Most couples assume they already know what the danger signs look like.
Raised voices. Name-calling. Threats that get made and later taken back. The drama is easy to read as evidence of a relationship in trouble. So when a couple makes it through year one without much of that — when they have mostly managed to keep things calm — there is often a quiet, private relief. A sense that the foundations must be solid. That the absence of visible conflict means something good.
It may mean nothing at all.
A 16-year study of 373 couples, one of the longest investigations of marital conflict ever conducted, found that whether or not couples reported any fighting in the first year of their marriage had no effect on whether they had divorced by year sixteen. Not statistically. Not meaningfully. None.
What predicted it was something much harder to see.
What the research actually found
The data comes from the Early Years of Marriage Study, run out of the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institutes of Health. Researchers followed 373 newlywed couples, interviewing them four times across sixteen years — in years one, three, seven, and sixteen of their marriages. By the end of the study period, 46 percent of the couples had divorced.
Lead researcher Kira Birditt and her colleagues were looking for patterns. Not just whether couples fought, but how. What strategies did people use when conflict arose? Did those strategies change over time? And which behaviors, present early in a marriage, most reliably predicted whether the couple would still be together a decade and a half later?
The absence-of-conflict finding stopped the researchers short. An astonishing 29 percent of husbands and 21 percent of wives reported no conflicts at all in the first year of their marriage — yet that peacefulness offered no protection. The couples who reported no early conflict divorced at roughly the same rates as everyone else.
What did predict divorce was not the presence of conflict but the shape of it.
The pattern researchers had to watch carefully to see
The finding that emerged most clearly was not about loud conflict. It was about a particular mismatch — a dynamic that is easy to miss because, on the surface, it can look like one person simply being calm.
A particularly toxic pattern is when one spouse deals with conflict constructively — calmly discussing the situation, listening to their partner’s point of view, genuinely trying to understand what the other person is feeling — and the other spouse withdraws.
That asymmetry. One person reaching toward resolution, the other pulling back.
Spouses who deal with conflicts constructively may view their partner’s habit of withdrawing as a lack of investment in the relationship, rather than an attempt to cool down. The research bore this out: year-one conflict behaviors — both individual and relational — were meaningful predictors of divorce rates sixteen years later.
The couple who yells and slams doors is, in some sense, still engaged. The couple where one person keeps trying to reach the other — and the other keeps going somewhere else — is running a quieter but more corrosive problem.
Why withdrawal is so hard to recognize as a problem
Withdrawal does not look like conflict. That is part of what makes it so difficult to flag, in a relationship and in research.
The person who goes quiet, who changes the subject, who becomes suddenly busy or suddenly reasonable in a way that shuts the conversation down — they are often described, including by themselves, as the steady one. The one who does not escalate. The peacekeeper.
But what the other person experiences is something different: the feeling of raising something that matters and watching it be received with absence. The sense that the relationship cannot hold certain conversations. That some doors, once opened, get quietly closed before anything can pass through them.
Over time, the person doing the reaching tends to either escalate — trying to generate a response, any response — or they stop reaching entirely. Both outcomes damage the relationship, though in different ways and on different timelines.
This dynamic maps closely onto what psychologist John Gottman identified in his decades of couples research: the four communication patterns that, when present during conflict, predict relationship dissolution with striking reliability. Gottman called them criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling — the last of which is withdrawal under another name. Contempt is the single greatest predictor of divorce, but stonewalling is its quieter companion: the communication that says, without words, that the conversation is not worth having.
The couples who thrive are not the ones who never have conflict. They are the ones who have learned to fight differently.
The difference between how conflict is managed and how much conflict there is
This distinction — between conflict frequency and conflict quality — cuts against something most people believe about relationships.
The common assumption is that more conflict means more risk. That couples who argue regularly are in more danger than couples who rarely argue. That a relationship with little visible tension must be, on some level, healthier than one with more.
The Birditt study challenges that directly. What matters is not the quantity of disagreement but whether both people, when disagreement arises, are oriented toward resolution or away from it.
A couple who argues regularly but both stay in the room — who get angry, come back, repair — is building something in those cycles. The repetition of conflict-and-return creates a kind of trust: the knowledge that the relationship can hold difficulty without fracturing. That the other person will still be there once the conversation has passed.
A couple who almost never argues but only because one person consistently exits — or both people have agreed, tacitly, to avoid certain subjects — is not stable. They are maintaining an equilibrium that has never been tested. And equilibriums that have never been tested tend to fail badly when something finally tests them.
What changes over time, and what doesn’t
One of the more nuanced findings from the Early Years of Marriage Study involves how conflict behaviors shifted across the sixteen years of the study — and where they stayed the same.
Wives were less likely to use destructive strategies or withdraw over time, while husbands’ use of these behaviors stayed the same through the years. The researchers offered a few possible interpretations: that the problems prompting wives to withdraw may have resolved; or that relationships may be more central to women’s lives than to men’s, prompting greater responsiveness to what is and isn’t working.
The asymmetry here is worth sitting with. If one person’s conflict behaviors become more constructive over time while the other’s remain fixed at their year-one baseline, the distance between them may actually grow rather than shrink — even as the relationship becomes more familiar and more settled in other respects.
Familiarity does not automatically generate better conflict. It can generate deeper avoidance, as the areas that have never been successfully navigated become increasingly off-limits.
What the study is really measuring
There is a version of this research that gets summarized as: fight nicely and you will be fine. That is not quite what it is saying.
What it is measuring, more precisely, is whether both people in a relationship are willing to be present during difficulty. Whether conflict — when it arises — is something they move through together or something that one of them exits while the other stays behind.
For a broader look at what long-term relationships require beyond conflict management, the video below is worth watching.
That question — what love becomes when the initial electricity is gone and people are left with the actual work of staying — is not separate from the question of conflict. They are the same question, looked at from different angles.
The thing researchers had to watch carefully to see
When Birditt and her team observed couples across sixteen years, the finding that emerged was not legible in a single argument. It was not visible in whether voices were raised or silences fell. It required watching couples across time, across different seasons of a marriage, to see the pattern that kept appearing in the relationships that eventually ended.
Not whether they fought.
Whether, when things got hard, both people stayed in it.
That is a small thing to look for. It is also, apparently, one of the more reliable things researchers have found to look at.
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