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Trivial fights with your significant other can be hard, tiring and, well, quite frankly, annoying.
And when an argument turns really ugly it’s easy to spit out something nasty based on an intimate detail you know about them, causing said-argument to go from civilised chit-chat to yelling so loud you may alert the neighbours.
But what if there was a way to defuse a fight with one simple tactic or, rather, word?
Speaking to Business Insider, marriage and family therapist Hal Runkel swears by using the word “ouch” to cool an argument down.
Yes, “ouch”.
“When [you’re] in conflict, inevitably [you] will say something that hurts the other person using the ‘inside information’ that you have on them or that they have on you,” he says.
Runkel goes on to explain that the best response to someone’s nasty comment about you (using the personal information only they know) is to say:
“Ouch. That one hurt. I don’t know if you were meaning to hurt me; I don’t know if that’s what you were going for; but that’s what you did.”
Yes, this counts as taking the high road (which we know can be hard), but Runkel truly does endorse it.
The expert believes that the secret to saying “ouch” is that you change the regular narrative of the fight from back-and-forth insults to a display of vulnerability, which is unexpected in most fights.
The idea goes that by becoming vulnerable you open up a conversation about what the problem is, rather than get caught up in name calling.
As with all relationships, communication is the most important key to success.
