The Not-Fight Fight: Why the Worst Arguments Are the Ones That Never Happen
Thursday, June 19, 2025.
There’s the yelling fight.
There’s the crying fight.
There’s the “one of us storms out and the other one Googles ‘uncoupling” fight.
And then there’s the Not-Fight Fight.
You know the one.
Where nothing is technically said, but everything is heard.
Where the conversation about who should’ve picked up the dry cleaning somehow becomes a referendum on your entire emotional history.
Where the silence is so loud it makes you miss actual yelling.
It’s the kind of fight couples don’t even remember having—because they never actually had it.
They just walked into a low-pressure front, smiled, made dinner, and quietly started treating each other like coworkers who barely survived a team-building retreat.
When You’ve Been Hurt Before, Silence Feels Safer
Let’s say you grew up in a home where conflict meant danger. Or where emotional needs were met with mockery or withdrawal.
For you, saying what you feel doesn’t feel like a right—it feels like a trap.
So in adult relationships, you do the emotional equivalent of ducking under the table during a thunderstorm.
You nod. You agree. You go blank.
Psychologists call this conflict-avoidant attachment behavior—a legacy of developmental trauma and emotional invalidation.
Research by Lyons-Ruth et al. (2006) shows that early disorganized attachment predicts unresolved conflict strategies in adulthood, including stonewalling, flat affect, and emotional shutdown.
And here’s the irony: These behaviors don’t look dramatic. They look downright polite.
The Neuroscience of the Not-Fight
The Not-Fight Fight is what happens when conflict avoidance meets attachment anxiety in a dark alley and they both pretend they’re “fine.”
Research by Gottman & Levenson (2002) shows that the most dangerous sign in a relationship isn’t conflict—it’s emotional disengagement.
When couples stop fighting, stop laughing, stop reaching—it’s not peace. It’s frostbite.
When you suppress emotional expression—especially to keep the peace—you’re engaging in emotional labor without a labor union.
Over time, this leads to what James Gross (2014) calls emotional suppression fatigue.
It drains your working memory, reduces your immune response, impairs executive functioning, and—ironically—makes you more likely to explode over that one pan left in the sink.
Neuroscientist Ruth Feldman (2017) adds that couples who avoid emotional synchrony for too long start to deactivate coregulation systems in the brain.
In plain english? When you stop showing up emotionally, your body starts forgetting how to be with someone at all.
Emotional Safety Isn’t What You Think
We like to believe that emotional safety means everything is calm, polite, and serene.
It doesn’t.
Emotional safety means you can tell the truth without punishment.
It means you can say, “I felt abandoned when you shut down,” and the other person doesn’t blow up, check out, or correct your grammar.
Couples confuse calm for connection all the damn time.
But in the absence of emotional safety, calm becomes a muzzle. It’s the death of vitality masquerading as maturity.
According to therapist and researcher Ellyn Bader (2021), couples that over-prioritize harmony often delay crucial emotional growth. Their nervous systems learn to associate authenticity with rupture—so they stay “safe” but slowly become strangers.
In other words: If you can’t say what hurts, your relationship will stop healing itself.
The “Well-Oiled Machine”
High-functioning Not-Fight couples often look great from the outside. They have systems. Calendars. Kids with matching water bottles and emotionally distant parents.
These couples “don’t argue.” And it’s true—they don’t. Not out loud. Instead, they do:
Weaponized Tone Moderation: “I’m not mad, I’m just speaking calmly.”
Tactical Overfunctioning: “Don’t worry, I already did it. Again.”
Polite Disassociation: “No, really. It’s fine. We’re fine.”
This isn’t conflict resolution. It’s emotional offshore banking. You’re not spending it, but you’re definitely stockpiling it.
And just like financial offshore banking, this strategy often hides a deep fear: that if you did bring it all out into the open, it would ruin you.
If You’re Neurodiverse, Add This additional dilemma:
If you’re a neurodiverse couple, you may not be able to “talk it out” in the moment. Believe me, that’s okay.
Try Asynchronous Processing. Send a note, record a voice memo, or write it down. Time-delay is not avoidance if it ends in reconnection.
Use decidedly Visual Metaphors or systems-based check-ins (e.g., “Are we red, yellow, or green right now?”) to locate shared emotional space.
Schedule Noticing Time—15 minutes where no one problem-solves, interrupts, or judges. You just describe what you’re noticing in the other person.
Neurodiverse love is often profoundly deep, but often it needs new or additional scaffolding.
How to Interrupt a Not-Fight in Real Time
Want to stop fighting silently? Interrupt the ritual. Here’s how:
Name the Fog:
“Hey, we’re doing that thing again—where we’re not talking but everything feels tense.”Drop the Script and go META:
Use a non-linear opening:
“I don’t want to rehash what we said. I want to understand what we’re both feeling.”Use Repair Language a Lot Damn Sooner:
Gottman calls these “repair attempts”—any phrase that de-escalates the moment:
“Can I try that again?”
“That didn’t come out the way I meant.”
“I think we’re both on the same team, right?”Invite Contrast:
“What am I missing about how you see this?”
(Not to be confused with “Explain to me why you’re wrong,” which is the secret voice of many husbands and more than a few therapists.)State Emotional Risk—Right Out Loud:
“I’m scared to talk about this because I don’t want you to pull away.”
Vulnerability kills the Not-Fight faster than logic. Because logic just makes you better at fighting about the wrong thing.
A Final Thought: The Opposite of a Fight Isn’t Harmony
It’s connection. And connection is messy. Honest. Sometimes awkward.
The real danger isn’t in having too many fights. It’s in treating every conversation like a press release.
So the next time you’re in a Not-Fight, don’t keep score. Keep speaking.
Want to Break the Loop?
Drop me a line and I’ll send you:
“How to Recognize and Repair a Not-Fight Fight Before It Erodes Your Bond.”
I’ll also include neurodiverse-friendly tools, real repair scripts, and exercises for building emotional fluency for those who specifically request it.
Be Well, Stay Calm, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Feldman, R. (2017). The neurobiology of human attachments. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), 80–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.11.007
Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (2002). A two-factor model for predicting when a couple will divorce: Exploratory analyses using 14-year longitudinal data. Family Process, 41(1), 83–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2002.40102000083.x
Gross, J. J. (2014). Emotion regulation: Conceptual and empirical foundations. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (2nd ed., pp. 3–20). The Guilford Press.
Lyons-Ruth, K., Yellin, C., Melnick, S., & Atwood, G. (2006). Expanding the concept of unresolved mental states: Hostile/helpless states of mind on the Adult Attachment Interview are associated with disrupted mother-infant communication and infant disorganization. Development and Psychopathology, 15(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000013
Overall, N. C., & McNulty, J. K. (2017). What type of communication during conflict is beneficial for intimate relationships? Current Opinion in Psychology, 13, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.03.002
Bader, E. (2021). The progression of couples therapy: The developmental model in practice. The Couples Institute Press.
Would you like the PDF worksheet now? Or a follow-up post titled something like “Emotional Safety vs. Emotional Control: Can You Be Too Nice to Stay Married?”
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