In every argument there is a topic, and then there is what the argument is actually about. They are almost never the same thing.

I work with bright, successful people. And yet many keep having the same arguments — the kind most of us figured out in childhood. Share. Be kind. Compromise. Don't spew your feelings all over someone who wasn't asking for them.

So why do adults who know better keep having these arguments? Because the argument isn't the point. It's a stand-in. A symbol for something else going on underneath.

What's Actually Happening

Power struggles. Fear. Insecurity. A need to be loved, but a terror of saying it plainly. Being so disconnected from our own emotional world that we can't name what we're actually experiencing, let alone make sense of what our partner is experiencing. Wounds from decades ago, finally finding an outlet through the person who happened to be nearby — who had nothing to do with any of it. Projection: assigning bad motives or intentions to our partner that are actually our own.

A client said to me recently: "I just realized my problem hasn't mainly been that I feel unloved by my partner. My problem is allowing myself to admit how much I need her love, seeing myself as someone who actually needs this intimate connection to another person. My problem is that I'm terrified."

Wow.

That's a person in a position to finally change something, because for the first time, they're looking in the right direction.

The Most Honest Thing a Person Can Say

"Turns out, after all these years, it's not her. It's me."

A statement like that doesn't just fall out of someone's mouth casually. They said it in thirty seconds. It took them decades to see it.

So often we are not living authentically — not with our partners, not even with ourselves. We are in many ways noble tragedies: risking everything in our bids for love and connection, but paralyzed by fear and by the sheer depth of what we need. Terrified to find and face the truth in ourselves, so we keep acting as if the problem is whatever topic we happen to be clashing over today.

The answer to this, as strange as it sounds, is love. Not as a feeling, but as a practice. The willingness to turn toward the truth about who you are and what you need, even when it's inconvenient, even when it's scary — and then extend the same grace to the person across from you.

Which, of course, is also our greatest problem.