Terry Real borrows the phrase "normal marital hatred" from the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who wrote about a mother's hate for her infant as a legitimate response to the genuine difficulty of that relationship. Real applies the same concept to long-term intimate partnership: over the course of a real marriage, both partners will feel, at various moments, something that can honestly be named as hatred.
Not at the level of wanting to harm. But at the level of a genuine, visceral negative feeling — a flash of contempt, a surge of resentment, a moment of real disgust at the person you have chosen to share your life with.
Most couples never say this out loud. And so it goes underground. It becomes a secret. And secrets, in marriages, are almost always corrosive.
Why It's Normal
Long-term intimate partnership is the most demanding relational context in human life. You are living in close proximity to another person whose needs, habits, moods, and limitations are in constant, unavoidable contact with your own.
Limerence — the early phase of falling in love — is, in part, a neurochemical state designed to obscure this reality long enough for attachment to form. Real love is what comes after the chemistry fades and you are left with a real person, in a real life, with all of the difficulty that entails.
The Harmony-Disharmony-Repair Cycle
The developmental psychologist Ed Tronick's research on mother-infant interaction established the "harmony-disharmony-repair" cycle as the fundamental rhythm of healthy attachment. No relationship stays in harmony. Disharmony is not a failure — it is the inevitable consequence of two separate people with separate needs being in close contact.
What matters is repair. The capacity to come back from disharmony — to acknowledge what happened, to take some responsibility for one's contribution, to reach back toward the other person — is the most reliable predictor of attachment security. Not the absence of rupture, but the presence of repair.
What to Do With It
The worst thing to do with a flash of genuine negative feeling toward your partner is to either suppress it entirely (it doesn't go away; it just moves underground) or to express it directly and fully in the moment (what RLT calls "unbridled self-expression," which reliably makes things worse).
The more useful approach is to use the feeling as information. What is this feeling telling me? Is there a chronic pattern that isn't being addressed? Is there something I need that I haven't asked for clearly?
The goal is to move from the raw feeling to what's underneath it, and then to bring that — the actual need, the actual hurt, the actual longing — into the conversation. Not the hatred, but what the hatred is pointing at.