to mean they’d never taken opposing views, with The Cut suggesting that “civil discussions about whether your in-laws should be allowed to comment on your living room décor or whether your spouse was wrong to gamble away the entirety of your savings account on DraftKings” were foreign concepts to Swift and Kelce. What I’ll say is this: If every civil discussion with your partner is a fight, then every white lie is gaslighting.
My fiancé and I are what counselors would call low conflict, meaning we don’t often have strong disagreements. We tend to chalk this up to a combination of similar values and tastes and an expectation of radical transparency between us. We know just about everything about each other, from our first memories and childhood secrets to what kind of families and burial arrangements we want—leaving little for us to fight seriously about or become resentful over. We accept and respect each other totally, something that neither of us had experienced in a relationship before.
Maintaining respect for your partner is no small thing: Fitzpatrick notes how much Kelce and Clooney esteem their partners, with the latter remarking, “I can’t believe how lucky I am, so what am I going to fight about?”
Jordan Conrad, a licensed psychotherapist and couples counselor, puts it this way: If everyone in America had a broken arm, a break would be statistically normal—but that wouldn’t mean people were meant to be walking around with broken arms. The same could be said of couples who fight; arguing may be statistically normal, but it’s not functionally normal unless it facilitates something productive. “Fighting is not a good thing,” he says. “What you should be doing is exchanging your ideas, collaborating, coordinating whenever you need to—and if that happens without [anger], that’s the dream come true.”
In a way, the conversation about arguing in relationships is similar to the one we’re still having about sex. How much sex you and your partner “should” be having is really between you and your partner, whether that’s once a week, once a month, or twice a day. Still, we obsess over the question, judging other people’s habits against our own—for better or for worse.
From the outside, never fighting seems either unbelievably lucky or a sign that one or both parties in the relationship are somehow overcompromising. In our culture of oversharing, with its high premium on authenticity, claiming you don’t argue sounds like hiding or denying a flaw. It sounds, in other words, like a lie.
But when I tapped my network again to hear from others who have never fought with their partner, I was surprised by just how many of us there were, keeping our peaceful relationships to ourselves for fear of being judged. “I don’t tell anyone [that we don’t fight],” one entrepreneur told me. “I don’t think they would believe us, and they’d think we’re obnoxious.” Another Instagram user shared: “Been married 44 years and can’t remember one argument.”
Of course, there is no universal standard for a perfect relationship. Descriptively, it’s normal for people to fight, but proscriptively, what a healthy relationship can or should look like is endlessly negotiable. As Claire Robertson, an assistant professor of psychology at Colby College, put it to me: “Everyone wants to be right and good and normal.”
We don’t have to regard Kelce and Swift as being any better than the rest of us, for any reason—but we also don’t have to be so dubious and cynical about how others exist within their relationships if they are happy. We should all strive to be nicer to our partners and ourselves and to show respect for how other people navigate their own partnerships. What’s the use in fighting about it, anyway?