Every Time Your Partner Makes You Angry, Write Them a Letter

Anyone who’s been in a relationship for more than a few months is no stranger to nasty fights. The stakes are higher, and every little thing bothers us more than it should. Over the last ten years, I have realized a few things about these arguments.

Fighting with your partner is a skill. It is a delicate balance between having the liberty to say ridiculous stuff that you’d never say to a friend or coworker and saying something so hurtful that it haunts your conversations for a long time. Mastering this balance is the key to good conflict resolution.

Over time, many of us learn to identify the line and become skilled at having arguments that heat up to just the right amount.

One way to practice this skill is — writing letters to your partner when you have unresolved issues. My partner and I sometimes get too carried away in a fight and an alarm goes off in either of our heads. We call a time-out and decide to write instead.

Writing about your problems helps in a couple of ways.

Get clarity about your own emotions

Have you noticed how sometimes there are multiple problems going on and they snowball into one big fight? We yell and scream because we finally have an outlet after all these days, but somewhere in the middle of the fight, we realize we’re not sure what we’re yelling about.

And worse, we have no idea what outcome we want at the end of the fight.

At such times, continuing to rage does more harm than good. When you reach this point, treat it as a cue to start writing.

When we write in private, we feel more freedom in expressing our thoughts. It’s private, only we can see it and we know we can delete it later. I’m not saying you should delete whatever you write. I’m just saying that the option of deleting creates a safe mental space for you to explore whatever is going on in your mind.

As you write, you start cooling down and the real problems start to surface. You look at the stuff you’ve written and you realize that some parts of it don’t really affect you anymore. And some parts of it look really important and you feel like formatting them in bold. You figure out what’s really bothering you in this process.

Remove the urgency and speak without interruptions

When we fight in person, we usually start with one topic. But with all the back and forth and the interruptions, the argument morphs into something else entirely. What should have been an us-against-the-world situation turns into a you-vs-me spat.

We could all benefit from the opportunity to lay out our entire argument clearly and concisely, without interruptions or distractions. And equally, our partners could use the chance the receive our arguments without interruptions — which is why they will also be calmer when you finally let them read it.

Review what you’ve written before sending it to your partner

The point of writing is to create a space where you can rage freely and get all the anger out of your system without hurting your partner too much in the process. So it’s important to make sure that you don’t end up rage at them on paper either.

The point of writing is different from the point of showing it to your partner. You write to have an outlet. But you show it to your partner to find a solution together.

You don’t need to sugarcoat things. If you have a problem with your partner, you deserve to communicate it. Reviewing just helps in ensuring that you’re doing this constructively.

If you’re just going to say “You’re so useless, I don’t even wanna talk to you” on paper, you might as well do it in person. (Don’t do that!)