Couples Call It "The Same Fight." It's Usually Two or Three Different Fights Wearing the Same Opening Line.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
"We keep having the same fight" is a common description, and a slightly misleading one — closely examined, what gets lumped under one label is frequently two or three distinct fights that happen to share an opening line or an early trigger, then diverge into different mechanisms, different escalation patterns, and different resolutions.
This matters because a fix aimed at "the fight" as a single object will, at best, work on whichever of the two or three variants it happened to target, and appear to fail the rest of the time — not because the fix was wrong, but because it was aimed at an object that doesn't actually exist as a single thing.
Separating a labeled "same fight" into its actual distinct variants usually requires looking past the opening line — which really may repeat exactly — to where each instance goes after that, which is where the real divergence, and the real number of distinct patterns, becomes visible.
It's rarely one fight in a costume. It's usually a small family of related fights, sharing a doorway and going in different directions after that — and the doorway was never the part that needed fixing.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai