Reddit reviews Getting Together and Staying Together: Solving the Mystery of Marriage

New rule: No more physical touch when you're angry. Go for a walk or just leave and cool off. Physical touch is only for showing affection.

You're right, the relationship does go both ways. She can say or do things that are provoking. But you have to remove the violence entirely.

Have a talk about you both protecting your sleep. Sleep helps with anger, anxiety, depression, everything. So share with her that getting sleep is extremely important for you and ask for her help creating a calming atmosphere when it's bedtime.

There's a book called the 5 Love Languages. It's about recognizing and learning what your partner feels is showing them love. This book talks about healthy ways.

But it can also be unhealthy. For example your partner provoked jealousy talking about texting someone else. Jealousy is obviously a huge potential trigger for anger. That's the kind of trigger that can make you go from 0 to 100 very quickly, instantly even. That's extremely bad communication for someone who is prone to anger. So your anger is justified. But you want to manage your response and not use physical touch. Instead of being violent, communicate and talk to her. Set boundaries that help set the terms of your relationship. You can ask important questions like, "If you're not committed to me, why are we even in a relationship?" You can use the format, "When you say , it makes me feel ." "When you talk about texting someone else, it makes me feel you don't love me. Do you love me?" A relationship based on jealousy isn't a healthy one and will always provoke a strong negative response from you. You have to protect yourself emotionally from a manipulative person who doesn't respect you.

We all have said things in the moment when we're fighting that we don't really mean. We mean it in the moment because we're angry. But we regret it and feel terrible later. That's because we know we can do better but have made a mistake. Saying things just to be hurtful is a mistake. She ultimately may not have meant it. The best thing we can do is learn from the mistakes and improve our communication so it brings us closer together instead of harming the relationship. There's another book, Getting Together and Staying Together that helps with this kind of relationship building. I wish I'd read it 20 years ago.

You will still get mad again. Don't beat yourself up about it. Getting mad at ourselves for getting mad makes it last that much longer. But use each incident of poor communication, each anger episode as a chance to practice managing your response when it happens. Stop talking and take a break. Literally just leave the house. Anger is a natural response. But we want to keep our reaction and level of anger matched to the situation. We don't want to let it run loose and become overblown. Use your own body language, how loud you are talking, tone of voice, cursing, etc., as a guide to how angry you are. Just pay attention to your speaking volume and level of agitation and use it to help identify when you need to take a break.

There's no shame in taking a pause. It's actually the most respectful thing you can do for your partner, to not transmit all that anger to them and allow them to maintain their own emotional levels, to control their own level of feelings. If she tends to blast you with emotions too, this is definitely something to have a talk about. "I want us to work on lowering our anger and frustration at each other. Can we do this together? We need to talk and share so we both get what we want and to keep building our relationship. But without using anger." Using an anger scale of 1-10 can help accurately describe where you are at the moment. "You seem mad, are you at a 5 or more like an 8?" Help each other identify what makes you mad and what doesn't so you can work on the right things together.

When talking through important things, take a break when you get agitated. Cool off. Then come back to it. You can take a break this way, tabling the conversation, and then returning to it as many times as you need to get through important discussions. Let's talk about this again after lunch (or after dinner, or tomorrow). The amount of time needed to cool off and reflect by ourselves is up to us. The goal though is to always come back and keep working on issues until they are resolved enough so both partners needs are met and feelings are acknowledged. That's why there can't be a "winner" in an argument. When there's a winner, there's a loser. And there needs to be understanding on both sides.

So an important part of being in a relationship is to not worry about being right all the time. Of course there will be values that are important to you. Don't let go of your values. But for most things, don't worry about being right. Let your partner be right just to see what it feels like. We each have our own perspective. And that's often what draws us to a person in the beginning. So we want to keep letting that person share their perspective. Without being overbearing and not letting them share what's important to them too. A relationship is 50/50 sharing and letting them have their opinion too, just like we have ours. Couples therapy is an option if you feel it will help. Improving communication always improves the relationship and couples counseling can help in that area. Hope some of this helps. Take care of yourself and hang in there!