You’ve had a horrible fight. You were having an affair and got busted. Your relationship is in crisis with emotional meltdowns; there’s talk of divorce.

In these crises, your focus is on putting out the emotional fire. Here is where you apologize, try and explain your side of the story, ask what it is you need to do to calm the emotional waters and stop the talk of divorce—conversations about being sorry, forgiveness, doing better, working on the problem. You want to patch things up, get back to where you used to be, get out of the dog house. The other person is in the driver’s seat; you’re willing to accommodate.

But despite your good intentions, this “being good” is usually not sustainable over the long term. At some point, you’ll get tired or resentful of feeling controlled, one-down, and will likely rebel, probably within a few months. More importantly, patching things up is what it is: a patch over a shaky infrastructure. The underlying cause and problem—what triggered the affair, the meltdown, the talk of divorce—isn’t really about some isolated, last-straw event or an........

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