Month: January 2026

There’s a quote often attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald that I love:

“The sign of a highly intelligent person is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still function.”

That line applies perfectly to marriage.

Because marriage asks you to do two things at once… especially when you’re hurt or disconnected… things that go directly against your instincts BTW.

The first is open-mindedness.

The second is curiosity.

And when you’re in emotional pain, those are the first two things to disappear.

When you’re hurt, your nervous system floods your body with stress hormones. That shuts down your higher faculties like creativity, imagination, perspective. You basically stop seeing clearly.

So instead of approaching conversations like they’re happening for the first time, pain convinces you that you already know where this is going.

You assume.
You judge.
You stop listening.

And the moment that happens, connection collapses.

In conflict, the goal isn’t to be right.
 It’s to stay open.

Open enough to create a space where both of you can be vulnerable… because that’s the only place intimacy actually lives.

If you can make it your mission to discover something new about your spouse (even in the middle of an argument) you keep access to the problem-solving part of your brain.

That’s how fights end.

So how do you do that?

• You ask better questions.
• You dig deeper instead of defending.
• You show real interest in how your partner experiences the world, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Curiosity is not easy.

But with discipline, it’ll build you emotional strength.

Stay curious about the person you love.

Commit to these two simple shifts… open-mindedness and curiosity… and you will change the course of your conflict.

I see it every day.

In solutions and strength,

A follower reached out to me yesterday and asked a question I hear all the time:

“How do I deal with a partner who gets defensive and can’t self-reflect?”

Let me start with this.

Most defensive people aren’t unwilling to engage in hard conversations.

They’re overwhelmed by what the conversation feels like it says about who they are.

When defensiveness shows up, it’s easy to tell ourselves a story about the other person.

That they’re immature.

That they’re selfish.

That they refuse to take responsibility.

But after a decade of working with couples, I’ve learned something far more useful:

Defensiveness usually has very little to do with the behavior you’re trying to talk about.

And it has everything to do with identity.

When you bring something painful to your partner (something they said or did) many people don’t hear feedback. They hear an attack on themselves.

“You’re wrong.”
“You’re not good enough.”
“You’re a bad person.”

And people will defend their identity aggressively, because they feel under attack.

That’s when conversations derail. Not because the issue is too big, but because the nervous system has taken over.

Here’s the shift that changes everything.

Every hard conversation has two layers.

One is about behavior (what happened). The other is about identity (who someone is). Defensive partners collapse those two layers into one.

So when you try to talk about behavior, they experience it as a threat to their identity. And once that happens, curiosity disappears. Self-reflection shuts down. The conversation goes sideways.

Lowering defensiveness isn’t about finding the perfect words.

It’s about restoring this separation.

You do that by making it explicit that you’re not questioning who they are, you’re addressing something that happened.

Sometimes that sounds as simple as saying, “I love who you are. I’m upset about something that happened.”

That clarification matters more than people realize. Because now your partner doesn’t have to defend their worth. They can stay present with the moment.

A lot of couples think their problem is communication.

It’s not.

The real issue is that they don’t share a framework for handling feedback inside the relationship. Without that framework, every hard conversation feels like an attack instead of an invitation. A threat instead of an opportunity to reconnect.

And that’s where defensiveness comes from.

What I do with couples is help them build that framework before things go sideways. We separate behavior from identity. We create shared language that keeps both people out of fight-or-flight. And we practice real-time repair so resentment doesn’t quietly pile up and harden over time.

This isn’t about digging endlessly into the past or analyzing childhood wounds. It’s about having the right distinctions and the right language so your relationship can breathe again.

In solutions and strength,