Background: Life-long Blue Piller, on my second marriage, working hard for two months now to learn the RP way, slowly applying lessons learned in my marriage.

Set Up: My wife can be extremely emotional (as I’ve read on TRP, an attribute common to all women). Generally speaking, when she goes off the deep end, yelling and spazzing about something stupid, I lose it too, and match her emotional outburst, scream for scream. Bad things are said, and typically I end up apologizing and asking for her forgiveness, even though at best, we’re equally culpable.

Report: One night recently, she loses it on something stupid. I used the wrong pan to cook a meal for my son (from my first marriage, who's visiting). She just goes off on me about it. When I’m feeling the urge to yell back, I mentally repeat to myself, thinking of TRP, “maintain your frame.” I did that. I told her I wouldn’t use that pan any more. When she continued to rant, I told her that she was acting like a child. I spoke calmly and authoritatively. That’s all I said. Then I walked away and did my own thing for an hour until it was time to go to bed.

Just before bed, she comes to me, tells me she’s sorry about the way she acted and she won’t do that again. She hugs me and I hug her back, thanking her for her apology. And then we’re good.

Epilogue: Gentlemen, as I said, I’m new to TRP and so I may not have done everything 100% RP in this brief account, but I’m here to tell you that the results of my maintaining frame were 180 degrees different from how this normally would have ended. Frankly, it’s amazing. Thank you.

Edit: it's not an important detail, but a couple of people have asked about what kind of pan it was. I was baking popcorn shrimp and used a baking pan that my wife only uses to bake pastries. I'd covered the pan with foil, but whatever.