Rupture is inevitable in intimate relationships. What matters is not whether couples encounter rupture but whether they are willing to repair— and, even more important, whether they are able to reset afterward.

Reset isn’t about pretending the rupture never happened. Instead, it’s about integrating what the conflict revealed, what the repair required, and how each partner grew and contributed to the repair in the process.

Reset is the fifth and final step in the PACER model we developed, as described in our book Love. Crash. Rebuild.. It’s the point at which couples recognize that the relationship they are stepping back into is not the same one that ruptured—because they themselves have changed. Reset marks the moment when new patterns begin to replace old ones and the couple can experience their relationship as something distinct, something shared, something more resilient than before.

As couples work through the steps preceding reset—pause, accountability, collaboration, and experiment—they build new ways of responding to stress and to one another. Reset occurs when the new ways of relating begin to feel reliable. Patterns that once unfolded automatically—defensiveness, retreat, escalation—are interrupted before they gain momentum. The couple notices this shift not because everything is suddenly easy but because the........

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