CHAPTER ONE

Who is a High-Conflict Person?

(and Why Should You Avoid Committing to One?)

Wouldn’t it be helpful if people came with color-coded relationship-potential labels? Green for “All clear—go ahead.” Yellow for “Caution—trouble ahead.” Red for “Chaos, misery, and destruction—avoid at all costs.” Think about it: if we (hopefully) reasonable folks picked people with green labels, our lives would be easier and less stressful, and our relationships would be more likely to succeed. The yellows and reds would be left to date each other, and we all know howthat would go.

But people don’t come with warning labels, and even if they did, we might not heed their colorful advice. The trouble with humans is that we often make decisions that are against our self-interest without realizing it, especially when love and lust are involved.

For better or for worse, it’s up to us to pick good partners and make good decisions. Of course it’s not a good idea to marry a serial killer, a stalker, or someone who treats us badly. Most of us manage to avoid these types. But if we’re so good at screening partners, why does approximately half of the population end up divorced or in a relationship that doesn’t last? And why do 10 to 20 percent of breakups escalate into all-out war? (If you’re not sure what we mean by that, skip ahead a few pages to “Kelly’s Story”.) We’d all like to know who will make our life complete and won’t cause us misery, yet we are clearly not so good at telling the greens from the reds.

We don’t have to drill down very far to discover that some of those divorces and break-ups are the result of destructive, chaotic, disastrous pairings that at one time felt happy and solid. Even when parents, friends, or others are able to identify impending relationship disaster, we ourselves can be blind to it. We look back after a disastrous relationship and wonder how we didn’t see it. Where was our dating r