Every couple fights. What makes a relationship hard is how you fight: the moves you reach for when you feel hurt, scared or unheard.
Relational Life Therapy (RLT), the approach developed by family therapist Terry Real, names five of these moves "losing strategies." In the moment they feel like winning. Over time, they cost you the closeness you actually want.
Here's something reassuring. In a recent training for relationship professionals, participants anonymously named their own go-to losing strategy. "Being right" came out on top at 39%. Therapists do this too. Everyone does. And if you're sure you don't have a losing strategy, there's a good chance yours is being right.
The Five Losing Strategies
1. Being right
There's an old saying: you can be right, or you can be married. In a relationship, objective truth rarely settles anything. You and your partner are not going to see every situation the same way, and the goal isn't to get there. The goal is to live well with two different views. That takes maturity and a tolerance for ambiguity.
Instead of arguing about who's right, try: "Here's what I'm going through. As a favor to me, could you…?"
2. Controlling your partner
Control can be loud, like telling your partner what to do, think or feel. It can also be quiet: guilt trips, manipulation, or sulking until they give in. You might win in the short term, but there is always payback.
The alternative is to stay on your side of the street. Share what you see, feel and value, and accept that the choice belongs to your partner. Say your partner smokes. You can't make them quit. You can tell them honestly, "When I see you light up, I picture losing you too soon. I can't make this choice for you, but I want you to know what it does to me." That's influence, not control.
Even a firm limit doesn't have to be controlling. Stating what you will do in response to what they do is honest. Demanding that they change is not.
3. Unbridled self-expression
Your feelings matter, and you should share them. But "you always," "you never" and "you're such a…" aren't honesty or intimacy. They're emotional dumping, and they almost always escalate. Healthy expression is a skill: you speak from a calm, grounded place, about yourself, with your partner's well-being in mind.
4. Retaliation
"You hurt me, so now I get to hurt you back, twice as hard." Retaliation feels like justice. It feels almost heroic, like you're setting the record straight. But righteous indignation doesn't repair anything. It just keeps the cycle of hurt going.
5. Withdrawal
Taking space is healthy. Intimacy is always a balance of closeness and distance. Withdrawal is different. It means going cold, stonewalling, walking out, or shutting down a whole area of the relationship, like sex or money, without saying why. Sometimes it comes from feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes it comes from feeling entitled not to deal with it. Either way, your partner is left alone.
Responsible distance sounds like this: "I'm getting flooded. I need 20 minutes, and then I'll come back to this."
Your Losing Strategy Profile
Most people lean on one or two of these. Often a couple's strategies mirror each other: the more he explains why he's right, the more controlling she gets, and around they go. Neither strategy is the whole problem. The problem is the loop they create together.
These habits usually start in childhood, when they helped us cope. That's why they show up so automatically, and why they're so hard to see in ourselves.
What You Can Do Starting Today
Name it. Change starts by making the implicit explicit. Saying "my thing is withdrawing" out loud is uncomfortable. Most people's first reaction is a bit of a cringe. That's normal, and it's a good sign.
Notice it. At the end of each day, take a few minutes to journal. Did your losing strategy show up? Did you catch it in the moment, or were you so caught up that all you could see was what your partner was doing?
Pause it. When you feel the surge coming, take a breath, take a break or take a walk around the block. The skill of noticing yourself getting activated and bringing your calmer, wiser self back on board is called relational mindfulness. It's at the heart of the work we do with couples.
Practice it. Every difficult conversation is a chance to practice something new.
If you recognized yourself or your relationship in this article, you're in good company. This is exactly what we work on together in couples therapy. Reach out to schedule a consultation.