Usually only one of you takes it upon themselves to resolve the arguments.
Which is in fact the reason they do not get resolved.
A clear division of roles and labour is fine if you are a technology company. But if you are two people who are supposed to love and live and love again, locking yourselves into a role is one of the most damaging things you can do to yourselves.
Because then we are not genuinely trying to solve a painful problem in order to get somewhere better.
We are conducting a ceremony. An argument ceremony. Each side knows their part in the play, and the ritual simply repeats itself according to the accepted rules.
We need to talk.
Leave me alone.
Do you want to stay like this? We have to talk.
Fine, what do you want?
Listen…
And so on. And so on.
And do not expect your partner to be grateful for your peacemaking efforts and to respond with a gesture of his own.
You have trained him that responsibility for ending the unpleasantness is exclusively yours, and from his point of view he is doing the most sensible thing available — nothing.
He expects you to be the forest ranger who gets you both down out of the tree.
And the truth? He is entirely right.
And the two of you are jointly maintaining a comfortable lie: that this relationship matters more to one side than the other.
You had better hope that is a lie. Because if this relationship genuinely does matter far more to one side, it stopped being a relationship some time ago.
The repair is not that the peacemaker should stop. It is that they should stop once, deliberately, and tolerate the silence that follows — which will be long, and genuinely awful, and is the only thing that has ever renegotiated this.