From Conflict to Harmony: Navigating Romantic Relationships

Conflict Recovery in Romantic Relationships
Conflict in a romantic relationship is inevitable and how well partners resolve conflict between each other is crucial to understanding how relationships function and maintain successfulness. In past years, researchers have not focused a lot on how romantic partners recover from hurtful conflict discussions between each other. It has been proven that conflict management and recovery in relationships are consistent with the quality of early care that the partner received as a child, which leads to how an individual self-regulates in later years (Salvatore, Kuo, Steele, Simpson, & Collins, 2011). According to Simon and Furman (2010), studies are flourishing with research that shows that a child with

Those who possess autonomy in romantic relationships tend to obtain the ability to hurdle over obstacles and challenges that approach throughout a romantic relationship and see conflicts as opportunities to improve relationships rather than give up on them (Knee, Lonsbary, Canevello, & Patrick, 2005). In a relationship, whether it be platonic or romantic, conflicts and arguments are always going to occur and sometimes benefits the relationship by alleviating the escalation of built up tension and conflict (Aloia & Solomon, 2014). While focusing on romantic relationships, it is important to dig deeper into the course of conflict recovery, which includes how and why it occurs. The purpose of this paper is to explore how partners in a romantic relationship recover from conflict efficiently can detect if a relationship is going to be successful or unsuccessful. In order to examine conflict recovery in romantic relationships, studies that focus on success rates of relationships due to conflict recovery will be reviewed. The literature being reviewed should show the tie between the successfulness or unsuccessfulness of a relationship with how each partner recovers from conflict. To begin, different research literature that focuses on conflict in relationships will

From gathering information from a variety of research articles, conflict can be collectively defined as an argument between individuals while conflict recovery is a self-regulatory process, which is the ability to put aside interpersonal conflict in order to achieve other goals. Conflict can occur between romantic partners from a variety of sources such as stress, money, sex, jealousy, values, beliefs, etc. During conflict recovery and while self-regulating, there are consequences that will help the quality and satisfaction of the relationship after conflict (Salvatore, Kuo, Steele, Simpson, & Collins, 2011). Research has shown that the use of conflict styles are much more important rather than the actual content of the argument itself (Bertoni & Bodenmann, 2010). According to Thomas Kilmann, there are five various types of conflict styles that people partake in; accommodating, avoiding, collaborating, competing, and compromising (Riasi & Asadzadeh, 2015). Thomas Kilmann discovered these different conflict styles to describe how each individual handles conflict. Bertoni and Bodenmann’s (2010) research has shown that the satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction between couples stems from the styles of conflict that one uses when in an argument. Conflict, conflict recovery, and conflict styles can all factor in together to help