Being married and living together is pretty much like living in a SWAT team hostage situation for the rest of your life.
You just have to make peace with the perp and try and survive without killing the perp, or landing yourself in jail.
If you walk out of the hostage situation periodically, you’ll be handing over negotiations to another person in most cases.
If you have managed to build up enough rapport with the perp, they might turn down offers to negotiate with someone else. And that’s a good thing.
You’re in that confined space. Sometimes you’re the negotiator. Sometimes you’re the perp. It works best when both are negotiators. It works even better when people outside, but invested in the situation (family, friends) are aware, conscious and not prone to emotionally driven outbursts themselves. More often than not, they’ll make things worse. It is tough when it is constantly the same person playing negotiator and the other party is constantly making demands. Sometimes it’ll be that way. Then it depends on how much the negotiator is willing to give up to keep everyone alive and out of jail.
The trick is to turn a hostage negotiation into a collaboration. Both need to be focused and invested in the other person’s sanity and survival enough, for them to turn it into an us vs the rest of the world situation. That can happen only through trust and respect.
Walking in and out at random creates uncertainty. Uncertainty heightens anxiety. Anxiety destroys negotiations and collaboration.
Rules need to be set. Confidence building measures need to be instituted repeatedly. Both parties need to negotiate on good faith with the best outcomes for both, being their primary goal.
The hostage situation can be even more heated and volatile if there are children in the room. And if those children are being used as literal hostages then, the battle is lost.