087|You Want the Fights to Stop — Here's Why Every Little Thing Turns Into One

[00:00:00] When Every Little Thing Turns Into a Fight

Have you ever had that experience where every little thing in your marriage turns into a fight? Where something so small, something that shouldn't be a big deal at all, somehow becomes this huge problem standing right there in front of you?

You load the dishwasher, you think you did a decent job, and somehow the way you put the bowls in becomes a whole thing. Or you send a text, the wrong text apparently, or the right text at the wrong time. You showed up when you said you would, and it was either too early or too late. She asked you to do something, so you did it, and it still wasn't quite right.

And it's not like any one of these small things are a big deal. That's the part that gets to you. Each one is small, a bowl, a text, a few minutes, but every single one of them seems to have a fuse on it, and you can't figure out which little thing is going to be the one that sets the whole night on fire.

So you start walking on eggshells in your own house. You get quiet. You get careful. You try to do everything right, and you're exhausted because it feels like there's no version of you that's good enough. Whatever you do turns into a fight, and whatever you try next, that turns into a fight, too. If that's where you're living right now, every little thing turning into a fight and you genuinely can't see the way out, stay with me.

I've been there. I know that house. And what I've found is that the way out isn't where you've been looking for it. In this episode, I'm going to show you why you can't win the little things game, why no matter how many of them you get right, it never seems to be enough. I'm going to show you what's actually going on underneath all those fights because it isn't the dishwasher, and it was never the dishwasher.

And I'm going to show you what the real work is, which isn't doing more, and it isn't trying to do it better. So if you've been killing yourself trying to be perfect and wondering why it keeps not working, you can set that down right now. That was never the job.

By the end of this episode, you're going to understand what the job actually is and where this can go once you start doing it.

And if you're listening to this with your wife or if you've thought about putting one of these on together, this is a good one for that. The work I'm going to describe runs both directions.

Sometimes it's the little things you do that she reacts to and the fights grow from there, but sometimes it's the other way around. It's the little things that she does that get under your skin and you're the one starting the fight. This isn't about blame. It's not about figuring out who's the one doing the thing wrong.

It's about finally seeing the pattern the two of you are caught in and learning how to step out of it together. So if your marriage is stuck in that loop where every little thing turns into a fight, stick around. You don't want to miss this one.

[00:02:28] When a Six-Year-Old Reloaded My Dishwasher

Welcome to Better Husband, the podcast that helps you answer the question: how can I be a better husband? I'm Angelo Santiago, a men's marriage and relationship coach, and every week I bring you practical insights to help you strengthen your marriage and become the best husband you can be.

So the other night, we just finished dinner. My wife Julie and I got up, took our plates over to the kitchen, and our son carried his over, too. He's getting older now, so we've been teaching him to put his dishes in the dishwasher instead of just leaving them on the counter and walking off. Normal thing, you're trying to get a kid to do one small chore.

And he opens the dishwasher and he goes to put his plate in, and then he stops, and he starts looking around inside of it. And I watch my son, my six-year-old son, start rearranging the entire dishwasher, and I'm not exaggerating. He's pulling things out and moving them. "This goes here. That's in the wrong spot.

You've gotta turn this one around. This one needs to be on the top shelf. The forks go this way. The spoons go that way." He's standing there, this little kid, correcting the way his parents loaded the dishwasher, completely sure that there's a right way and that we got it wrong. And Julie and I just looked at each other, and honestly, the first thing was that it was funny.

It's adorable. You watch that little person be that certain about silverware, and you can't help it. You start laughing. There's this rush of, "Oh my gosh, look at him. He's so sure of himself." But right underneath the laugh, there was something else. Because the only place he could have learned to do that, the only place he could have picked up that exact energy, that there's a correct way to load a dishwasher and somebody's doing it wrong, was from us. He learned that at home. He learned it from watching me and from watching Julie, and the two of us caught that at the same time, in the same look.

And I wanna slow down here, because this is the part I really want you to get. In that one glance, the one where we're both smiling at each other about our son, a part of us also slipped back in time for a second.

Because there was a stretch earlier in our marriage where the dishwasher wasn't cute at all, where the way the dishwasher got loaded could actually be the thing that kicked off a fight. Not a five-minute fight, a real one, one that hangs over the whole house for a day, two days, maybe even three. And it was never just the dishwasher.

It could be the dishwasher, sure, but it could just as easily be how one of us parked the car, or how we ordered takeout, or how we made plans for the weekend, or we didn't, or shoes got left in the wrong spot by the door. Any of it, any one of these tiny, microscopic who cares things could become the spark, and then the spark became an argument, and the argument became a couple of bad days, and a couple bad days became the way things just were for a while.

If you'd pulled me aside back then and asked me what we were fighting about, I would've told you about the dishwasher. I would've told you about the parking. I would've made a real case about the shoes, and I would've completely believed it. But standing in that kitchen, years later, watching our son line up the forks, Julie and I could finally see the thing we couldn't see back then.

All those fights, all those little things, every single one of them, they had something in common, and it wasn't the dishwasher, and it wasn't the shoes, and it wasn't the car or the takeout or the weekend plans. What tied all of it together was that none of it was ever actually about the little thing.

That's what I wanna talk about today. Because if you're stuck where I used to be stuck, you're pouring everything you've got into the little things, and I need you to hear that you're working incredibly hard on exactly the wrong layer.

[00:05:45] Why You Can't Win the Little-Things Game

So let's start with the trap because you're in it, and you probably can't see the walls of it. The trap goes like this. You believe that somewhere out there is the right combination of little things that makes the fighting stop. If you can just load the dishwasher the way she likes it, and remember the things on the calendar, and text back fast enough, and not text the wrong thing, and read her mood right when you walk in the door, then you'll finally get a peaceful house. So you're out there collecting the little things like you're trying to crack a safe, the right sequence in the right order, and the lock pops open.

And I want you to notice what actually happens. You get one of them right, and there's no relief. There's just the next one. You fix the dishwasher, so now it's the laundry. You nail the timing, so now it's your tone. The bar doesn't sit still long enough for you to ever reach it. Every little thing you check off becomes the next little thing you missed.

That's not you failing at the game, that's the game because the game itself is rigged. And I don't mean she rigged it, I mean the whole idea is built on something that was never true, that if you could just become flawless, the marriage would be safe. I did a whole episode a while back on perfectionism, on chasing this flawless version of yourself that doesn't exist, and this is that same lie.

You think the problem is that you keep messing up the little things. The real situation is that you signed up to be perfect, and perfect was never on the menu. Nobody can do it, not you, not her, not me. And maybe you're sitting here thinking, "That's not me. I'm not the one scrambling to get everything right."

Maybe you're on the other side of it. You're the one keeping the list, watching every little thing she does and feeling it grate on you. Same rigged game, just from the other chair. And hold onto that because this whole thing runs both ways, and I'm gonna come back to it. So here's the relief, and I mean this.

Sit in it for a second. The reason you can't win the little things game is not that you're bad at it, it's that it can't be won by anybody. You've been pouring your whole self into a game that has no end, and the day you stop trying to win it is the day you can finally turn around and look at what's actually going on because it was never about the little things

[00:07:52] Why Everything That Person Does Bothers on You

So let me take you out of your marriage for a second because it's easier to see this when it's not about you and your wife. I want you to think of a person in your life who just annoys you. Not an enemy, just someone who gets under your skin. Everything they do bugs you. The way they talk, the way they chew, the way they're too helpful, or the way they're never helpful enough, and just sit there.

You feel tension in your body when their name comes up on your phone, or the thought of them crosses your mind, and if you're honest, they could walk in the door right now and say good morning, and that little voice in you would go, "Even that, even the way he said good morning."

Now, here's the question. Is it actually about the way they say good morning? Of course not. Nobody flinches at good morning. What you're reacting to isn't this morning at all. It's something older than that, and it usually runs one of two ways. The first way is that something happened in that relationship a long time ago, some hurt, some pattern, something that broke, and it never got dealt with, so now it sits underneath every single interaction, coloring all of it.

They can't do anything right anymore because you're not really responding to what they're doing, you're responding to what broke. But here's the second way, and I want you to sit with this one as well because it turns the finger back around at you. Maybe it's not about something they did to you at all.

Maybe it's about a boundary you never held. They crossed a line somewhere back there, and you didn't do anything about it. You let it slide. You wanted to keep the peace, play the nice guy, not make it a thing, so it never got said, and it didn't go away either. It just turned into a low-grade annoyance, a low-grade anger, a kind of passive aggression you've been carrying around ever since, not because of what they did, but because you never got assertive about your needs.

Either way, you end up in the same place. Everything they do now gets read through that one unresolved thing. So this is where I want to introduce you to an idea called the core negative image. It's kinda like the amplified cartoon version of a person, them at their absolute worst, on their worst day, frozen in place, like one of those caricature pictures you get drawn at an amusement park or by an artist on the sidewalk in New York City. The ones where the head is blown out of proportion and the teeth are 10 times bigger than they should be. And once that picture of that person sets in your head, you stop seeing the actual human in front of you.

You see the cartoon. Every move they make gets read as one more piece of proof that that cartoon is right. Most couples end up having some version of the same fight for 40 years, and the reason is that they're not really fighting each other anymore.

They're fighting the caricature they've each built of one another. That's the core negative image you hold of that person. So now bring it home. That annoying person? In a marriage that's gone sideways, that annoying person is your wife, and to her, it's you.

You've each got a frozen worst-case cartoon of one another running in the background, and every little thing, the dishwasher, the text, the tone, gets fed through it. That's why you cannot win on the little things. When there's a break in the relationship, every small thing gets read through the break.

[00:10:54] Why You Patch One Hole and Two More Open

So now we're at the real thing, the break, because that's what's underneath all of it. A hurt that got down into the foundation of the marriage that never got looked at, and now it's underneath everything, and every little thing that touches the surface presses right down on it. I want you to picture something with me.

Picture the walls of a brick home. Those walls are what hold everything up. They create the stability, the safety. They're what keeps the people inside protected from the weather, from the cold, from whatever's out there in the dark. And I need you to understand, this home is your marriage. Those walls are your marriage, and inside them lives everything that made you wanna build the thing in the first place, the love, the connection, the intimacy, the whole life the two of you share.

That's what the walls are protecting. Now, there are a lot of ways a home like that takes damage, but I want to walk you through two that bring men to me. The first is a wrecking ball, one enormous blow. In a marriage, the wrecking ball is the big betrayal. The affair is the obvious one. One event that the wall takes a massive hit all at once.

Everybody sees that one. It's loud, and I'm naming it because I wanna be clear that is not the one I'm talking about today. The one I'm talking about is the second kind. It's a chisel and a hammer. Not one blow, just a tiny tap, and another tiny tap, and another.

This is every little thing that turns into a fight. Each fight is a tap on the wall, and each tap leaves a tiny little hole. The dishwasher, tap. The text, tap. The tone when you walked in the door, tap. And here's what the holes do to you. Every time you look at your house, they're all you can see. The wall is covered in them, and all you wanna do all day, every day, is patch them up.

You can't see anything else. None of those taps look like it's causing any real damage on its own, and that's the whole problem. Each one is so small, you feel ridiculous making it a big thing, so you just keep patching. Now, here's what I really need you to get, because this is the turn of the whole episode.

A marriage with a solid foundation has the ability to survive both of these, the wrecking ball, the chisel and hammer, both of them. All homes get damaged. Every home does. But you patch them together, and they stay patched. The walls end up with a few patches here and there, and that's fine. That's a normal home.

Every home needs upkeep, and the two of you are committed to keeping it up. And even the wrecking ball, a solid foundation marriage can come back from that. It's a brutal amount of work to rebuild, but the foundation is still there, so the house can be rebuilt. So if that's not your experience, if you patch one hole and two more open up behind it, and it never stops, and no matter how much you do, you can never catch up, I need you to hear what's I'm actually telling you.

The problem was never the holes. You're not bad at patching. The problem is underneath. The foundation has shifted, and you can't see it because you've been looking at the walls the whole time, patching holes. And from where you're standing, all you can see is the little stuff on the surface. But from a distance, you step back, and you stop focusing on the little holes.

You see that the entire structure is leaning, and it's getting close to toppling over. That's the real story. The little fights aren't the cause. They're what a cracked foundation looks like from up where you're living life. A wall sitting on solid ground holds the patches you put in it. A wall sitting on a foundation that's been pulled out from under it can't hold anything, so you patch, and it opens, and you patch, and it opens forever.

And what cracked the foundation in the first place? It's the break we've been talking about, the hurt that got in a long time ago and never got repaired. It's the thing that turned you or her into the annoyed or annoying person. That's the wound, and it's been sitting there under everything, which is exactly why every little thing turning into a fight feels impossible to fix.

You've been working on the wrong layer this entire time. So let me bring you to what the work actually is, and I'm not going to sugarcoat this part because you don't need it softened. This work goes down, not more patching, down to the foundation itself, and that's hard, and it's slow, and it's uncomfortable because sometimes you have to tear into the walls just to get to the foundation underneath them.

You can't repair what you won't expose. So this isn't about touching up the marriage you've got. It's bigger than that. You're going all the way down to the bottom and rebuilding from there, which means in a real way, you are building a new marriage, not the one you've been holding together with patches, a new one on a foundation that can actually hold the weight of two people's lives.

[00:15:33] Why You Can't Outwork What's Underneath

So what is that work actually? Well, let me make it concrete because rebuild the foundation can sound like a slogan, and I don't want it to land like one. The work is not more doing. It's not a better dishwasher technique, a faster reply, a smoother tone. None of that reaches the wound. You could become the most efficient, agreeable, perfectly behaved husband on the block, and the wound would still be sitting down there in the dark, cracking the foundation under everything you build on top of it.

You can't outwork it. You've already been trying, and you already know it doesn't work. That's why you're listening to this. Going down means getting underneath the last fight and finding the actual hurt that's been driving it. It's the two of you sitting down and saying out loud the thing that never got said, the disappointment that got swallowed, the moment one of you stopped trusting that the other one had your back.

That's the foundation. You have to expose it before you can rebuild it. You don't paint over a crack like that. You dig down to it, you look at it honestly, and you rebuild from the bottom. It's slower, it's harder, and it's the only thing that holds. So the question I've got for you is simple.

Are you willing? Not willing to do more chores, willing to go down to the real thing and look at it. And I have to say the other half of this again, because like I told you at the start, this runs in both directions. So far, I've been talking like she's the one who's annoyed, and you're the one scrambling, but a lot of you are standing in the other spot.

You look at your wife, and everything she does annoys you. How she plans the day, how she loads the dishwasher, how she texts, the way she does the thing, the way she doesn't do the thing. And if that's you, that's not her failing some list of little things either. That's your wound talking. Same exact mechanism, just your side of it, and it's the same work.

Go down, find what actually broke, and look at it together. The real work isn't more effort on the surface. It's going down to the foundation, exposing what cracked it, and rebuilding.

[00:17:28] When the Little Things Are Finally Little Again

So I've been hard on you this whole episode, and I wanna end by showing you what all of this is for, because the digging isn't the point. The digging is how you get to the point, and I wanna be honest with you about what's on the other side because I think the honesty is the hopeful part.

When you finally go down and fix that foundation, that is not an easy repair. That is the work. That's the part that takes real time, day in and day out, what each of you brings to the table, what the two of you figure out together, usually with some help.

So I don't want you walking away thinking, "Okay, I... now I see it. This is gonna be quick. Let's just knock it out." Seeing the foundation is not the same thing as fixing the foundation. It's slow, and it's worth saying that out loud because the people who think it's going to be easy are the ones who give up the moment it isn't. But here's what changes. Once that foundation is solid, the little things go back to being little things, not gone, just little.

Cracks still show up. Holes still appear. That never stops completely because no home is maintenance free. The difference is that now when you patch one, it stays patched. You fix the one hole knowing that there aren't 10 more about to open up behind it because the structure underneath it is finally holding, so the repair actually finishes.

It's not this bottomless thing anymore where you can never catch up. You handle it, and you get on with your life together, and a lot of the small stuff on the solid foundation never even becomes a fight. It's just a disagreement, a miscommunication. Sometimes it's the kind of thing you work through that actually leaves the two of you stronger on the other side of it, closer than you were before it ever came up.

That's what a healthy marriage looks like. It's not a marriage with no problems. It's a marriage where the problems are the right size because the thing holding it all up can take them. That's where this goes, not a flawless marriage. There's no such thing, and chasing one is what got you stuck in the first place.

A stable one. A home where the little things are finally just little things again, and the two of you are standing on something that holds.

[00:19:29] Awareness, Action, Accountability

So let's get our hands dirty and actually do something about this broken foundation.

Here is your awareness question, action steps, and accountability for this week. Let's start with awareness, because nothing changes until you can see it. I want you to think back to the last fight, the real one, the dumb one, the one over the dishwasher or the text or the timing, and instead of re-litigating who was right, ask yourself a different question.

Strip the little thing away completely, and underneath that fight, can you name the hurt that neither of you have actually looked at? What's the crack in the foundation that every little thing keeps pressing down on? You might not have the answer today, but sit with that question anyway. That's where the wound is.

Now, here are the action steps you can actually take this week.

First, stop adding to the pile of little things. When the next one flares up, don't reach for the quick patch. Pause and ask yourself, "What is this really about?"

Second, name one. Pick one foundational hurt you know has not been resolved in your marriage and decide to say it out loud to her gently as a real thing that you'd like to talk about and work through together.

And third, if the crack in the foundation is bigger than the two of you can repair on your own, get help, a good counselor, a coach, a room full of men doing the same work. Fixing the foundation was never meant to be a solo job, and needing help isn't a sign of weakness. It's how the rebuild actually happens.

And for accountability, if you're looking for support in repairing your marriage, that's exactly what we do inside of Better Husband Academy. It's where men come to do this for real, to stop patching up the surface, get honest about the wound under the same old fights, and do the harder work alongside other guys who actually get it.

So if this one landed for you, come join us. Go to betterhusbandacademy.com, or just click the link in the show notes. I'd love to see you in there.

[00:21:18] Closing Takeaway

So let me leave you with the one thing I want you both to carry out of this. The fights were never the problem. I know they feel like the problem.

The dishwasher, the texts, the timing, the shoes by the door. They feel like the whole war, but they're just the little holes in the wall. The real thing is the wound underneath, the one that shifted the foundation while you ran around patching the surface. So you can stop trying to patch all them up at once.

You don't have to be perfect. You never could have been, and it was never the assignment. The work in front of you is harder than being perfect, but it's the kind of hard that actually leads somewhere. You go down together to the thing that broke. You look at it, you talk about it, and you rebuild from the bottom up.

And on the other side of that, past all the little things, past the version of each other you've each got frozen in your heads, there's a home that finally holds. Two people standing on something solid, and the little things finally just little things again.

That's the marriage you've been trying to get to this whole time. You were just working on the wrong layer.

Thank you for listening to this episode and being willing to look at the deeper issues with me. That's not an easy thing to do, and most people are never willing to do it. You're listening to Better Husband. I'm Angelo Santiago, and I'll see you on the next one.