"Nowadays, if my wife Belinda and I start to square off... we take a break for 20 to 30 minutes, and we’ll come back."

"And one or the other of us will say something like: 'Hey, do you want to fight? I don’t really want to fight. Can we get out of it? What do you need from me?' And Belinda will say, 'Well, you can say you’re sorry about blah, blah, blah.' I say, 'OK, you’re right. I apologize.' Then, I might ask her to be accountable for three things, and she’ll take ownership of one and I let the other two go. And we’re done. What would take five or six days now takes 20 minutes.... There’s no such thing as an individual. We co-regulate each other’s nervous systems all day long. We need to shift from the control model to a collaborative one, an ecologically humble model. You’re not above the system, you’re in it. You breathe it."

From "A Couples Counselor Takes On ‘Normal Marital Hatred’/In his new book, ‘Us’, Terrence Real explores how ‘enlightened self interest’ could save your relationship" (NYT).