Is your recurring argument solvable?

Two kinds of argument

Some arguments are about a situation. Who does the school run on Thursdays, whose family you see over the holidays, what to do about the car that keeps breaking down. John Gottman calls these solvable problems. They can be annoying and even heated, but underneath each one sits a practical question with an answer, and once you find the answer the argument tends to go away.

Other arguments are about a difference. One of you is tidy and one of you is not. One of you wants to save and the other wants to enjoy the money now. One of you needs time alone and the other feels that time as distance. In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (1999), Gottman reports that about 69% of couple conflicts fall into this second group. He calls them perpetual problems. They come from lasting differences in personality and needs, so they do not get solved. They get managed, often for decades, and often with a fair amount of humour.

Livable or gridlocked

A perpetual problem is not a bad sign. Every couple has a handful, and whoever you had chosen, you would simply have a different set. What matters is how the conversation about it feels. With a livable perpetual problem you can talk about it, you can see the other side, you might tease each other about it, and the evening survives.

A gridlocked problem is a perpetual problem that has hardened. The same conversation plays out with no movement, each time leaves you both a little more hurt, and compromise starts to feel like giving up a piece of yourself. Gottman’s explanation is that gridlock usually hides a dream: something one of you deeply hopes for or believes in, often rooted in your history, that has not been fully said or heard. Arguing about the surface topic cannot reach it, which is why the argument keeps coming back.

What this quiz can and cannot tell you

You answered about one argument, so your result describes that argument, not your whole relationship. Plenty of couples have a solvable disagreement about chores and a gridlocked one about where to live. It is also one person’s view. Your partner might place the same argument somewhere else, and that gap is worth a conversation of its own.

This quiz is a reflective tool, not a diagnosis, and it is not a substitute for therapy. If this argument involves fear, threats or feeling unsafe at home, that is outside what a quiz is for, and it deserves real support now.

Something to try together

If your argument looks solvable, treat it as a shared problem. Each of you says what you need rather than what the other keeps doing wrong, then you agree on one small change to try for a few weeks and check back in.

If it looks perpetual or gridlocked, stop trying to win it and try to understand it. Gottman’s dreams within conflict exercise works like this: one of you talks and the other only listens and asks questions, then you swap. The speaker explains what their side of the argument means to them. The listener is not there to persuade or solve, only to ask things like:

• What do you believe about this, deep down?
• Is there a story from your past that connects to it?
• What would your ideal outcome look like, and why does it matter so much?
• Is there a fear underneath it?

The aim is not agreement. It is to move from gridlock to dialogue, where you can both hold the difference without either of you having to disappear. If your arguments overheat before you get that far, the flooding quiz looks at what happens in your body, and the repair style quiz looks at how you find your way back afterwards. For the habits that make any argument harder, try the four horsemen quiz, and to see how your wider argument style fits together, what kind of couple are you.