Why 69% of Relationship Conflicts Never Really Get Solved

Two types of conflict, not one

John Gottman, after years of following real couples in his research at the University of Washington, arrived at a distinction that changes how relationship conflict is understood: not every disagreement is the same kind.

According to his work, any relationship conflict, from the smallest irritation to the most serious argument, can be sorted into one of two categories: solvable or perpetual.

A solvable problem has, under this distinction, a concrete practical way out: something specific to change or agree on, and once it’s agreed, the conflict stops reappearing in those same terms.

A perpetual problem is different at its root: it comes from a difference in personality, lifestyle or values between the two partners, something with no single solution that closes it for good. It’s going to keep being part of the relationship, in one form or another, indefinitely.

Here Gottman borrows an idea from couples therapist Daniel Wile, who wrote in After the Honeymoon (1988) that choosing a long-term partner means inevitably choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems to live with for ten, twenty or fifty years. With someone else there would be other problems, not none.

The number: 69%

Here’s the most surprising finding from this part of Gottman’s research: most relationship conflicts, around 69% according to his data, are perpetual, not solvable.

In the follow-ups his team did with the same couples over four years, they found something striking: they were still arguing about the same topic. Gottman describes it with an image: it was as if, instead of four years, four minutes had passed. The couples had changed clothes, hairstyles, even weight, but they were still having the same underlying argument.

Where the figure comes from, and what it doesn’t say

The 69% appears in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (1999), a popular book written with journalist Nan Silver. The book doesn’t point to a specific scientific paper explaining how the conflicts were classified or what exact sample the percentage was calculated from. It comes from American couples observed by his own team, and the precision of the figure shouldn’t be read as a universal constant.

What is well supported is the general idea. Kristen Johnson and Michael Roloff (1998) studied serial arguments, the ones that keep coming back to the same issue, among people in relationships. What best predicted relationship quality wasn’t how often the argument repeated, but whether it was seen as resolvable, that is, whether each episode moved something forward. That perception was lower when the argument came with counterattacks, demand-withdraw cycles, brooding alone or pulling away from the other person afterward; and it was higher when the first confrontation had been constructive.

Some of the real perpetual conflicts he documents in his research, among couples he describes as happy, give a sense of how ordinary they tend to be:

• One partner wants a child and the other isn’t sure they want one, or feels ready.
• A sustained difference in sexual desire between the two.
• One partner is careless about household chores until the other has to push, creating recurring friction.
• A couple where one wants to raise the kids in one religious tradition and the other in a different one.

Why this isn’t necessarily a bad sign

What makes this finding interesting isn’t just the number itself, it’s where it shows up: Gottman found perpetual conflicts both in couples he classified as stable and satisfied and in couples who ended up separating.

Having a perpetual conflict didn’t, by itself, tell a healthy couple apart from one that wasn’t.

What did make the difference, according to his analysis, was how each couple lived alongside that conflict: whether they could talk about it without it turning into contempt or a total communication shutdown, or whether the topic became a constant breaking point every time it came up.

This distinction has an implication that goes against a very common idea about relationships: that a good couple is one that “has no problems” or “solves them all.”

According to Gottman’s own data, not even the most stable couples in his research managed to resolve most of their underlying conflicts.

Stability didn’t depend on eliminating those differences, but on the specific way the couple handled them each time they resurfaced.

When a perpetual conflict turns into “gridlock”

Within perpetual conflicts themselves, Gottman distinguishes between the ones a couple manages to live with and the ones that end up in what he calls “gridlock.”

A well-managed perpetual conflict still shows up now and then, but without escalating.

A gridlocked conflict, by contrast, repeats over and over with no progress, generates a sense of mutual rejection, and over time the four horsemen (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling) show up more and more while humor and affection nearly disappear from those conversations.

Gottman describes how, at that point, the couple starts to emotionally isolate without realizing it, drifting toward what he describes as parallel lives within the same relationship.

If you want to check whether you fall into these patterns in your own arguments, take our four horsemen of the apocalypse quiz.

The hidden dream behind gridlock

According to his research, behind almost every gridlocked conflict there’s what he calls a “hidden dream”: a deep personal aspiration or value belonging to one partner that hasn’t been named or acknowledged within the argument.

The recurring dispute, under this idea, isn’t really about the surface topic that keeps repeating (money, chores, parenting), but about that underlying need neither partner has clearly put on the table.

Identifying what type of conflict it is, before trying to solve it

As a first step, Gottman proposes something as simple as categorizing each recurring disagreement: asking whether it’s solvable (something with a possible concrete way out) or perpetual (an underlying difference that will probably keep showing up).

According to him, a good deal of couples’ frustration comes from treating a perpetual problem as if it were solvable: insisting on finding a definitive answer to something that, by its very nature, doesn’t have one, instead of recognizing it as a difference to live alongside in some other way.

An example: punctuality

Pablo is late to almost everything; for Irene, arriving ten minutes early is a form of respect. Every few weeks they argue about the same thing, and each time they try a “definitive solution”: alarms, agreeing on an earlier time, joking penalties. None of them lasts.

Read as a solvable problem, it’s a failure that keeps repeating. Read as a perpetual problem, it’s a difference in temperament and values (for him time is flexible; for her, a sign of consideration) that is going to stay. The shift isn’t in solving it, but in being able to talk about it with humor and without contempt, and in agreeing on minimums for the situations that really matter to each of them, like a flight or a medical appointment. That’s the kind of dialogue that Gottman and, by another route, Johnson and Roloff associate with relationships that last.

This distinction between the solvable and the perpetual changes how you read a conflict that keeps coming back: not as a failure because it “still isn’t resolved,” but as a different category of problem, with its own rules.

If you want to go deeper into Gottman’s communication patterns, you can continue with our article on the four horsemen of the apocalypse in relationships.

Sources

• Gottman, J. M. and Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Crown.
• Johnson, K. L. and Roloff, M. E. (1998). Serial arguing and relational quality. Communication Research, 25(3), 327-343. https://doi.org/10.1177/009365098025003004
• Wile, D. B. (1988). After the Honeymoon. Wiley.