Finally, happy couples seemed to concentrate more on controlling the boundaries of the conflict itself. “Happy couples, when they fight, usually try to make the fight as small as possible, not let it bleed into other fights,” said Karney. But unhappy couples let one area of disagreement spill into everything else. “They start arguing about, ‘Are we spending the holidays with my family or yours?’ and pretty soon it becomes, ‘You’re so selfish, you never do the laundry, this is why we don’t have enough money.’ ” (In marriage therapy, this is called kitchen-sinking, a particularly destructive
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