You don't have to figure out alone if this is love or habit

When the fight isn't about what happened

You're not fighting about the dishes. You're fighting about what you expected and never said out loud.

The argument repeats. The topic changes — money, time, whose turn it was — but you end up in the same place, and it never quite reaches what's actually going on. Underneath it there's usually an expectation nobody put into words: what you assumed your partner would just know to do, without being asked, because that's what you saw growing up. If you built your closest relationship in a language that isn't the one you grew up in, some of those unspoken rules crossed the border with you — the idea of what a partner "just does," learned at home in Spanish, never actually checked against the life you're living now in English.

The question "is this love or habit" can't really be answered from inside the fight. Therapy doesn't hand you that answer — it helps you separate the closeness that's still there from the friction that's been doing the holding. Once you can see the difference clearly, only you can say which one you're standing on.