A ‘wrongly’ stacked dishwasher, used dental floss left beside the sink, wet towels discarded on the bed.

In a long-term relationship, all kinds of seemingly mundane things can trigger the biggest rows and, after two decades helping people find and retain love, what I’ve learned is that when couples keep having the same arguments over and over again, the problem is rarely the mundane thing itself. It is what that behaviour has come to represent.

Recurring ruptures in a relationship usually boil down to one of three things: a lack of closeness, a lack of respect or an imbalance of power. So when you find yourself having the same ridiculous disagreement for the hundredth time, ask yourself what it is really about.

If you’ve repeatedly told your partner, ‘This matters to me’, the more important issue may be what happens next. Do they hear you, do they consider you and do they respect the fact that something can matter to you even if it seems insignificant to them?

If they don’t, that is when a tiny domestic irritation potentially transforms into a life-changing problem.

After 25 years of marriage, my wife Jill and I have been there. For instance, my job at the end of each day was always to take the bins out. Sometimes I wouldn’t do it or wouldn’t do it properly. I would then hear about it quite a bit. Now I’ve solved the problem – I pay our sons, Kingston, 15, and Liam, 12, to do it, so now Jill yells at them instead!

OK, I’m just kidding, but beneath the joke is something important because mental load and unequal domestic responsibility can make a partner feel like there is no equity in their relationship.

If one person feels they’re carrying far more domestic responsibility, organising the family and repeatedly asking their partner to do things, it’s no wonder resentment can build. Which is why a fight about stacking the dishwasher may really be about respect.

Relationship counsellor Paul C Brunson has spent two decades helping people find and retain love

Paul and Jill, who have been married for 25 years, have had their fair share of domestic irritations

If you never get to the root cause of these niggles, a marriage can unravel over something that seems as trivial as whose turn it was to do the washing up.

It may surprise you to hear but my route into relationship work wasn’t through psychology or therapy. I began my career in investment banking at the age of 21, chasing the conventional markers of success.

But I realised the work wasn’t fulfilling me and I wanted to do something that gave me purpose. I became a certified life coach and launched my own matchmaking company in 2009, building a career helping people with relationships.

What’s interesting is that, in recent years, the reason people come to me for relationship advice has changed. Previously, the number one question I’d be asked was, ‘How do I save this relationship? What do I do to keep this together?’ Now it’s, ‘How do I get out of this? How do I know if I should leave?’

This surprises people, but I’m a massive advocate for divorce in the right circumstances, because I don’t believe people should stay in a relationship simply because society has told us that longevity is the ultimate measure of success.

Although there is still stigma and some shame wrapped around divorce, it has become more acceptable to step away from a relationship that isn’t working. Even so, I think we still wrongly value longevity over satisfaction.

Often somebody will practically stand up and applaud when I tell them I’ve been married to Jill for more than two decades. But what if those years had been miserable?

The real litmus test should be satisfaction, not simply how many years you’ve managed to remain together. The biggest complaint I encounter from midlife women about their relationships isn’t necessarily infidelity or explosive rows, it is stagnation.

In a long-term relationship, all kinds of seemingly mundane things – like whose turn it is to do the washing up – can trigger big rows, but the real issue is rarely the mundane thing itself

Paul C Brunson hosts a podcast called We Need To Talk which streams on Spotify and YouTube

By the time couples have spent decades juggling children, work and money, the things they have tolerated for years can suddenly become impossible to overlook.

Alternatively, there’s a tendency to settle. Many people know they are no longer doing the fun things they used to or are aware they’re not growing as a couple, but they mistake the absence of outright misery for a successful marriage.

Some species of sharks need to keep moving to breathe, and I believe relationships work in much the same way.

Keeping the spark alive involves falling in love with your partner over and over again. The time we invest in each other and the communication we maintain make up the glue of a relationship, and novelty can help reignite what has been lost.

I know this because Jill and I met at university, and we reached our own period of stagnation around the 12-to-15-year mark of our marriage when our lives revolved around two young sons and everything became what I call ‘plug and play’.

Week after week we were living the same schedule and were bored. Jill and I weren’t yelling at each other and weren’t in some terrible crisis; we were just getting by. If marriage was school, we were C students, not great, not bad, just coasting.

In 2018, we moved to the UK. Relocating our family from Washington, DC, to London brought new experiences into our relationship. Suddenly, every day felt like a date. Our love was renewed by novelty.

Moving countries is an extreme example. You don’t have to uproot your life to change the energy of your relationship. Whether it’s doing a dance class or visiting somewhere you haven’t been before, it’s not only about doing something new but experiencing that newness together.

Novelty won’t fix everything and, if you feel you’ve really lost each other, one of the first questions I would ask is what your partner needs to do, or what you need to do with your partner, in order to feel emotionally safe again.

Emotional safety means being able to share your deepest vulnerability, shame and fear with your partner.

Many partners are no longer telling each other those things often because vulnerability has stopped feeling safe. Perhaps something shared in confidence was later used in an argument, dismissed or met with judgment.

After enough of those small ruptures, people learn to protect themselves by sharing less, and that matters because emotional safety is the underlying infrastructure for everything else, including intimacy.

The best sex happens when you feel emotionally safe with your partner, so when you no longer want your husband touching you, don’t simply decide the absence of sex is the problem; ask whether there is enough respect in the relationship to repair what has been damaged.

Perhaps you and your partner have developed completely different values, goals and visions of life, in which case leaving may genuinely be the right answer.

But you may also be exhausted or overwhelmed, because work, money, children and the feeling that everybody needs something from you all affect how you connect with your partner.

Before you conclude, ‘I can’t stand my husband, my marriage must be over’, also consider what else you can’t stand about your life at that moment. Sometimes all of that pressure lands on the person closest to us and can masquerade as a problem with the marriage itself.

Interestingly, I’m seeing more men recognise that they need to do some of this work, too.

Older married men with children come to me and say, ‘I know I can be better. I know I should be better. How can I become better?’ A willingness to look at yourself and ask what you can do differently is important, because a partner who can hear that something is wrong without becoming defensive is showing you something valuable about the health of the relationship.

There is, however, an important distinction between the ordinary frustrations of a long-term relationship and behaviour that is coercive or abusive and making my new series Paul C. Brunson: Red Flag crystallised that for me.

One of the biggest things I would ask is whether you feel you have to become less than yourself in your relationship.

Does your partner constantly try to reduce you rather than uplift you? It can begin with comments that sound relatively minor, such as, ‘Do you have to wear that much make-up when we go out?’ Or, ‘You talk quite a bit when we’re out. Could you just…?’

A green flag is the opposite. It is a partner saying, in effect, ‘Give me more of what you do. I want you in abundance and I want the world to see you in abundance.’

That difference between being reduced and being increased is significant. The fundamental factor is whether you feel emotionally and physically safe in your relationship. If you don’t, that’s a red flag and what’s tricky is that sometimes control can initially look very much like care.

A partner asks what time you’re leaving work, wants a text when you arrive somewhere and another when you leave. In isolation, that could simply be somebody who cares, but if you become nervous about leaving late, scared of not telling them exactly where you are, or their preference becomes a steadfast rule with consequences, you’re moving into something coercive.

Across the survivor stories we explored in Red Flag, three behaviours repeatedly appeared: pressure to move the relationship on quickly; separation from friends, family or other support networks; and increasing dependence on the abuser.

Those are very different situations from a row over washing up, but the broader lesson is to pay attention to patterns rather than isolated incidents. Ask yourself whether your relationship repeatedly makes you feel smaller or bigger, ignored or considered, unsafe or secure.

If yours is a safe relationship that has simply become disconnected, there are three small daily things you can do to make your partner feel seen again.

First, tell them something you genuinely appreciate about them, whether that is their kindness, humour or something else you really value.

Secondly, consider them in small practical ways, whether that means making them a coffee or taking care of a daily chore like emptying the dishwasher, so they don’t have to.

Finally, tell them what you’re thankful for, which is slightly different from appreciation.

I don’t manage all three every day, but I always keep consideration at the top of my mind and every evening I do a gratitude exercise where I write down three things I’m thankful for, one of which will often be about Jill.

I’ll always tell her what I write, but if you want to reach graduate level, leave those words for your partner in a letter. There is something incredibly romantic about giving somebody the chance to sit with those words and digest them, and I’m telling you, watch how their interaction with you changes because it will.

Ultimately, a strong relationship isn’t one where nobody ever argues about the dishwasher, floss or wet towels. It’s one where both people are willing to look beyond the argument to understand what is truly being said and make the other person feel heard, respected and considered.

That, for me, is the real green flag – not perfection, but two people who are still willing to turn towards each other.

As told to Gemma Calvert. All episodes of Paul C. Brunson: Red Flag are available to stream for free on U