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06/23/2026
For three days only, Barnes & Noble Rewards and Premium Members can save 25% on a preorder of Why We Fight.
Use code PREORDER25 at checkout.
Premium Members save an additional 10% on top of the offer.
The deal ends June 26, so preorder your copy now through the link in my bio.
Comment whywefight and I’ll send you the link to order!
ConflictResolution EmotionalHealing
06/15/2026
Everyone talks about the honeymoon ending. The integration stage where you finally see your partner as human. The advice is always the same: love conquers all.
But somewhere past that, in a marriage that lasts longer than 3 years, there’s another phase nobody names. The phase where you can’t stand the sound of them chewing. The phase where every story they tell, every mood they bring home, every way they show up for everyone in the world except you, makes you feel repulsed.
The advice you get when you admit this out loud is to remember the good times. To work on yourself or to think about the kids. None of it addresses what’s actually happening.
In the honeymoon, the way they were was endearing to you. Their avoidance was them being easy-going. Their criticism was discernment. Their lack of assertiveness was polite. The traits were always there. What changed is that you got close enough to fear being hurt by them.
Abuse would be an exception to this and should be approached differently.
In most situations, your spouse has become the receptacle for things you can’t bear to see about yourself. A version of how you behave or how someone from the past made you feel. This is the heart of our most challenging personal work.
More on the phases nobody warns you about in Why We Fight, out July 21st.
Comment “why we fight” and I’ll send you a link to order.
06/01/2026
“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.
05/21/2026
“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.
The 2-3 year mark is one of the most misunderstood transitions in a relationship.
Here’s what’s actually happening: around this stage, the neurochemistry of early love begins to normalize. The dopamine surge and norepinephrine activity that drive obsessive thinking, intensity, and passion start to settle. Helen Fisher’s brain imaging research at Rutgers documented this shift. Early romantic love has a neurochemical shelf life of roughly 18 months to 3 years. What’s supposed to replace it is companionate love, a quieter, friendship-based bond studied extensively by Elaine Hatfield and Ellen Berscheid. The problem is nobody tells you this is coming.
So when the intensity fades, you assume something is wrong. You start fighting more. You feel distant. The roommate fear sets in. And underneath all of it, resentment has been quietly building from every conflict you didn’t know how to repair.
Attraction doesn’t not only fades but turns into disgust. That’s the part that catches people off guard.
The couples who make it through this stage have the skills to deal with conflict before resentment takes over. That’s exactly what my book Why We Fight is about.
Comment “WhyWeFight” and I’ll send you the preorder link.
05/13/2026
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.
05/11/2026
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.
05/08/2026
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.
🎙️
There’s a particular kind of resentment that builds when you finally ask for something and actually get it. You might feel angry or disgusted as a result, maybe even worse than before.
That’s because the ask itself felt like a loss. Like proof that you’re the kind of person whose needs get ignored. If you grew up in a home where your needs were consistently deprioritized, you learned that needing things was a burden. That it was troublesome to want things, let alone ask for them.
So when a partner finally does the thing you asked for, the satisfaction you expected doesn’t come, because what you actually wanted was to be seen without having to speak.
This is how attachment wounds surface. The work is learning to believe that asking is something you’re allowed to do in the first place.
My book Why We Fight goes deeper on this. Link in bio to preorder.
05/01/2026
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.