Marriages are fertile grounds for misunderstandings. The chances that either person in the relationship is attentive and emotionally available at any given time are statistically about the same as those of flipping a coin and getting heads instead of tails.

But coming short is not the problem. The difference between happy and unhappy couples is not that happy couples don’t make mistakes. We all do. All couples argue, but successful couples repair. And it’s how couples repair that separates happy from unhappy marriages...