The Problem Couples Actually Have Is Rarely the One They're Arguing About
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
Couples argue about dishes, money, a comment made at dinner, whose turn it was to call the plumber. These are real disagreements and the frustration around them is genuine. But ask most long-together couples what they're "actually" fighting about and, if they're honest, the topic on the surface is rarely the full explanation.
What's actually driving the argument is more often a pattern that predates the topic entirely — a default response to feeling unheard, or dismissed, or deprioritized, that would have found some other doorway in if the dishes hadn't been available that day. The topic is real. It's also incidental. The pattern would have shown up regardless of which specific disagreement carried it.
This is easy to miss because the topic is so much easier to argue about than the pattern. Dishes have a right answer. The underlying pattern doesn't resolve with a right answer, because it was never really about dishes — it's about what dishes happened to trigger. Couples can "win" the topic argument completely and still feel nothing has actually changed, because nothing about the pattern was ever addressed.
Recognizing the difference between the topic and the pattern it's carrying doesn't make the topic unimportant. It makes it possible to finally argue about the thing that's actually costing the relationship something.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai