Business and Life Advice: Fight With People You Care About

The most important lesson of my youth was how to handle conflict in relationships. I used to avoid conflict and discomfort as much as I could. I was so polite, I let people do things I didn’t like, until I was so full of resentment that basic interaction with them became impossible. After I reached my tipping point, I would avoid the person until the relationship was dead.

That’s how I lost my most important relationships. I reached another tipping point later, when I had experienced so many bad breakups, I stopped bothering with people. After writhing in loneliness and trauma for years, I finally came to the most important realization of my life.

Fighting is how you preserve relationships. Fighting is how you smooth out friction. And when you fight a lot, you learn to fight well. Your social skills and confidence will improve vastly, as will your negotiation abilities. You will gradually become an honest person with solid morals, because you can’t be fighting with people you’re holding secrets from.

It’s paradoxical on surface level, but being confrontational in relationships creates stronger bonds. You also weed out weaker bonds with weak people who cannot handle honesty. When you assume this direction, soon enough, all your social connections will be something better than those mentally exhausting diplomatic relations where you’re constantly dodging trigger words and trigger topics and always keeping a social mask.

Truly solid relationships require honesty. Yes, speaking the truth will lead to conflict. Better things will come out of that conflict.