The five losing strategies: what therapist Terry Real says keeps couples stuck

The most frustrating thing about relationship conflict isn't that it happens. It's that you can have the same fight twenty times and walk away feeling like nothing changed. Same fight, same outcome, different week.

Terry Real, a couples therapist and author of The New Rules of Marriage and Us, has a theory about why. He calls them the five losing strategies, the default behaviors most couples fall back on when they're hurt or frustrated. They feel natural. Some feel righteous. All of them make things worse.

Worth saying upfront: these aren't obscure patterns only dysfunctional people fall into. Almost everyone uses at least one of them, usually without noticing.

1. Needing to be right

The most common one. The argument starts about something specific (the schedule, the money, how a conversation went) and somewhere in the middle it stops being about that thing and becomes about who's correct.

Being right feels important. Sometimes it is. But in a relationship, winning the argument usually means your partner ends up feeling defeated or talked down to. Which means they get defensive, or they shut down, or they start building their counter-case. Nobody's listening anymore. The original issue is still unresolved. You're both just trying not to lose.

Real has a blunt line about this: "You can be right, or you can be in a relationship. Pick one." That's a slight oversimplification (you're allowed to be right), but his point is that insisting on it at the expense of actually connecting costs more than it's worth. What he suggests instead is something he calls cherishing: leading with what you value about the person even while you're in conflict. Not pretending the issue isn't there. Just remembering the relationship is more important than the score.

2. Controlling your partner

This one disguises itself as helping.

Controlling your partner looks like telling them how they should feel ("you shouldn't be upset about this"), telling them what they should do ("if you just did X, we wouldn't be having this conversation"), or refusing to accept their perspective until they've adopted yours. It also shows up as unsolicited advice, or asking the same question repeatedly until you get the answer you want.

The common thread is treating your partner's thoughts and feelings as problems to be corrected rather than realities to be understood.

This is a losing strategy not just because it's frustrating to be on the receiving end of. It almost never works. People don't change deeply held feelings because someone else decided they should. They dig in. Both people end up stuck: you because nothing changed, them because they felt managed.

What works better is making clear, specific requests rather than arguments about why they're wrong. Here's what I need, here's why it matters. That's it.

3. Unbridled self-expression

The one that gets covered by "I'm just being honest."

Real isn't arguing against honesty. Being willing to say hard things and bring up difficult topics is necessary. The losing strategy is the belief that because something is true and you feel it, you're entitled to say it in exactly the form it shows up: with full force, right now, unfiltered.

Dumping raw emotion on someone ("I'm furious and everything you do drives me insane and I don't know why I'm still in this") might be accurate. It's also likely to create a level of damage that needs to be repaired before any real conversation can happen. The thing you actually needed to say gets buried under the wreckage.

Real draws a line between expressing a feeling and acting it out. You can feel rage and still choose how you deliver it. That's not suppression. It's the difference between communicating and just running your emotional state at another person. One of those moves a conversation forward. The other one doesn't.

4. Retaliation

When someone hurts you, wanting to hurt them back is human. That's not a character flaw. But turning that impulse into a strategy (going cold until they apologize, dragging up old grievances mid-fight, finding the sharpest thing you can say when you're angry) doesn't lead anywhere good.

Retaliation doesn't resolve the original hurt. It creates a new one, which means the other person now needs to respond to that. If their response is also retaliatory, you're in a loop where both of you are legitimately injured and neither of you is addressing what started it.

Real talks about the difference between responding from wounds versus responding from values. Retaliation is the wound talking. The part of you that just wants the other person to feel what you felt. Responding from values means pausing long enough to ask: what do I actually want here? Not "how do I make them hurt" but "what would move this somewhere different?"

That's harder than it sounds in the moment. It almost always requires a genuine pause before you can access it.

5. Withdrawal

The quietest one, and maybe the most corrosive over time.

Withdrawal is stonewalling: going cold, going silent, leaving the room and not coming back to it, shutting down emotionally and staying that way. On the surface it can look like de-escalation. Sometimes it does prevent a fight from getting worse in the short term. But used regularly, it communicates to your partner that you're not willing to stay with the difficulty of the relationship. That when things get hard, you leave.

The person on the receiving end of withdrawal usually doesn't read it as "they need space to calm down." They read it as "they don't care," or "I'm not worth engaging with." That interpretation may not be accurate, but it's what the silence communicates.

Real distinguishes between a strategic retreat ("I need twenty minutes, and then I'm coming back to this") and full withdrawal, where the conversation never gets returned to. The first can genuinely help. The second just accumulates. Unfinished conversations pile up into a general sense of distance that gets harder and harder to cross.

Every losing strategy is a virtue at the wrong volume

You probably came to this list hoping it would settle the matter. You want to see your behavior described and decide if you are actually the problem. The truth is more frustrating. These patterns survive because they look like virtues you already believe in. Accuracy, helpfulness, honesty, self-respect, and composure are all good things. The problem is that they are being run past the point where they actually work. Your defense is sincere, and that is exactly why the habit is so hard to break.

To see this in your own life, you have to ask what the virtue is actually for. Honesty exists so that you can be known by your partner. If the way you deliver your truth leaves you feeling less known, the volume is wrong, not the virtue. Composure is meant to keep you in the room during a hard conversation. If your self-control actually removes you from the room, it is no longer serving its purpose. It is a calibration problem, not a character flaw.

Simply knowing the list does not disarm the pattern. These strategies are chosen in a split second, long before you have time to consult a guide or remember a rule. You are reacting, not auditing. Once the dust settles after a fight where any of these played out, you are usually left wondering how to move forward. That is the moment to look for better ways to reconnect instead of analyzing the failure.

When you step back, you can see that these are really one move in different costumes. Each is an attempt to change what your partner is doing instead of a clear statement of what you need. The fix is not to stop being honest or composed. It is to change the target and the volume. You can learn to state your needs directly without trying to manage the other person. That is how you actually fight fair.

Why these five?

What Real's list has in common is that every one of these strategies makes sense. They feel natural because in many situations, earlier in life, they were adaptive. Being right protected you from being dismissed. Controlling your environment kept things predictable. Expressing everything you felt was honest. Retaliating established that you weren't a pushover. Withdrawing kept the peace.

The problem is that they're survival strategies imported into a relationship that requires something different. An intimate partnership (especially a long-term one) needs you to tolerate discomfort, stay present when it's hard, and respond to your partner as a person rather than a problem to manage or a threat to neutralize.

None of this means you'll stop falling into these patterns. The point isn't to achieve some idealized conflict style. It's to notice which one feels most familiar, understand why it doesn't work even when it feels justified, and have a clearer target for where you're trying to move.

Real's argument is that relationship is a skill. Which means it can be learned, or more precisely, it can be unlearned and rebuilt. The defaults make sense. They just don't serve you well when what you actually want is to stay close to someone.