The Turtle and the Monkey: Why You Keep Having the Same Fight

It's a Tuesday evening. The argument starts about something small, the bin, the calendar, a tone on a text, and within ten minutes you're somewhere you've been a hundred times before. They've gone quiet and you're getting louder. Or you're getting louder and they've gone quiet. Either way, it's familiar in the worst possible way. By 10pm one of you is in bed pretending to be asleep and the other is in the kitchen wondering how you got here. Again.

Most couples don't really fight about new things. They fight about the same thing, in the same way, on different topics. The good news is, the shape of that fight is much less mysterious than it feels.