Hello and welcome to the Empowered Couples podcast, where here you get modern, non-boring relationship advice for you and your partner to communicate like pros, fight smarter, and stay in the same team no matter the challenge that you face.

I am one of your hosts, Aaron Freeman.

And I'm Jocelyn Freeman, but you all just know us as the Freeman's.

And this episode is ending the standoff after a big blowup.

Oh, the dreaded standoff, where you are holding out, you are not going up to your partner,

you are waiting for them to go, you are suffering in silence, you haven't talked maybe in days,

or it's been very dry and disconnected.

So we came up with this idea, right? Our whole book is called

the argument hangover. So we are no strangers to that dreaded feeling after the argument, hence

the term that we came up with. But it really stood out to us. We got a text message from a couple

that we've worked with and they were at one of their favorite

spots. They're on vacation. I mean, they should be in paradise and in heaven with each other.

And they were in a standoff. They had a couple really tense days, one or two big blowups. And they

were in the standoff period where they could have gone the rest of

the vacation not repairing and in that dreaded standoff and then not only that because

the main vacation, that's a terrible time for that to happen. But we also know so many couples

will just have a big blow up and not interact for three, five, seven days and then maybe slowly ease into business

as usual, we can sense it. I remember being a kid and I could feel the tension in the room,

even if I didn't totally understand what was happening. So we wanted to cover this today so that

you can end the standoff and be able to, as a lot of our topics

are about, be able to come back together, come back to love, come back to unity, come back to

enjoying life together because I'm going to just start off with a little like motivational

...