This distinction matters clinically. We tend to speak of conflict as something that happens to a relationship — an intrusion, a pathology, evidence that something has gone wrong. The psychoanalytic tradition understood it differently: conflict is the sign that two separate subjectivities are present. The couple who never conflicts is not the couple who has achieved harmony. It is, more often, the couple in which one person has disappeared — has organised their inner life around the avoidance of friction, has made themselves small enough to prevent collision.
This is not love. It is its approximation.
The question is not whether conflict exists in a relationship. It is whether the conflict can be metabolised — whether it produces something, teaches something, or whether it simply cycles, accumulating without resolution. Chronic unresolved conflict is not the same as frequent conflict: many couples live in a state of permanent low-level tension not because they cannot stop fighting but because they have not yet found a way to fight well. Fighting well is not a euphemism. It means: fighting toward something, fighting with both people still present, fighting without the implicit threat that the relationship itself is on the table.
Contemporary culture has produced two competing and equally unhelpful myths about conflict in intimate life. The first is that conflict is always destructive — that the healthy couple is the conflict-free couple. The second is that conflict is always productive — that fighting is passion's evidence. Both of these are defences: against the complexity of staying present in opposition, against the more demanding work of learning what the conflict is actually asking for.
The Latin is useful again here. Conflict is two forces meeting. The com- is not incidental. There is, inside the etymology, the possibility that conflict is not the opposite of intimacy but a form of it — a form in which two people are sufficiently present and sufficiently distinct to push against each other. The couple who has lost the capacity for conflict has often also lost something else: the sense that the other person is real enough to resist.