After her long-distance beau expressed that he still “didn’t know her well enough,” author Lindsay Jill Roth devised a system to discover (and reveal) everything they could about one another in the hope of finding out: Were they truly compatible? Her new book, Romances & Practicalities, is that system—a set of 250 questions to help readers identify red flags and non-negotiables, initiate tricky conversations with grace, and build strong, deeper relationships. In the following excerpt, she reveals a paradoxical truth: why understanding how you argue can actually bring you closer together.

Excerpt

“Oh, man. I knew this was going to be like a therapy session.”

I was talking with a woman named Julia Baldwin about how she and her husband argue when she made the crack about therapy. It was a joke I heard a lot in the course of researching and refining R&P. Opening up about communication challenges with a loved one—really, any challenges—even to a layperson, probably isn’t all that different from a counseling session. In fact, I was stunned at how often my interviews with these generous people who’d graciously donated their time and perspective ended with them thanking me.

“I’m passive,” she continued. “My husband is much more up-front about confrontation, and I very much shy away from it. I’ll just shut down and say, Okay, you think your thing. I’ll think my thing. I think part of it is a game. Like, secretly I’ll win if I just don’t say anything at all. It’s a very passive-aggressive mentality.”

She had a point. Trying to covertly win an argument without even telling your partner that’s what you’re doing is rather passive-aggressive. But that wasn’t what I’d been thinking in the moment. Instead, I felt oddly proud of her. “I love that you know that about yourself!” I said.

Plenty of people don’t. We don’t all have that kind of self-awareness, which is something I’d chatted about earlier with Alexandra Solomon, professor of the wildly popular “Marriage 101” course at Northwestern. “A lot of people can’t tell you how they argue,” she’d said. “Sometimes they don’t even see that they have been arguing.”

“They’re not able to say, for example, ‘I’m passive-aggressive,’” I’d ventured.

“That’s right. This is actually what we’re working on in class this week. We’re talking about conflict, but the goal is for each and every student to notice: Okay, over time, the kinds of arguments I’ve gotten into—what’s the theme? What is your pattern? Do you tend to get loud? Do you tend to pull away? Do you get passive-aggressive? Do you freeze? Does your mind go blank?”

By the way, if you’re thinking it sounds strange that the most popular class at a major research university is one on marriage, you wouldn’t be alone. The course launched in 2000—Dr. Solomon, then a grad student and teaching assistant, took the reins roughly a decade ago—with the aim of imparting a countercultural message: successful partnerships are less about finding the one than being the one. The bulk of coursework focuses on self-exploration, as a means to more effectively communicate and weather conflict. For a culture obsessed with love and sex, Dr. Solomon has pointed out, we don’t place much value on relationship education.

That’s why I’d felt proud of Julia, and why I told her so.

“Oh, yeah. I mean, I married my mother,” she continued. “Which is so weird because my husband, how he handles things? The one person who I would clash with is, of course, the person I’m married to.”

One of the most fascinating parts of hearing people’s stories is seeing the patterns emerge, the ways they were shaped and molded by their childhoods. Equally fascinating is the fact that two people can be raised in the same household and yet have vastly different experiences, with vastly different outcomes. “It’s funny, because my sister went through Pre-Cana with her husband, too,” Julia said, referring to the marriage prep course that’s typically required of anyone planning to wed in a Catholic church. “She came home—I love this story, because it’s just so her—and she goes, ‘The priest said I’m a hailstorm. I’ll just keep attacking. And Doug’s like a turtle. He’ll go into his shell.’”

“So she’s like your mom?”

“Totally.”

“And you’re more like Doug.”

“My husband and I aren’t that extreme. But what a great visual—just to have the words, the analogy, to help you process what’s happening in the moment. I think that’s such a great tool. I didn’t get a tool. I wish I’d had one.”

If there was anyone I knew who could help with tools, it had to be “the holistic psychologist,” Dr. Nicole LePera. Part of her draw is in her promotion of what she calls “self-healing,” a belief that all of us are intrinsically capable of resolving and healing from whatever traumas or hardships we’ve endured. “I think a lot of communication issues are actually because there’s a lack of safety,” she said. “I could want to say something, but maybe I had a reactive parent or I have a reactive partner, and every time I go to share myself, I’m overpowered, overwhelmed, yelled at, right?”

I nodded. Sounded a lot like a hailstorm, actually.

“So the first step is an awareness. For example, if I have a partner who shuts down or flees any hard conversation, that can feel really invalidating. And in the past I might have taken that personally: Oh, you’re leaving because you don’t care. This conversation is not important to you. But if we have a different language—they’re leaving because they’re having a physiological response, because this is too emotionally overwhelming or stressful for them—now we can shift to possibly being more compassionate. They’re detaching right now because they’re overwhelmed and stressed. For a lot of us, that’s a huge shift.

“That awareness leads to new choices we can make,” she said. “So, if I understand that your shutting down or fleeing isn’t about me or our relationship, I might not get activated, right? I can stay calm and grounded. Or, if I continue to become activated, I can make the choice to self-regulate: by paying attention to how my body is feeling rather than spiraling in my mind, by doing some deep belly breathing, the somatic work to calm myself down. The calmer I am, the safer my partner is going to feel.

“That doesn’t mean we continue to sweep conversations under the rug. At a later time, when we’re both calm—when I’m not activated and they’re not in flight mode—we can reengage. But I think a big shift happens when you have that awareness. It’s about creating the safety.”

Safety is something the Brit and I would also have to learn. Very early on, I noticed that his tendency was to get quiet, to disengage, whereas mine is to talk. I think out loud. I want to talk through everything, work through everything, get everything out in the open. That awareness led to a conversation, and ultimately to an agreement: I would work to pull myself back a little, to honor his need for time and space, if he could allow me a few minutes to talk, to get it out, before we took that break.

“Yes, that’s incredibly important,” said Dr. LePera. “What do you do when you’re feeling unsafe? What is your active protection? Yours is to seek understanding, to have your train of thought seen and heard and reflected back to you. Whereas I’m more like him. I need a minute to process, otherwise I say things off the cuff that I don’t mean. And that’s beautiful what you were able to do, to meet in the middle. It wasn’t that he had to be immediately available. It wasn’t that you had to stop getting your needs met. And it’s back to this idea of understanding yourself, being an observer of how you navigate conflict. All that comes with awareness.”

You wouldn’t think the topic of fighting makes for particularly enjoyable conversation, and yet “how do you fight?” is one of the most popular questions in the world of R&P, in the sense that it generates the most feedback. We typically focus on the what—the substance of an argument—without ever bothering to consider the ways in which our patterns and triggers play off or mesh with a partner. Over and over, I heard variations on the same theme: I never even thought to ask.

“‘How do you argue?’ is such a beautiful question,” Dr. Solomon told me. “Because it’s not pathologizing.” In other words, it’s not about right or wrong. “It’s open. It’s curious. It’s asking, ‘What will our stance be?’”

Excerpted from the book ROMANCES & PRACTICALITIES: A Love Story (Maybe Yours!) in 250 Questions by Lindsay Jill Roth. Copyright © 2025 by Lindsay Jill Roth. Published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

Author(s)

  • Lindsay Jill Roth is an award-winning television and live-events producer who has created and developed a wide variety of programming globally, including original content for NBC, BET, ESPN, Food Network, Billboard, The Masters, The Grammys, The TONYs, and the US Open. She is the former producer of Emmy-nominated Larry King Now and the creator and executive producer of Haylie Duff’s Real Girl’s Kitchen. She is also the author of the novel What Pretty Girls Are Made Of. Lindsay lives in New York and London with her husband and two young sons.