The Night We Opened Love More, Fight Less Instead of Arguing

It was a Tuesday night in March, about halfway through year 24 of our marriage, and Glen and I were having the same argument we had been having for months. He had come home at 7:40 again, after another fourteen-hour week of field work, and the dinner I had saved for him sat in the microwave. We did not yell. We did the quieter, worse thing. We talked about the water heater, the recycling, and whether his mother should book her flight for the second week of May. Then we stopped talking. That silence was still there the next morning, and it is why I finally ordered Gina Senarighi's workbook, Love More, Fight Less.

The argument underneath the silence was money, and underneath the money was his work weeks. Glen is a land surveyor, fifty-eight years old, and for thirty-one years he has been the kind of man who finishes the job even when the job eats the evening. I retired from the middle school library the year before, and suddenly our days did not match. Mine were quiet and mine. His were fourteen hours and his. We were two people sharing a house and a mortgage and almost nothing else.

We had tried things, and I think that part matters, because when people tell you to just talk, they skip what happens when you sit down and nothing comes out. We tried date nights, which turned into logistics meetings by the second glass of iced tea. We tried a deck of question cards a friend gave us, but it felt like flashcards, and Glen said so, gently, and I agreed. We tried one bestselling book that read like a textbook, all models and diagrams, and we both put it down after two chapters. None of it was bad. None of it matched us.

Then a librarian friend from the old district, someone I trust with actual problems, told me about a workbook by Gina Senarighi called Love More, Fight Less. She said it was the only couples book she had ever worked through twice. I ordered it the same week, and then I did not tell Glen. I left it in the bag for three days, because I was afraid of the look on his face, the one that says, here we go again.

The night we opened it, we were both tired and both defensive. It was a Thursday, April 4, because I wrote the date in the margin. I put the workbook on the kitchen table between my mug and his mug, and I said, I do not want to fight about the water heater tonight. I want to try this for twenty minutes. If it is terrible, we can quit, and I will never bring it up again. Glen looked at the workbook, then at me, and he said, twenty minutes.

The quietest thing we did all year was sit down with a pencil and let the workbook ask the questions we were too tired to ask ourselves.

The first twenty minutes were not smooth. The workbook opens with a section about what you want from your relationship, and I wrote, to be heard, without having to think about it. Glen wrote, to not feel like every conversation is a performance review. I laughed, because it was exactly the right phrase, and then I almost cried, because it was also the truest thing he had said in months. We did not fix anything that night. We just said two true sentences out loud.

What surprised me was the structure. Gina's book does not tell you to communicate better. It hands you a page, a question, a space to write. There is something about a pencil and a line on paper that slows a person down. Glen, who cannot sit through a movie without checking the weather, sat through three sections that first week. He underlined something. I have seen him underline a survey map in thirty-one years of marriage, and I had never seen him underline a book.

Over the next month, we made it a Sunday evening thing. Same table, same two mugs, one workbook, one pencil. Some weeks we did two pages. Some weeks we did one question and then watched a show. The rule we made up ourselves was that we could stop anytime, and knowing we could stop is probably why we kept going. By the end of April we had worked through the first half of the book, and the money argument had not disappeared, but it had changed shape. It became a conversation about what his long weeks cost us, not a fight about who was failing whom.

I am not a therapist, and I want to be clear about that. This workbook is not a substitute for professional help. If your marriage is in crisis, or there is any abuse, or anyone's safety or mental health is at stake, please talk to a licensed counselor. That is not a disclaimer I am adding to be careful. It is the truth. What I can tell you is what happened at our table: we started hearing each other again, in small doses, on purpose.

One Sunday in May, Glen looked up from the page and said, this is the first thing we have done together that was not about the house or the kids or the money in a long time. The kids have been out of the house for years. That one sentence told me we had both been feeling the same empty space, and that the workbook had given us a way to sit in it together instead of around it.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If we were sitting at my kitchen table, I would tell you to lower the stakes. Do not decide on the way there that this workbook has to save your marriage, because that pressure will ruin the first three sittings. I would tell you to set a timer for twenty minutes and to agree out loud that quitting is allowed. I would tell you to use a pencil, because pencils erase, and knowing you can erase makes it easier to write a clumsy true thing. And I would tell you what my librarian friend told me: the best couples work is the work you do in the same room, on purpose, more than once.