The Art of Non-Standard Conflict: Thinking About It Again

Editorial note: This article began as my interpretation of a 2009 post by my friend Thomas Diener called "Rules of Conflict: Management and Resolution." Thomas ended that post by explicitly inviting people to critique, dissect, add to, or even ridicule his ideas because he expected them to evolve through discussion. I love that. I wrote about his framework in 2024, and now I've thought about it again. Some of his ideas have become more useful to me with time. Some have gotten more complicated. A few need amendments.

Thomas Gave Me a Framework, Not a Commandment

One of the things I appreciate most about Thomas's original post is that it doesn't treat conflict as a single thing requiring a single response. Before deciding what to do, he asks us to consider how serious the conflict actually is, what resources are available, what is at stake, and what outcome we're trying to accomplish.

He distinguishes matters of life and death from serious priorities and matters of principle. He reminds us that not every adversary is an enemy, not every conflict is equally threatening, and not every principle needs to be defended as though civilization will collapse if we concede an inch. He also gives us multiple possible responses, including doing nothing, fighting back, withdrawing, talking, and what he calls Aiki: accepting the situation, harmonizing with it, redirecting its energy, and leading it somewhere else.

That is much more interesting to me now than the version I wrote in 2024, which flattened much of it into a generic message about handling conflict with grace and turning tension into growth. Conflict doesn't always produce growth. Sometimes it produces clarity, damage, repair, or the realization that the person on the other side is someone you shouldn't keep trying to build harmony with. The useful question isn't whether conflict is good or bad. It's what this particular conflict is asking of you.

Not All Conflict Is a Contest

One of Thomas's lines has aged particularly well for me: there is nothing wrong with winning, provided what you're winning is a contest. Not all conflicts are contests.

That distinction becomes much more important when the person on the other side is someone you intend to continue loving, living with, working with, or building community with. You can win an argument and absolutely destroy the thing you were supposedly arguing to protect. You can prove that your facts were correct while making it impossible for the other person to safely tell you what they think next time. You can force an apology without changing anyone's understanding of what happened. A victory can be technically complete and relationally catastrophic.

Thomas calls Pyrrhic victories losses, and I think that's right. But I would add that sometimes the opposite problem exists too: we become so afraid of damaging the relationship that we prioritize the appearance of peace over confronting something that actually needs to change.

I learned that distinction rather dramatically through two conflicts involving the same friend.

A Conflict I Thought I Had Already Resolved

Years ago, I ran a Facebook community where femmes could talk privately about things happening in our local community that they needed help processing. The boundary was simple: what happened in the group stayed in the group. In particular, screenshots were not to be taken outside the space and shared with people who weren't part of it.

Someone my husband was friends with was also part of the group. This person was non-gender-conforming in their own particular way, and I'm intentionally leaving identifying details vague. They didn't know that one of my closest friends, who presented fairly femme but used she, they, and he pronouns interchangeably, was non-binary.

A conversation happened in the group. My husband's friend interpreted some advice through a gendered lens, took screenshots of the private conversation, and posted them publicly on Facebook while mocking what had been said. My husband joined in. My friend found the public post and brought it to me.

As the group admin, the first part was straightforward. My husband's friend had knowingly violated the central rule of the space, so I removed them from the group and told them they could return after six months. They ultimately chose not to because, from their perspective, they had come to the group looking for help and ended up punished for how they responded to what happened there.

I understood why that felt unfair to them, and I could empathize with how they'd arrived at that interpretation. I still enforced the boundary because understanding why someone did something doesn't necessarily change the consequences of doing it. Empathy doesn't require me to pretend the violation didn't happen.

Peace Isn't Necessarily Harmony

My husband's involvement was much harder. This was one of only a handful of actual fights we've had during our marriage. I was furious not just because he'd said unkind things about my friend, but because the whole interaction felt like mean-girl behavior that directly contradicted the way I was trying to exist in the world.

I was trying to build communities around kindness and support. Here was my spouse publicly participating in mocking someone I loved. His behavior didn't exist in isolation from me because we shared relationships and a community. Whether he intended it or not, what he was doing undermined both my friendship and the values I was trying to represent.

So we fought about it. I told him what I thought he'd done, why it mattered, and why I found the behavior ethically unacceptable. He heard me in a way that went far beyond simply deciding that his wife was angry and he should avoid doing that particular thing again. The conflict appears to have changed how he thinks about the pleasure people sometimes take in somebody else's misfortune. He became much more aware that the casual glee of mocking someone can have real consequences, especially when the person being mocked isn't an abstraction but someone connected to your actual life.

That fight was unpleasant, and avoiding it certainly would have been more peaceful in the moment, but it also would have preserved the problem. That's why I'm much more suspicious now of using peace and harmony interchangeably. Sometimes peace means a problem has been resolved, and sometimes it just means nobody has said anything about it yet.

You Cannot Resolve a Conflict You Don't Know You're Having

My friend knew that I had removed the person who violated the group rules, and I told her I would handle the situation with my husband. What I didn't do was report the details of that conversation back to her. From my perspective, I'd handled it. I'd gone directly to bat for her, confronted my husband, and had one of the most significant fights of our marriage over the way he'd treated her.

Months later, she and I went to lunch, and she cried while telling me that she'd felt I didn't care about her because I "hadn't done anything" about what happened. I was shocked. I explained that I had done something, a lot actually, but afterward I also felt betrayed. She had apparently spent months believing that I might have watched my husband publicly mock one of my closest friends, told her I'd handle it, and then simply done nothing. I had thought our history together had earned more trust than that.

Looking back, I can also see the communication gap. I thought trust meant, I told you I would handle it, so trust that I did. She apparently needed enough information about what "handling it" looked like to know that I'd actually defended her. Neither of us knew the other person's expectation until months of hurt had accumulated around it.

Thomas wrote that we do no one a favor by letting a conflict go unresolved. I agree, but I'd add something now that I didn't understand when I first read his rules: you cannot resolve a conflict you don't know you're having. From my perspective, the conflict had been addressed. From hers, an injury to the friendship was still actively unfolding. There was nothing for me to consciously resolve because I didn't know it existed.

Synthesis Doesn't Always Mean Reconciliation

Thomas writes that the purpose of conflict is synthesis: thesis plus antithesis creates something new. I still find that idea enormously useful, but I don't think synthesis necessarily produces reconciliation.

That lunch with my friend did create new understanding. I finally understood why she'd felt abandoned, and she learned that I had defended her much more forcefully than she'd known. The missing information became visible. But the new information didn't simply erase the conflict. It gave me new information too. I now knew that she had spent months believing I might have failed her in a way I found fundamentally inconsistent with the person I thought I'd shown myself to be throughout our friendship. Greater understanding didn't automatically heal the original hurt. In this case, it created another one.

I don't know that this incident alone ended our friendship, and I don't want to retroactively assign it more causal power than I can actually establish. But it was part of a relationship that ultimately ended, and that's one of the amendments I would make to Thomas's framework now. Synthesis can lead to reconciliation, where greater understanding allows people to repair the relationship. It can lead to transformation, where the conflict changes how somebody behaves or understands something in the future, as happened with my husband. Sometimes it leads to separation because understanding one another more clearly reveals that the relationship no longer works. Understanding isn't the same as agreement, and synthesis isn't necessarily reconciliation. Sometimes greater clarity is the resolution.

Sometimes the Fight Is the Constructive Choice

Conflict advice often assumes that calmer communication is inherently healthier communication. Be softer. Validate more. Don't confront. Stay centered. Lower the temperature. Sometimes that's exactly what a situation needs, and sometimes it isn't.

Research on conflict in close relationships complicates the idea that direct opposition is always destructive. In situations where a serious problem can actually be changed, more direct confrontation can sometimes contribute to better outcomes. Softer approaches may work better when a problem is minor or when meaningful change isn't realistically available.

That makes intuitive sense to me when I compare these experiences. My conflict with my husband required clarity strong enough to communicate that this wasn't an irritating difference of opinion I planned to shrug off. I believed his behavior was cruel, inconsistent with our shared values, and harmful to people in our lives. Preserving immediate comfort wasn't my goal because I didn't want him merely to stop saying those things around me. I wanted him to understand why I thought the behavior itself was harmful. In this case, the confrontation actually accomplished that. Something changed.

That doesn't mean escalation is inherently virtuous. Thomas's advice to use the minimum force necessary to restore balance still feels wise to me, although I'd use less martial language now. I think of it more as using enough conflict to address the actual problem without creating additional damage just because you're angry enough to do it.

Sometimes enough is a quiet conversation, and sometimes it's a hard boundary or withdrawal. Sometimes it really is one of the handful of enormous fights in a 26-year marriage. The intensity of the conflict isn't enough by itself to tell me whether it was constructive. I'm much more interested in what happens because of it.

Fair Fighting Still Matters

Thomas also warns against exaggeration, generalization, projection, and unfair tactics because they make it easier for both people to lose sight of what the conflict was supposed to accomplish. I think that holds up extremely well.

If I'm angry about something you did Tuesday and suddenly we're litigating every irritating thing you've done since 2004, we've probably stopped solving Tuesday. If I exaggerate your behavior to make my case stronger, I may win a rhetorical point while making it harder for you to hear the legitimate part of what I'm saying. If I decide that your mistake proves what kind of person you fundamentally are, I've turned a conflict about behavior into a trial of your character.

None of that means conflict has to be bloodless or devoid of emotion. I'm certainly not capable of becoming an emotionless conflict monk just because it would make the conversation more elegant. But I do think fairness matters, especially when the relationship matters. You can be furious and still try to tell the truth.

Pick Your Battles, But Know What You're Protecting

Thomas spends a lot of time asking us to distinguish levels of importance. Life and death is not the same thing as serious priority. Serious priority is not the same thing as principle. And, importantly, not every principle deserves to be treated like a life-and-death issue merely because we feel strongly about it.

I like that hierarchy because strong emotion can make everything feel equally urgent. But I also think it's worth asking what you're protecting when you choose not to engage. Sometimes declining a conflict is an act of wisdom. Sometimes it's conserving a finite emotional resource for things that matter more. Sometimes the disagreement simply isn't worth the relationship damage required to pursue it. Other times, "picking your battles" becomes a convenient way to keep tolerating something you actually believe is wrong because confronting it would be uncomfortable.

That was part of what made the conflict with my husband significant. I could have decided it wasn't worth a marital fight. He'd made some shitty comments online. Nobody was physically unsafe. The world would continue spinning. But I wasn't willing to normalize the behavior simply because confronting it would create more immediate discomfort than ignoring it.

The principle mattered enough to me to spend some relationship capital defending it. Not every principle does, and figuring out which ones do is part of the work.

What Does Winning Look Like Now?

The older I get, the less interested I am in winning arguments for their own sake.

I still like being right. Let's not get ridiculous.

But if the conflict involves someone I care about, proving I'm right usually isn't enough to tell me whether the interaction succeeded. Did we understand what actually happened? Did we identify the real problem? Did anything need to change, and did it? Do we trust each other more or less now? Do we know something about one another that will make the next difficult situation easier to navigate?

Sometimes the best result is repair, and sometimes it's changed behavior, a boundary, or leaving. Sometimes the other person never agrees with you at all, but you understand each other well enough to stop fighting about something that isn't going to change.

Thomas called the goal harmony, stability, and/or transcendence. I think transcendence may be the word I appreciate most now, as long as we don't make it more mystical than it needs to be. The best conflicts sometimes change the system that created them. My husband didn't merely agree not to make those particular comments again. Something about how he understood that kind of behavior appears to have shifted. That's more valuable to me than winning.

Thinking About It Again

Thomas ended his 2009 post by inviting readers to "Critique, Dissect, Addend, or even Ridicule" the framework. He expected it to evolve through other people's feedback, and I don't know that I fully appreciated how much I loved that until now.

The framework wasn't presented as finished truth. It was a snapshot of what he thought about conflict at that moment, placed into the world so other people could think about it too. I wrote my first interpretation of it fifteen years later. Now I'm revising that interpretation because my own experiences have given me more things to test it against.

That's probably the version of conflict advice I trust most: the kind that leaves room for another human being to complicate it. Conflict is part of being alive, but it isn't automatically transformative. Understanding another person's perspective is valuable, but it doesn't obligate you to agree with them. Peace can conceal an unresolved problem, and a loud argument can sometimes produce genuine harmony. Synthesis can repair a relationship, transform it, or clarify why it needs to end.

Not every conflict needs your energy, not every adversary is an enemy, and not every principle deserves a war. But sometimes the thing that looks like keeping the peace is really just avoiding information you need. I don't think there's one correct way to navigate all of that, and Thomas didn't either.

That's probably why his framework has stayed interesting to me for so long.

Extended Reading