Most couples I sit with in my Toronto practice aren’t lacking love. They’re lacking a map. They know they’re stuck in the same fight, on repeat, but they can’t quite name the moves that keep pulling them back into it.
That’s where therapist and author Terrence Real’s work has been such a useful tool for the couples I work with. In his book The New Rules of Marriage, Real lays out what he calls the Five Losing Strategies — five automatic, almost reflexive patterns that feel protective in the moment but quietly erode a relationship over time. None of them are about being a bad partner. They’re about having a nervous system reacting to hurt, fear, or feeling unseen.
Here’s a look at each one, why we default to it, and what tends to happen instead when we can catch ourselves in the act.
1. Needing to Be Right
This is the strategy where an argument stops being about repair and starts being about winning. Both partners start building their case — who said what, who did what first, whose version of events is more accurate — as if a marriage were a courtroom with a verdict at the end.
The pull toward this usually starts young. Most of us learned early that being wrong meant disapproval, criticism, or shame, so proving we’re right became a way to stay safe. The problem is that a marriage isn’t a debate to win. Even when you successfully prove your point, you haven’t actually gotten what you wanted — connection, understanding, repair. You’ve just made your partner feel smaller.
What to try instead: Ask yourself, mid-argument, “Do I want to be right, or do I want to be married?” As Real often puts it: you can be right, or you can be married — rarely both at the same time.
2. Controlling Your Partner
This strategy shows up as pressure — trying to manage, correct, or engineer your partner into behaving the way you need them to. It can look like lecturing, micromanaging, giving unsolicited advice on a loop, or subtly punishing your partner until they fall in line.
Control usually comes from anxiety, not malice. If I can just get you to do this differently, the thinking goes, I’ll finally feel safe. But no one responds well to being managed by the person who’s supposed to be their partner. Control tends to produce exactly what it’s trying to avoid: distance, resentment, and a partner who digs in harder.
What to try instead: Trade control for a request. “I need X from you” lands very differently than maneuvering someone into giving it to you.
3. Unbridled Self-Expression
This is the “letting it all out” strategy — venting every frustration, past and present, in full force, because it feels honest and cathartic in the moment. It often sounds like, “You always…”, “You never…”, or a rundown of grievances from three years ago dragged into tonight’s disagreement.
The appeal is obvious: it feels good to finally say it. But raw emotional discharge isn’t the same as honest communication, and it rarely lands the way it’s intended. Instead of being heard, your partner goes into defense mode, and the actual issue gets buried under the flood.
What to try instead: Feel it fully, but filter it before it leaves your mouth. Ask what you actually need your partner to know or do — then say that, without the twenty years of backlog attached.
4. Retaliation
This one is straightforward: I’ll hurt you the way you hurt me. It can be loud — a sharp comment fired back — or quiet, like a subtle dig, a cold shoulder, or “forgetting” something your partner cares about. Either way, the logic is the same: pain for pain, evening the score.
Retaliation offers a hit of satisfaction, but it’s a short-term trade for long-term damage. It teaches both partners that the relationship is a place where hurt gets repaid rather than repaired, and it puts you both on the defensive, always half-braced for the next return volley.
What to try instead: Name the urge out loud instead of acting on it: “I feel like I want to hurt you back right now, and I’m not going to.” It sounds strange, but it interrupts the cycle before it starts.
5. Withdrawal
Withdrawal is the strategy of leaving without leaving — going quiet, shutting down, physically walking away, or simply checking out emotionally mid-conversation. It’s often mistaken for keeping the peace, but to the partner on the other end, it can feel like being abandoned in the middle of something important.
Withdrawal is frequently a nervous system doing its best to protect itself from feeling flooded or overwhelmed, which is understandable. But when it becomes the default response to every hard moment, nothing ever actually gets resolved — the couple just stops having the conversation instead of having a different one.
What to try instead: If you genuinely need space, say so and give a return time: “I need twenty minutes, and then I want to come back to this.” That’s different from disappearing — it’s a pause with a promise attached.
The Real Question
What makes Real’s framework so useful isn’t just that it names these patterns — it’s the question he suggests asking in the heat of the moment: You can be right, or you can be married. Almost every one of the five losing strategies is really an attempt to feel safe, respected, or in control that ends up costing the very connection it’s trying to protect.
The good news is that none of these patterns are fixed traits. They’re habits, which means they can be noticed, interrupted, and replaced — often with the support of a couples therapist who can help you catch the pattern in real time rather than after the damage is done.
If you recognize your marriage in one or more of these strategies, that’s not a verdict on the relationship — it’s a starting point.
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