Blog 4: Conflict Management

When learning about conflict management, I found that my new relationship has the conflict type of Volatile.  Volatile conflict type has many frequent but passionate arguments.   One of the arguments that Jacob and I have a ton revolves around trust and cheating.  With starting a long distance relationship and since we have been friends since forever, we know how each other are with girls/guys and both like to flirt a lot.  I have a lot more trust for him than he does for me because he knows that I am far away at college and that there are a lot of cute college boys.  Our arguments are typically over texts but the one that we had while he was here was on and off yelling and then frequent make ups and saying sorry.  I feel that at this point in our relationship, arguing over the one thing is okay rather than having a whole ton of issues.  I feel that also if we didn’t know each other’s past so well trust also wouldn’t be an issue.

I love to use fight tactics.  I think that I have used them all.  I have used sabotage when I’m upset so that I don’t have to do something that he wants to do.  For example, Jacob ditched me one night and said that we could just hang out on Sunday.  Well I didn’t want to do that so I purposely went into work that day to paint walls.  I have used fight evading tactic a few weeks ago when I got mad also when he didn’t want to hang out at night.  I decided that I didn’t want to wait till noon Sunday when he woke up to talk about our fight from the night before so I left early to go back to school and didn’t respond to texts or calls.  I have also used mixed messages when I don’t want to discuss a topic.  I like to say I’m fine and just blow it off.  Finally, one of my favorite tactics is the gunny sacking and kitchen sinking.  I love to bring back up the past to remind them that they have been wrong before.  For example, my ex-boyfriend could never remember dates and he forgot my birthday and always forgot our anniversary date.  Every time he would forget I'd remind him that he forgot my birthday and forgot his wallet on our first date and I would keep bringing it up.  I love this tactic because I can remind them of every other time they messed up and it was their fault.