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Conflict decides which friendships last
The questions come down to a few choices. A person can address a problem when it happens or let it sit. They can be open to repair or insist on being right. They can disappear, withdraw, and avoid, or say honestly how they feel and let themselves be seen.
Many people carry a fairy-tale version of friendship in which two people connect, stay pleasant forever, and never have a rift because this is their person. Friends are human beings who make mistakes, mess up, and do things that annoy each other.
That makes hard conversations part of friendship with people who count as friends. Someone who has known a new friend for three or six months and decides it isn't working may be reacting to exactly this kind of rough patch, which every friendship has.
Why do people withdraw instead of talking?
Psychologist John Gottman, who studied couples in his lab at the University of Washington, identified stonewalling, shutting down and withdrawing from an interaction, as one of four behaviors he called the Four Horsemen, alongside criticism, contempt, and defensiveness. He linked stonewalling to physiological flooding, in which heart rate climbs during conflict and makes it hard to process what the other person is saying. His lab recorded heart rate and other signals while couples argued.
What makes a repair attempt work?
Gottman defined a repair attempt as any statement or gesture that keeps a tense conversation from escalating, such as a joke, an apology, or a show of affection. He found that whether repair attempts were accepted was one of the strongest predictors of whether couples stayed together. Couples in stable relationships were more likely to have their repair attempts received, even during heated moments. Gottman's lab followed couples for years to see which ones stayed together.
Why do small slights feel so big?
Roy Baumeister and colleagues reviewed the research in a 2001 paper titled Bad Is Stronger Than Good in the Review of General Psychology. Across many domains, they found that negative events and feedback had a larger effect on people than positive ones of equal size. In relationships, bad interactions weighed more heavily than good ones. One often-cited ratio from Gottman's couple research puts stable relationships at about five positive interactions for every negative one.
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