What is a relationship pattern, and how do you recognise yours?

A relationship pattern is the same sequence of reactions between two people, and it runs regardless of the trigger. The topic changes, the movement stays. That is why arguments in stuck relationships feel so familiar, even though each time they are supposedly about something different.

This page is the starting point for everything I have written on the subject. If you only read one text of mine, make it this one.

The short definition

A relationship pattern has four parts:

1. A trigger. Usually something small. A tone of voice, a glance at the phone, a sentence that sounds ten years old.
2. Your reaction. To you it feels necessary, not chosen.
3. His reaction to your reaction. To him it feels just as necessary.
4. The outcome that neither of you wanted, and that supplies the trigger for next time.

The crucial point is this: in this sequence, both of you do exactly what, from your own point of view, is supposed to save the situation. And it is precisely this behaviour that sets off in the other person what you were actually trying to prevent.

That is why trying harder does not help. Trying harder usually means more of the same.

How to tell it is a pattern and not a problem

There are three fairly clear signs.

You can predict the argument. Not the topic, but the course it takes. You know at what point he will turn away. You know which sentence you are about to say, and you say it anyway.

The topic is interchangeable. This week your mother-in-law, next week the holiday, the week after the housework. If you could solve every topic and still end up at the same point, then the topic was never the topic.

It always ends the same way. One of you leaves the room. Or there is a reconciliation that feels too quick. Or you both go quiet until it fades. The same ending, for years.

By comparison, you can recognise a genuine practical problem by the fact that it is gone once it is solved. You decide who takes the car, and then it is settled. If it carries on after the solution, it was never about the car.

The patterns I come across most often

There is no definitive list, but I see four sequences again and again.

She moves closer, he pulls back. The most common pattern of all. She brings something up because she wants connection. He senses criticism and goes quiet. His silence feels like indifference, so she becomes more insistent. The more insistent she becomes, the further he withdraws.

Both pull back. The quiet version. Neither brings anything up, because both know how it will end. From the outside it looks peaceful. Inside it is the opposite.

Both push. Two people who get loud, and for whom every conversation becomes a competition over who has suffered more.

One carries, the other functions. One organises, thinks ahead, holds things together. The other does what he is told. This does not lead to loud arguments, but to exhaustion and a quiet resentment that at some point becomes very loud.

A woman once described her marriage to me in one sentence that I have never forgotten: “The marriage is one-sided, one loves, the other functions.”

Why you cannot see your pattern

Because you are standing inside it.

Each of you sees only your own half, and always as a reaction. You see: I keep asking because he does not answer. He sees: I say nothing because otherwise she will tear me apart. Both of you are right, and both of you are describing a circle from the wrong side.

There is something else that is rarely mentioned. Above a certain level of arousal, the body switches over. Your pulse rises, and the part of you that can listen and weigh things up is no longer reachable. You are not being stubborn at that point, you are physically no longer able to have a conversation.

This is exactly the state in which most couples try to talk about their pattern. It cannot work.

Where patterns come from

Not from the two of you. For many people, that is the biggest relief.

Each of you brings from your family of origin a basic assumption about what happens when you need something. In some families, people respond. In others, it gets ignored. In others again, it leads to an argument that lasts for days.

These assumptions keep running in the background, even thirty years later, even in people who can laugh about them. The pattern between you is often the collision of two such assumptions.

That does not mean your parents are to blame for your marriage. It only means: what you do is not character. It is habit, and habits can be changed.

In families with a migration background, there is often another layer on top. What counts as respect in one family counts as distance in the other. What is closeness in one family is intrusion in the other. I naturally bring this into my work, because for a great many couples it is half of the explanation.

Finding your pattern in four steps

You need about twenty minutes for this, and an evening when nothing is escalating.

Step 1: Take your last three arguments. Write down the topics. Then cross them out. They do not matter.

Step 2: Describe what each of you does. Only behaviour, no interpretation. “I keep asking” rather than “I try to get through to him”. “He goes into the kitchen” rather than “he does not care”.

Step 3: Build the circle. What do you do when he does that? What does he do when you do that? You will notice that after two rounds you are back at the beginning. That is your pattern.

Step 4: Give it a name. It sounds silly and it is the most effective part of the whole exercise. Couples who give their pattern a name can call it out in the middle of an argument. “We’re in it again.” This one sentence interrupts more than any technique.

What can change and what cannot

You will not delete your pattern. It will probably stay with you for a lifetime, because it is made of two life stories.

What changes is the speed. At first you notice it afterwards, often days later. Then you notice it while it is happening. At some point you notice it before it starts.

That is the realistic goal. Not to become a couple that never argues, but a couple that finds its way out again more quickly.

Where this does not apply

Everything described here assumes that both of you basically mean well.

It does not apply where there is violence, physical or verbal. It does not apply if you are systematically put down, controlled or kept away from the people who matter to you. There is no circle there that two people are part of. There is one person who acts, and one who endures.

In Germany, the Violence against Women Support Hotline (Hilfetelefon Gewalt gegen Frauen) is available around the clock and free of charge on 116 016.

What I would like you to take with you

When I started working with couples, I looked for the problem. Today I look for the movement.

The difference is huge. A problem has someone to blame. A movement has two people involved and no culprit.

And honestly, that is the best news I can bring to couples.