Six Ways to Win the Fight and Lose Each Other

I know I have mentioned this in other blogs: most relationships don't come apart over the big betrayals; they come apart in a hundred small moments. In this blog, I'd like to talk about the strategies you use to "win the fight."

You might not realise this, but every time tension rises with your partner, you have two options: Do I want to be right, or do I want to be connected? Sadly, you can't have both. And unfortunately, the strategies we reach for when we're hurt or scared often lead us toward "right" and away from each other.

Terry Real, who developed Relational Life Therapy (RLT), named five of these moves and called them losing strategies — not because they don't work, but because they work in the worst possible way. They win you the moment and cost you the relationship. I want to walk you through all five, and then add a sixth that hides better than the rest, because it's the one that wears the face of love.

Before you read on

First, let's have a quick check-in to see which of these losing strategies you use in your relationship when things go wrong. Where do you go when you feel hurt, scared, cornered, or flooded?

Now, read these slowly and notice which ones you recognise you lean towards. The question isn't "am I like this?" It's "when the wheels come off, for which one do I reach?"

1. When it heats up, I'm certain I'm right and they're wrong — and I won't let it go until they admit it.

2. When they don't do it my way, I step in to manage, fix, or steer them — because my way is the better way.

3. Whatever I'm feeling pours straight out towards them, full force and unfiltered — whether that's heat or tears.

4. When they hurt me, I want them to feel it too, so I go cold, get a dig in, or find a way to make them pay.

5. When it gets hard, I shut down and pull away — I go silent, leave the room, or disappear behind a wall.

6. I give in, smooth it over, or say "I'm fine" when I'm not — abandoning myself to keep the peace.

Hold onto the ones that landed. You'll meet each of them by name in a moment, and it's a lot more useful to read about a strategy you've just caught yourself using than one you're sure is your partner's.

1. Needing to be right

This is probably the most familiar one — the one many of us reach for without thinking. You build your case, you marshal your evidence, you remember the exact date and what was said and who started it. And maybe you are right. That's what makes it so seductive.

However, you can win every point and still lose your partner. Being right is a position you take over someone. And when you stand over your partner, the most natural thing in the world is for them to either stand over you back, or quietly stop bringing you their inner world altogether. Win enough arguments and you'll end up married to someone who agrees with you and tells you nothing.

2. Controlling your partner

Control comes in two flavours. There's the loud kind — bullying, lecturing, "let me tell you how this is going to go." And there's the quiet kind that's harder to spot — managing, correcting, withholding approval, the heavy sigh, the guilt trip dressed up as concern.

Underneath both is the same thing: anxiety wearing a costume. Control says I don't trust you to do this without me running it. And people don't grow toward someone who's managing them. They shrink, or they rebel. Either way, the person you're trying to hold close moves further out of reach.

3. Unbridled self-expression

We've been sold a story that letting it all out is "honest." That if you're feeling it, you're entitled to put it across the room in the name of authenticity. But discharging your feelings onto your partner unfiltered isn't honesty — it's flooding. The rage, yes, but also the sobbing that floods the room, the spiralling anxiety, the wave of hurt that has to land on them the instant you feel it. Soft emotions can dominate a room just as completely as loud ones. Collapsing into tears every time a hard topic comes up can shut a conversation down as surely as shouting does.

There's a real difference between sharing a feeling and spraying it. One invites your partner closer and leaves room for them to respond. The other asks them to absorb it. And underneath it, there's usually a demand: now you make me feel okay. Flooding doesn't just put the feeling in the room; it hands your partner the job of calming it, of soothing you — a job that is actually yours.

4. Retaliation

This one feels the most justified of all. They hurt you first — so getting your own back isn't pettiness, it's fairness. At least, that's the story running quietly underneath while you do it. Evening the score feels like setting things right.

But retaliation isn't justice — it's offence wearing justice's clothes. It's getting even: the dig that lands where it hurts, the punishment, the withholding — of sex, of affection, of conversation itself — used as a way to make them pay. And the moment you hand yourself permission to wound back, you've left the relationship and entered a war, and nobody wins a war with the person they share a bed with. You just take turns being the casualty.

5. Withdrawal

This is the quietest of the six, which is why it gets mistaken for the high road. Sometimes it's a slow fade — an absence where you used to be, a private decision that this conversation isn't worth having. But it can also be a wall: stonewalling, the flat "I'm done talking," the deliberate refusal to engage that leaves your partner knocking on a door you've bolted from the inside.

Withdrawal feels dignified to the one doing it and feels like abandonment to the one on the other side. It's the slow leak that deflates a relationship over years. No single moment looks dramatic. You just wake up one day far apart and can't quite point to when it happened.

6. Fawn — the one that looks like love

The first five are obvious losers. You can feel them go wrong. Fawn is different. Fawn comes from a deeper place — it's a survival response, the nervous system's way of staying safe by keeping everyone else happy. So it doesn't look like a losing strategy at all. It looks like generosity. Like being easygoing. Like being the "low-maintenance" partner who never makes a fuss.

Fawning is peace at any price. It's folding before the disagreement has even formed, handing over the decision and calling it being easygoing, reading the room and becoming whatever will keep it calm. It's the partner who can't say no, who over-gives until they're running on empty and then gives a little more, who says yes with their mouth while something in them quietly closes. The truth gets swallowed so the temperature stays down — and from the outside it can look a lot like kindness.

And it costs you exactly what the others cost you — connection — just by a different road. Because the partner you're protecting never actually meets you. They meet the managed, smoothed-over version. Resentment quietly fills the gap underneath, and one day it surprises everyone, including you. Fawn doesn't choose being right over being connected. It chooses safety over being connected. But the relationship loses either way, because you can't be close to someone who isn't really there.

Why your strategy pulls one out of your partner

The tricky part is that they interlock. Your losing strategy practically reaches into your partner and hands them theirs.

Stand over someone in your need to be right, and they'll go quiet and withdraw — or fire back. Control, and you'll often pull fawning out of an anxious partner, or hard rebellion out of a defiant one. Flood your partner with unbridled expression, and they'll fawn or shut the door — because when you can't predict the next wave, appeasing it or going numb to it are the two ways to survive it. Withdraw, and watch your partner pursue harder and louder, which makes you withdraw further.

It becomes a loop, and the loop has a logic of its own. After a while, you're not even two people anymore — you're a single, self-feeding pattern. The pursuer pursues because the distancer distances because the pursuer pursues. Each of you is convinced you're only reacting to the other. Both of you are right. That's the problem.

How you break through

You cannot fix this by getting your partner to drop their strategy (which, in fact, is the losing strategy 'Control'). You only ever get one move in this loop, and it's this: own yours and put it down.

That starts with catching it. In the heat of it, learn to feel the moment your body shifts into the strategy — the cold withdrawal, the rising case for the prosecution, the urge to smooth it all over. Name it to yourself: I'm doing the thing. That pause is the whole game, because a strategy only works on autopilot. The second you see it, you have a choice again.

Then ask yourself the question that started this: Do I want to be right, or do I want to be connected? And do the harder, more vulnerable thing that the strategy was trying to protect you from. Underneath needing to be right is usually a fear of not mattering. Underneath fawning is usually a fear that the real you is too much. Say that instead. "I'm scared I don't count to you" lands completely differently than "you always do this."

It's not the polished move. It's the brave one. And it's the only thing that actually turns the loop off — because the moment one person steps out of their losing strategy and toward the truth, the other person's strategy has nothing left to push against.

You don't win your way back to each other. You drop the rope.

Want to read more? Terry Real's audio book "Fierce Intimacy" is one of the best couples books I know. Great to listen to and talk about together.