This therapist's perspective reveals the hidden emotional needs behind recurring fights.
2 Reasons Why Fighting Can Feel Like Love
When arguments become the main pathway to intimacy, deeper emotional needs may be shaping your relationship patterns.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | Last Updated:
For some couples, the most intimate moments don't come during candlelit dinners or romantic getaways, but instead in the aftermath of heated fights. While popular culture celebrates "makeup sex" and dramatic reconciliations, a more complex psychological pattern lies beneath this post-fight bonding. Essentially, there are some people who genuinely feel most loved and connected to their partners only after experiencing conflict.
(Take my science-inspired Boundary Setting Style Quiz to know how easily you allow yourself or your partner to slip into conflict.)
Here are two empirically supported mechanisms that explain why this happens in relationships.
1. The Fight-And-Makeup Dance Satisfies Their Attachment Needs
Attachment theory is one of the most extensively researched frameworks for understanding individual differences in close relationship functioning. Adult attachment orientations, especially attachment anxiety, systematically influence how people perceive, react to and interpret conflict with romantic partners.
Research consistently finds that people with higher attachment anxiety:
- Report greater perceptions of conflict intensity
- Experience more emotional distress during disagreements
- Tend to view conflict as a threat to relational security
People with anxious attachment styles, characterized by a deep-seated fear of abandonment and intense need for reassurance, frequently experience what researchers call "conflict engagement" as a paradoxical pathway to intimacy.
An anxious attachment style, for instance, shows significant positive correlations with conflict engagement behaviors in romantic relationships. Anxiously attached individuals use conflict engagement more frequently, and this pattern connects to increased emotional intensity in relationships.
In simpler terms, anxiously attached individuals might interpret conflict experiences as existential tests of love and commitment. If the relationship survives the fight, it's evidence that their bond can withstand threat. This tangible evidence can be extremely reassuring for an anxiously attached partner.
However, this does create a troubling cycle in the relationship wherein conflict feels like the only reliable route to the emotional attunement that these individuals crave so deeply. The fight itself, while painful, guarantees that their partner will eventually turn toward them with focus and care.
When attachment systems are activated by perceived threats, like relationship conflict, the brain motivates behaviors designed to restore closeness and security. Physical intimacy (through quick fixes like "makeup sex") becomes a particularly effective repair mechanism because it activates reward pathways while simultaneously dampening threat responses.
2. They Misinterpret Fight Arousal As Love Arousal
When individuals experience elevated arousal (e.g., heightened heart rate or sympathetic activation), they can misattribute that state to salient interpersonal cues, including attraction or closeness. This is often referred to as misattribution of arousal.
One of the most influential demonstrations of this phenomenon comes from research showing that arousal from an unrelated source (e.g., exercise) can enhance ratings of romantic attraction if participants have no clear explanation for their physiological state.
In a classic study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, individuals who were physiologically aroused (by exercise) rated an attractive confederate more positively than non-aroused controls. This supports the idea that, sometimes, arousal can be (mis)labeled as romantic interest.
Although much of the early work on misattribution of arousal focused on attraction in dating contexts, the underlying mechanism of intense physiological activation being misinterpreted as emotional arousal is highly relevant to intense feelings of affection post-conflict in long-term relationships.
Beyond laboratory experiments on misattribution, 2023 research from Emotion on everyday romantic interactions has documented linkage in physiological arousal between partners. This means that partners' sympathetic and electrodermal responses often covary in daily life, and these physiological patterns relate to moment-to-moment feelings of closeness and annoyance.
Specifically, couples exhibit coordinated physiological arousal that increases during moments of felt closeness. This means that when conflict elevates arousal, and reconciliation follows with emotional release, both partners' nervous systems may momentarily solidify feelings of closeness through co-regulation.
Because high arousal is inherently ambiguous in affective meaning, individuals who lack secure regulatory frameworks (e.g., secure attachment and well-developed emotion regulation) may interpret post-conflict relief and resolution as intensified love simply because the arousal state is being re-labeled within the interpersonal context.
How To Detangle Fights And Love
Everyone should know how to resolve a volatile relationship conflict and come out of it stronger, with no love lost. However, conflict should never become a pre-condition to feeling loved. If you feel like the latter phenomenon dominates your relationship, here are a few things you can try:
- Clinical interventions. Treatment modalities like Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) explicitly target attachment insecurity and conflict reactivity, helping partners build secure affective regulation outside of high-arousal episodes.
- Emotion regulation training. Strengthening awareness of physiological arousal and clarifying its ambiguity can reduce misattribution errors and foster more stable closeness.
- Communication skills. Teaching couples to recognise conflict triggers and to resolve disagreements constructively can decouple the distinct passions of love and conflict.
Take my fun and science-inspired Hidden Superpower Test to know what role you might play when faced with life's challenges.
Take the research-informed Relationship Satisfaction Scale to know if recurring fights are chipping away at your relationship quality.