Masters of Love: Lasting relationships come down to kindness, generosity (2014)

Self-control and compassion don't make disagreement or bad feelings over important things disappear. They are still present. The "never fight" relationships (not just marriage, but also friendships) are either "we do things as separately as possible" or one of the two ceased to talk about his or her issues. The latter are then "I had not idea partner is unhappy and bam shock divorce" situations.

The easiest way how to keep calm is not to care. It does not have to be screaming match, but if you never disagree about things like child raising, it is likely that one did checked out.

> there is a trend which suggests Americans are growing less happy each year. So maybe in the interim of 4 years the world.

So are you saying that Amricans = World? Please (for example) go to Spain and look about how happiness works differently than America.

If both partners disagree about a core value (and no mutually agreeable compromise is possible), the rational thing to do is either separate or for one party to accept the disagreement and move on. Repeatedly arguing about something serves absolutely no purpose, as there's extremely little chance of one party changing the other's mind this way (as is the case for angry arguments in general). As the Einstein quote goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again but expecting a different result.

Stress and sleep deprivation indeed make this more difficult, but these are things that can be eliminated, if not easily: case study, people who aren't sleep derived or stressed (everybody's probably met at least one).

>Self-control and compassion don't make disagreement or bad feelings over important things disappear.

Compassion and empathy make it easier to see why other people feel/think about a matter in a particular way, and hence easier to sympathise with their point of view, which in turn reduces bad feelings about it. Self-control helps us not get angry about things we've accepted (if we haven't chosen to separate, and can't convince our partner to accept our view, then we've implicitly accepted them having their view), as we can make our brain see how silly/irrational it is to get angry about something we've agreed to, reducing bad feelings.

> It does not have to be screaming match, but if you never disagree about things like child raising, it is likely that one did checked out.

I agree disagreement is practically unavoidable, but a disagreement need not become a fight. Getting angry is a terrible way to resolve disagreements. People manage to disagree about things they care about at work without getting physically angry, as they know getting angry will probably harm their case.

When we first started working together we got in a lot of fights and put our relationship at risk. We realized that we had to figure it out or our relationship would break.

Around the same time this happened, we were incredibly lucky to have attended a free workshop called Founder's Communication (done free by innerspace.org highly highly recommended for anyone in a long term committed relationship, not just founders) which opened up our eyes and helped us improve our communication to the point where we realized that almost without exception, our arguments and fights were triggered by things that had nothing to do with what we were arguing about.

We discovered that "99%" of the time, the cause of our fights were that we were hungry, sleepy, in pain, or worse, a combination of any of those. Then we first started getting in the habit of trying to pause fights as early as possible and ask each other/ourselves if we were hungry, sleepy or in pain, then if either of us was, we would try to address the issue first (get some rest, food or comfort). Then we realized, why not prevent these things altogether? We could easily plan to avoid hunger and sleepiness, pain is harder but also a lot more unusual.

Now we are so aware of this stuff that we hardly ever fight, and whenever we end up saying something bad/mean in the heat of the moment, we are able to understand that we didn't really mean it, forgive ourselves quickly and move on.

As a side note, this is really just an application of the realization researchers have made, that verbal communication only conveys a small fraction of what we are trying to say, the rest is all body language. Watch out about thinking too much of the meaning of what anyone has said to you. Highly recommend reading the book The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox.