Have you ever cut somebody off in traffic?
Not on purpose. You were looking at your phone for a second. The coffee lid came off. You were thinking about the bills, the kids you have to pick up, the fight you had before you walked out the door. You didn’t see them. And then they pull up alongside you and let you know exactly what they think of you, as if they have never once done the same thing.
Here’s what I want you to notice about that moment. Your intent was fine. You weren’t trying to run anyone off the road. And it made no difference at all to the person you cut off.
That’s defensiveness in one small scene, and it’s the whole subject of this episode.
Nobody gets a hall pass
Before you decide this one isn’t about you, let me save you the trouble. I get defensive. Tom gets defensive. Brooke gets defensive. You do too.
Most of the time we don’t catch it, because defensiveness almost never feels like defensiveness from the inside. It feels like telling your truth. It feels reasonable. It feels like the obvious thing to say to someone who has just gotten something wrong about you.
There’s a bias underneath that. When I’m defensive, I know exactly why, and I feel completely justified. When you’re defensive, I have no idea what’s going on inside you, so it just looks awful. Same behavior, two very different readings, and that gap is where couples get stuck for years.
And here’s the irony I never get tired of pointing out. Defensiveness exists to protect us from emotional pain. It doesn’t. It creates more of it. Every time.
The sentence I want you to stop using
“That was never my intent.”
I know why you say it. It’s true. You genuinely did not set out to hurt this person you love. Everything in you wants them to know that, because the idea that they see you as someone who hurts them is unbearable.
But look at what that sentence does in the conversation.
Your partner has just told you they’re hurting. You have now moved the subject to your character. We were talking about their experience, and in one sentence, we’re talking about you and whether you’re a good person. Their pain is still sitting there, unaddressed, while you make your case.
That’s why “that was never my intent” is a form of defensiveness. You’re defending yourself. And your partner walks away from that conversation with the same hurt they came in with, plus the new information that you’d rather protect your image than hear them.
The move is small. You separate the intent from the result.
Your intent wasn’t to hurt them. The result was that they got hurt. Both things are true, and only one of them is the conversation you’re actually having. So you let the intent go and you address the result. “I hear that what I did landed hard on you.” That’s it. You have not confessed to being a monster. You have not agreed that you’re the villain. You’ve just stayed in the conversation instead of leaving it to go defend yourself.
“But I’m not that kind of person”
This is the one that trips up the good people, and the good people are usually the most defensive of all.
Brooke did this for a long stretch at the beginning of her relationship with Jack. He would tell her something she was doing that hurt, and she would answer with some version of, “No, that’s not the kind of person I am, so that can’t be happening.” Until he finally said, “Do you hear yourself? I’m telling you that you are. It doesn’t matter what kind of person you are. You’re doing it.”
Being defensive doesn’t mean you’re not a good person. It means you’re a person who has emotions. Welcome to the human party. But if your identity as a good person is the thing you’re protecting, you can’t look at your own behavior, and if you can’t look at your own behavior, nothing changes.
That was the wall Brooke was standing behind when Jack said the thing that shook her more than anything else in their relationship. She tells that whole story herself in this episode, including the part where it still took her months to admit he was right. She isn’t the hero of it and she tells it anyway.
What we get into in the episode
This is the piece I most want you to hear, because the part that’s hard isn’t understanding any of this. It’s doing it in the middle of an actual argument, when you’re hurt and your hands are shaking a little.
So in this episode we go into:
- How fast emotional safety disappears when defensiveness shows up. Not over years. I’ll tell you exactly how fast, and Tom has a balloon analogy for it you won’t be able to unsee.
- The four-step breakdown that takes a couple from “we’re solid” to “I don’t even know you anymore,” and how some couples run that loop for thirty years.
- What I call emotional weightlifting, and why I’ll tell you that you don’t need communication tips at all.
- The one sentence that gets you out of a defensive moment. It’s three words long. It works when you’re wrong, and it works when you’re absolutely certain that you’re not.
There’s also the line I’d write on your bathroom mirror if you’d let me: if your person feels hurt by you, you lose either way. So you may as well get to the bottom of things.
We’re bringing back the episodes you’ve asked for most over the next several weeks while our family finishes two new resources and gets ready for our first international retreat in Tuscany. New episodes are back mid-September.
If something feels off and you can’t tell how serious it is
Start with the Better Love Quiz. It’s 22 questions and takes about five minutes, and at the end you get an honest read on whether what you’re in is a rough stretch or something that needs real attention, plus your skill score so you know where to begin instead of guessing. It’s completely private. Only you see the results, and your partner is never contacted.
Take it at betterlovequiz.com.
And if you already know you need more than a quiz right now, you can book a private session with me at stacibartley.com/private-sessions. Helping couples get better at this is the work I do.
Love isn’t enough, but skills are. Learn them, practice them, and live them today.
