The Real Problem Isn’t the Fight: Understanding Active Failures and Latent Conditions in Marriage
I was listening to a podcast recently about pickleball — yes, I’ve joined the legions of middle-aged people chasing a wiffle ball around a court and hitting it pack with a piece of (expensive) wood. The host was discussing the difference between “active” mistakes and “latent” mistakes.
An active mistake, he explained, is the obvious one right there in front of you. I hit a bad shot that goes sailing into the net. Everyone (well, hopefully, not everyone is looking… but still) can see it. It’s clear. It’s the mistake.
But the latent mistake? That’s what’s built into the system, so to speak. I’m hitting the ball too late. My feet are out of position before I even swing. My paddle angle is wrong from the start. These are the repetitive, underlying issues that make that bad shot almost inevitable. They’re mistakes I keep making, over and over, because I haven’t addressed what’s really going wrong.
As I listened, something clicked. This perfectly describes what I see in marriages every single day.
The Fight You’re Having Isn’t the Problem
A couple sits in my office, still raw from a fight that turned ugly and personal. She said something cutting about his family. He brought up a mistake she made three years ago. Voices were raised. Doors were slammed. Maybe someone threatened to leave.
That’s the active failure… the crisis moment, the thing that brought them to my office. It’s obvious. It’s painful. It demands attention.
But behind that fight? There’s a pattern of disconnection that’s been building for months or years. Poor communication habits. Emotional distance. Unresolved resentments. A loss of friendship and intimacy. These are the latent conditions… the underlying systemic issues that made that ugly fight not just possible, but almost inevitable.
Here’s what I’ve learned over 30 years of marriage therapy: Most couples are focused on the wrong problem.
They want to dissect the fight. Who said what. Who started it. Who was more wrong. They want to fix the active failure, the obvious mistake right there in front of them.
But if we only address the fight without examining the disconnection underneath, we’re just waiting for the next crisis. Different topic, same pattern. The holes in the system remain, and eventually, something else will slip through.
A Systems View of Marriage Crisis
Seven years ago, I talked about the “Swiss Cheese Theory of Accidents” and how it applies to marriage. The theory comes from safety analysis in aviation, healthcare, and other high-risk fields. Imagine stacking slices of Swiss cheese. Each slice has holes in it, but normally those holes don’t align. If you try to pass something through the stack, it hits solid cheese and stops.
But when the holes line up? Something can pass straight through. Like an accident.
Or a crisis.
In marriages, we have protective layers, what I call safety zones. These include love, priorities, attention, affection, boundaries, communication, emotional intimacy, and shared meaning. When these are strong and intact, they protect the marriage from crisis. Even when stress comes, even when conflict arises, the marriage can handle it.
But when these protective layers develop holes — when we stop prioritizing the relationship, when communication breaks down, when emotional intimacy fades — the marriage becomes vulnerable. And when enough holes align, a crisis passes right through.
What I want to add to that framework today is a crucial distinction: the crisis that passes through is the active failure. The holes in the protective layers are the latent conditions.
Understanding Active Failures
Active failures are the events that happen at the point of contact. They’re:
Immediate and visible. Everyone can see them. The explosive argument. The affair. The decision made without consulting your spouse. The cruel words said in anger.
Proximate to the damage. These are the actions directly connected to the pain and hurt. When couples come to therapy, this is what they talk about first. “She cheated on me.” “He said he wished he’d never married me.” “She forgot our anniversary again.”
Easy to identify and blame. There’s usually someone who “did” the active failure. It’s clear who said what, who made which choice, who crossed which line.
What demands immediate attention. The active failure is what hurts right now. It’s the crisis that brought you to the breaking point.
Active failures are real. They cause genuine damage. They need to be acknowledged, and sometimes there needs to be immediate changes in behavior for the sake of safety and respect in the relationship.
But here’s the critical insight: Active failures are symptoms, not causes.
Understanding Latent Conditions
Latent conditions are the underlying systemic issues that create an environment where active failures become likely… or even inevitable. They’re:
Built into the system over time. They don’t appear suddenly. They develop through neglect, through patterns established early in the relationship, through accumulated resentments never addressed, through gradual emotional distance.
Often invisible until an active failure reveals them. Like those holes in the Swiss cheese, you might not notice them until something passes through. The couple who “seemed fine” until the affair. The marriage that “was good” until the explosion.
Harder to identify because they’re structural rather than event-based. There’s no single moment when you became disconnected. There’s no specific day when communication broke down. These things erode gradually, almost imperceptibly.
The real leverage points for preventing future problems. If you want to crisis-proof your marriage, this is where the work needs to happen.
In my pickleball example, the latent conditions were my footwork, my timing, my paddle angle. In marriages, the latent conditions are almost always some form of disconnection.
Disconnection: The Root Latent Condition
When I work with couples in crisis, I can usually trace the active failure back to underlying disconnection. It shows up in different ways:
Emotional disconnection. You’re living parallel lives. You talk about logistics, like who’s picking up the kids, what’s for dinner, and who needs to pay a bill or empty the trash. But you’ve stopped sharing your inner world. You don’t know what your spouse is worried about, excited about, or struggling with.
Physical disconnection. Affection has faded. You don’t hold hands anymore. You sleep on opposite sides of the bed, as far apart as possible. Intimacy is rare or absent. You’ve become roommates.
Relational disconnection. You’ve lost your friendship. You don’t laugh together. You don’t have shared activities you both enjoy. You don’t look forward to time together.
Communication disconnection. You’ve developed patterns that shut down real conversation. One person withdraws, the other pursues. Or you’ve learned you can’t talk about certain topics without it escalating. So you stop talking about anything that matters.
Priority disconnection. The marriage has slipped down the list. Work comes first. Kids come first. Everything else comes first. You tell yourself you’ll focus on the marriage “when things calm down.” But things never calm down.
This disconnection creates those holes in your protective layers. And the more disconnected you become, the bigger the holes grow. Eventually, when stress hits or a vulnerable moment comes, there’s nothing to catch the mistake before it causes damage.
The ugly fight, the affair, the threat to leave — these are active failures passing through a system weakened by latent disconnection.
Why Couples Get Stuck on Active Failures
If the latent conditions are the real problem, why do couples fixate on the active failures?
Because active failures hurt right now. They are immediate and painful. When your spouse says something cruel, when they betray your trust, when they make a major decision without you — that pain is real and it demands attention.
There’s also something psychologically safer about focusing on the active failure. It lets us maintain a clear victim/villain narrative. “If my spouse hadn’t done X, we’d be fine.” It keeps us from having to examine our own role in the disconnection that led to the crisis.
And let’s be honest, addressing the active failure feels more concrete. “Stop yelling at me” is a clear request. “We need to address our underlying emotional disconnection” feels vague and overwhelming.
But here’s what happens when you only focus on the active failure:
You apologize for the fight. You promise not to yell. You might even keep that promise for a while. But nothing fundamental has changed. The disconnection remains. The holes in the protective layers are still there. And eventually, you have another crisis. Maybe a different topic, maybe a different form, but the same underlying dynamic.
You’re stuck in a cycle of crisis management rather than actually solving the problem.
The Couple Who Kept Having “Different” Fights
Let me give you an example. “Sarah” and “Mike” came to see me after a particularly bad fight about money. Mike had made a large purchase without consulting Sarah, she confronted him, and it escalated into something ugly. Things were said that couldn’t easily be taken back.
In our first session, they wanted to establish “rules” about financial decisions. Who needs to consult whom about what amount. That’s addressing the active failure — the specific incident that brought them in.
But as we talked, a pattern emerged. This wasn’t really about money. Six months ago, they’d had a huge fight about his mother visiting. A year before that, it was about whether to let their teenager go to a party. Different topics, but the same dynamic underneath.
Mike felt controlled and micromanaged. Sarah felt disregarded and anxious. Both felt disconnected and misunderstood. They’d stopped having real conversations years ago. Now, it was just logistics and arguments. They rarely had positive interactions anymore. Physical affection had disappeared. They were living parallel lives, occasionally colliding in conflict.
The purchase without consultation? That was an active failure. Certainly a problem.
But the latent conditions were years of disconnection, poor communication patterns, and unresolved feelings of being controlled or disregarded.
We could have created financial rules (first-order change addressing an active failure). But unless we addressed the disconnection, they’d just have the same fight about something else six months later.
From My Swiss Cheese Model to Active/Latent Framework
When I wrote about the Swiss Cheese Theory in 2017, I identified the protective layers in marriage: love, priorities, attention, affection, boundaries, communication. The idea was that when these develop holes and those holes align, a crisis can pass through.
The active/latent framework gives us language for what we’re looking at:
The crisis that passes through = the active failure. This is the event itself. The affair. The fight. The threat to leave. The decision made without consultation. This is what everyone sees and what causes immediate pain.
The holes in the protective layers = the latent conditions. When love becomes routine, when you stop prioritizing the relationship, when affection fades, when communication breaks down. These create vulnerabilities in your marriage system. These are the latent conditions that make active failures possible.
Disconnection = the force that creates and enlarges the holes. As emotional, physical, relational, communication, and priority disconnection grows, it creates and widens holes in every protective layer. Your marriage becomes increasingly vulnerable to crisis.
So when a couple comes to me in crisis, I’m looking at both levels:
The active failure that brought them in — yes, we need to acknowledge that, address the immediate hurt, and sometimes establish boundaries for respectful behavior going forward.
But more importantly, the latent conditions underneath — the disconnection that made this crisis almost inevitable, and that will continue to create crises unless we address it.
The Question That Changes Everything
Here’s what I often say to couples after we’ve spent some time acknowledging the hurt from the active failure:
“We can get stuck on the specifics of this incident… analyze who said what, who was more wrong, what should have happened differently… and just wait for it to emerge somewhere else. Or we can go deeper and make sure we eliminate the reason this actually happened, has already happened, and will continue to happen. One approach is really about blame. The other is about solving.”
That question reframes the entire therapy. Are we here to referee this specific fight? Or are we here to rebuild a marriage?
Most couples, when put that way, choose solving over blaming. But it requires something from them: a willingness to shift focus from “what my spouse did to me” to “what’s happening in our relationship system.”
It also requires some humility: acknowledging that the problem isn’t just what happened in that one fight, but patterns both of you have contributed to over time.
It requires some hope: believing that change is actually possible, that you can build something better.
And it requires some courage: being willing to be vulnerable, to examine your own role, to do the harder work of reconnection rather than just demanding behavior changes from your spouse.
What This Means for Your Marriage
If you’re reading this and recognizing your own marriage, here’s what I want you to understand:
The fight you had last week isn’t your problem. It’s a symptom of your problem. The problem is the disconnection underneath, the holes in your protective layers that made that fight possible.
You can’t behavior-modification your way out of this. Promising to stop yelling, agreeing to check in before making decisions, scheduling a date night… these might address active failures, but they won’t heal latent disconnection. The disconnection will find another outlet.
Both of you have contributed to the latent conditions. Even if the active failure was clearly one person’s doing (like an affair), the disconnection that created vulnerability to that failure was built by both of you over time. This isn’t about equal blame for the crisis; it is about shared responsibility for rebuilding the system.
The good news? Addressing latent conditions naturally reduces active failures. When you do the work of reconnection — rebuilding emotional intimacy, restoring communication, reprioritizing the marriage, rekindling affection — the crises become less frequent and less intense. Not because you’re white-knuckling better behavior, but because you’ve strengthened the protective layers in your marriage.
Moving Forward
In my next article, we’ll dive deeper into why behavior changes alone aren’t enough. We’ll be exploring the difference between first-order change (changing what you do) and second-order change (changing the underlying system). We’ll look at why couples often fail when they try to fix active failures without addressing latent conditions.
But for now, I want to leave you with this:
If you’re in a marriage crisis, or if you keep having versions of the same crisis, stop asking “How do I fix this specific problem?” and start asking “What are the latent conditions in my marriage that keep making these problems possible?”
The answer is almost always some form of disconnection. And disconnection, unlike a specific fight or incident, is something you can work on together, starting today.
The holes in your marriage’s protective layers didn’t appear overnight, and they won’t disappear overnight. But every choice you make to reconnect — to have a real conversation, to show genuine affection, to prioritize time together, to be emotionally present — begins to fill in those holes.
Build enough solid cheese back into your marriage, and the crises stop passing through.
That’s not crisis management. That’s crisis prevention.
And that’s the real work of saving a marriage.
Dr. Lee H. Baucom is a marriage therapist with over 25 years of experience helping couples save and restore their relationships. He is the creator of the Save The Marriage System and author of How To Save Your Marriage In 3 Simple Steps.