How do you handle conflict in your marriage? We seem to be getting worse over time...

[HandlingConflictBadly]

Hi, have namechanged as I don't usually post any personal details at all under my regular name.

So have been married for 9 years and it feels like we are handling conflict less and less well as time goes by. DH comes from a family who don't really do conflict, they just say nothing and then do something else and forget it ever happened. My family were driven largely by my mum in handling conflict and that involved talking it through, usually some tears and apologies and then moving on together. After 9 years of being married to me, DH no longer believes that ignoring an issue will solve the problem - he's seen that they fester with with me if he does that. But in entering the conflict, he now gets angry too. I'm really not proud of the fact that a significant contribution of mine to the marriage is to teach DH how to get angry.

So the upshot is that I've spent 9 years trying to control my temper better - I have grown to understand that expressing my feelings with a raised voice, angry face and intemperate words is taken by him far more significantly than I would intend. But even as I have a slightly better handle on it (still not perfect by any stretch) he is expressing his feelings in just this way. The fact of feeling such anger and expressing it winds him up almost as much as whatever issue we actually have.

So how do you handle conflict? What strategies do you have? And I'm talking about the things that you are both just different on that therefore cause friction when they occur. With us, I'm pathologically punctual and DH is much more flexible with respect to time so whenever we're trying to go somewhere with a deadline - like to catch a train - is a classic.

we find there are certain trigger points - like getting lost and both being really tired that we are most likely to have a row -I am quicker to shout and quicker to calm down - am not sure that we handle it all that well - but I don't worry about it too much as its mainly when we are stressed
how often do you have rows? Is it getting more often?

with issues we don't agree about - which fortunately don't happen that often - on then my stratergy is to dicuss on an ongoing basis - I don't get cross about those things though

I don't have much to add regarding the conflict angle but a technique I now use with my dawdling,- we've- got- ages- before- we -need- to- be- there husband is to tell him the time we have to leave to get to the train/appointment or whatever rather than the actual train/appointment time etc.
In this way he only has one time to focus on rather than 2 (ie. the leaving time and the train time).
This works for us and rows regarding timekeeping which used to be fairly regular are now very infrequent.
I suppose knowing the friction triggers and discussing ways of handling them in future is a good way forward and avoids the rows happening in the first place.

Thanks for responses. They're not getting more frequent, a year ago we had quite a lot of them but that was probably the worst patch since our first few months of marriage (when there was a lot of adjustment!) and coincided with a stressful period of hours /commute for him and small DCs. Now they're probably equalling the lowest frequency of our whole marriage.

I think DH's reaction to his own anger is partly making him more devastated by any row we do have though. I find myself reminding him that it's been one issue in weeks of normal, pleasant, happy relating with each other so as not to get it all out of proportion.

Re actual triggers, we both try to head them off, but we are polar opposites in our approach to appointments / deadlines so we still don't get it right despite all our strategies. Those are more stressy frustrated conversations than full on rows though. Last night was because I'd been rushing around like a loon getting everything ready to go away and felt he was thoughtless about easy things he could have done - picking up the 3rd pile of ironed clothes to take upstairs and getting the children to bed on time - and he thought I was sarcastic and impatient about asking him without giving him time to do it proactively. We've sorted it now but I just feel like we need some techniques for communicating better so we could bypass the heated conversation in the middle and get to the sorted part quicker. Maybe it's just a personality transplant for both of us though....