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“Whatever you want.”

“I’m fine either way.”

“We can talk at 6 if you want to.”
“Okay, but do you want to?”
“Either is fine.”

If you live with someone who never has an opinion, you know this isn’t the easy partnership everyone assumes it is. It’s exhausting. Every decision becomes two: the choice itself, and the guesswork about what they really want.

From the outside it looks generous. They never push, never make demands, never seem to want anything for themselves. People probably tell you how lucky you are. But what you actually experience is the slow build of resentment that comes from making every micro-decision in the relationship while your partner watches and sometimes critiques the result.

Here’s what’s actually happening. They’re avoiding the risk of being wrong or upsetting you. If they don’t have a preference, they can’t be blamed for the outcome. If you pick the restaurant and the food is bad, you can’t criticize them. “Whatever you want” is the safest possible answer.

Most of them aren’t doing this on purpose. Somewhere along the way, they learned that having opinions was dangerous. Saying no got punished. Wanting things were dismissed. So they stopped knowing what they wanted, because the wanting itself was pointless.

The way out isn’t asking better questions. It’s removing the test. Stop asking. Start deciding. “I made a reservation for 7. Tell me if you can’t make it.” Now there’s information to respond to instead of a test they’re trying not to fail.

More on the patterns underneath your partner’s non-answers in my book, Why We Fight. Comment whywefight for the order link.

“I shouldn’t have to ask.”

“I had to ask, so it doesn’t count.”

These don’t sound like walls at first. They sound like reasonable complaints about a partner who isn’t showing up. They feel justified. They’re also one of the smartest defenses our survival brain ever built.

Asking for what you need is vulnerable. It means letting someone close enough to actually disappoint you. Being able to graciously receive things our partner does means admitting you appreciate them and maybe even need them. For a lot of people, that’s the scariest thing in the world.

Somewhere along the way you learned that needing was dangerous. That being too much got you rejected. So you built a workaround. A way to need without admitting it. A way to test instead of trust.

The problem is the test is rigged. If your partner doesn’t notice, they fail and confirm what you feared. If they do notice, you can dismiss it because they only did it because you asked. Either way, you don’t have to let them in.

You stay disappointed. They stay confused and exhausted. The closeness you actually want gets further away.

Asking is the harder thing. It’s also the only thing that gets you what you actually want.

More on the protective patterns that block intimacy in Why We Fight. Comment “why we fight” and I’ll send you the link to order.

Most people are waiting for conditions that will never arrive before they’re willing to forgive.

Waiting to feel ready. Waiting for the other person to fully understand the impact. Waiting for some sense that enough time has passed and enough repair has happened that forgiveness is now earned.

The inability to forgive is a fundamental misunderstanding of what forgiveness actually is.

Forgiveness isn’t reconciliation. You’re not letting them back into that role in your life. You’re not setting yourself up to be hurt by them again. You can forgive someone and still maintain boundaries. You can forgive someone who has never apologized.

It also isn’t forgetting, or saying what happened was okay. What happened, happened. The hurt was real. Forgiveness doesn’t revise any of that.

What it does is stop you from carrying the injury forward indefinitely. Into every subsequent argument. Into the way you interpret their behavior. Into the quiet background noise of a relationship that never quite gets back to where it was.

Forgiveness allows the resentment to subside. Expectations have been appropriately adjusted toward acceptance.

Last week we talked about resentment as a buffer. That function is real. But at a certain point the resentment stops protecting you and starts trapping you.

Forgiveness is how you put it down. Not for them, but for you.

More on this in Why We Fight, out July 21 from HarperOne. Presale link in bio.

Why We Fight got reviewed in Publishers Weekly.

If you don’t work in publishing, here’s why that matters: PW is the publication libraries and bookstores read to decide what to stock. They review about one in every 10 or 12 books submitted. Most books don’t make it in, and not all reviews are favorable.

Mine was chosen for review, and the review was a good one. They called it pragmatic, named my flowchart specifically, and closed with: “Readers who feel stuck in repetitive cycles of conflict with a partner, friend, or family member will be especially enlightened.”

That’s who I wrote the book for.

Out July 21 from HarperOne. Presale link in bio.

The entire episode of airing this Monday (May 11, 2026) is built around the question my book answers: Why do we fight, and what do we do about it.

One couple came in with actual report cards, grading each other on their relationship.

“Why We Fight” — July 21. Link in bio to preorder.

🎙️

You’re not actually fighting about the dishes.

The dishes are just a convenient thing you can point at, but the dishes are never what woke you up at 3am replaying the conversation in your head.

You’re fighting about who has to do the noticing in this relationship. Who keeps the running list. Who remembers when your child has a dentist appointment. Who notices when something feels off between you and brings it up. The noticing is invisible work, and the person doing more of it feels invisible too.

But the peacekeeper often gets misunderstood. The person on the other side of that complaint isn’t lazy or checked out. They have a lower threshold for distress than you do. Their nervous system floods fast. When you bring something up, even calmly, their body reads it as “something is wrong,” and the only tool they have is to make the thing smaller. To say it’s not a big deal. To ask why everything has to be a thing.

That’s how they regulate emotions. That’s a person trying to stay functional in a body that doesn’t give them much room.

So one of you is exhausted from carrying the noticing alone. And the other one is exhausted from feeling like every conversation is a crisis they have to survive. Both of you are tired. Both of you feel misunderstood. And both of you are right.

The fight isn’t about the dishes. It’s about two different nervous systems trying to share a life without ever having the language for what’s actually happening between you.

Once you can name that, the fight gets a lot shorter. And a lot more honest.

This is one of the patterns I unpack in Why We Fight, out July 21 from HarperOne. Presale link in bio.

If feedback from your partner makes you instantly need to defend yourself, it isn’t because you’re a bad person. It’s because somewhere along the way you learned that being wrong meant being rejected.

So when they say “you didn’t do the dishes,” your survival brain hears “you’re failing me.” When they say “you never listen,” you hear “you’re immature and self-involved.” You go into defense mode, argue the facts, and miss what’s actually being asked of you.

Most of the time, your partner asking you to show that you care.

The way out is learning to hear a complaint without hearing a verdict on your character.

Full chapter on this in Why We Fight, out July 21 from HarperOne. Presale link in bio.