When a seemingly stable and loving relationship suddenly falls apart, people tend to assume the love simply ran out. According to psychologist Mark Travers, that assumption is almost always wrong. The real problem, he argues, is not a lack of love but the absence of one very specific and demanding skill that most couples never think to develop. That skill is the ability to fully “metabolize” emotional ruptures rather than rushing past them toward a quick fix.
Travers draws a clear distinction between what gets a relationship started and what keeps it intact over time. Love may be the force that draws two people together and creates that initial sense of connection, but it is not the force that sustains that connection once real life sets in. What truly determines whether a couple weathers conflict, disappointment, and distance is the capacity to stay emotionally regulated and remain present with one another during those difficult moments. Without that ability, even the most loving partnerships quietly erode.
In a piece published in Psychology Today, Travers defined the concept with precision. “That skill refers to the ability to stay with an emotional rupture long enough to process, understand, and integrate it, rather than rushing to neutralize it quickly,” he explained. He describes a rupture as any moment where a crack appears in the connection between two people, even if it only lasts a few seconds. It might show up as a sharp tone, a moment of emotional absence, or a misunderstanding that lands harder than intended.
The danger, Travers emphasizes, is not the size of the rupture itself but how it is handled afterward. When couples sidestep these moments without genuinely working through them, the unresolved tension accumulates beneath the surface of what might otherwise look like a healthy relationship. Over time, the absence of open conflict can be mistaken for harmony, when in reality it is simply avoidance dressed up as peace.
Travers breaks the skill of metabolizing ruptures into three core abilities. The first is the capacity to stay present without either escalating or shutting down, meaning a person can feel anger, hurt, or disappointment without attacking their partner or withdrawing completely. The second is the ability to tolerate the impact of one’s own actions without immediately becoming defensive or explaining them away, which requires accepting that good intentions and harmful effects can coexist. “The third is to delay closure on the conflict until understanding develops naturally, without forcing a quick emotional resolution,” Travers added.
That rush to resolve things might look like emotional maturity from the outside, but Travers says it is more often driven by discomfort and a low tolerance for uncertainty. When tension lingers without resolution, anxiety and shame begin to surface, and a fast apology or a forced reconciliation becomes a way of escaping those feelings rather than genuinely addressing them. These fragile makeups stack up over time, each one leaving a small residue of unprocessed emotion that gradually weakens the relationship’s foundation.
“Metabolizing rupture requires emotional maturity, responsibility for one’s own regulation, and a willingness not to remove feelings quickly but to allow them to develop meaning,” Travers concluded. In other words, the couples who last are not the ones who never fight or never hurt each other. They are the ones who have learned to sit in the discomfort of a broken moment long enough to understand what it is actually telling them.
From a broader psychological perspective, the concept Travers describes connects to decades of research on attachment theory and emotion regulation in relationships. Psychologist John Gottman, whose work at the University of Washington became foundational in couples research, similarly identified the ability to repair emotional disconnection as one of the strongest predictors of long-term relationship satisfaction. His research found that it is not the frequency of conflict that determines whether a couple stays together, but rather the quality of repair attempts made afterward. Emotion regulation itself, the ability to manage one’s internal emotional state without becoming overwhelmed or numb, is widely studied in clinical psychology and is considered a core component of emotional intelligence. Attachment theory, originally developed by John Bowlby and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth, suggests that the patterns people develop for handling emotional closeness and conflict in adulthood are often rooted in early experiences with caregivers. Understanding those patterns can be a powerful first step toward developing exactly the kind of emotional presence Travers describes.
Share your thoughts on whether you think emotional regulation is the real key to a lasting relationship in the comments.
