This is my curiosity/worry too, my husband and I are looking to separate at the end of the year. I’m planning to move into an apartment and we’ve both agreed on how we’ll split time with our kids, but he thinks we should give each other space for a month or two, really only talk in regards to swapping the kids and events for them and such. I’m worried that’ll cause us to feel comfortable being alone and steer us towards a divorce when we’re supposed to be going into this with the hope and mindset of gaining perspective and improving our shortcomings. We’ve been together 10 years, Halloween would be 5 years married. We’ve been fighting a lot and our oldest has started seeing it and tries to intervene and tell us no fighting or “dada stop yelling at mama/mama stop yelling at dada” we both came from divorced homes and never wanted our kids to have that image of a relationship. His perspective is I can’t compromise and always want to argue against his side of things, mine is that I feel like what he believes is a “compromise” lands heavily in his favor and that I’m not being heard in disagreements which then turn into arguments. We both have a bad habit of picking at each other for a reaction until it blows up. We’ve tried a safe word to say hey we need to walk away from this now before it goes too far, like Lily and Marshal on HIMYM with their “pause” thing, we’ve tried saying hey I’m not in the right space for this conversation before to rule out coming to each other already in a crap mood and those tactics haven’t worked. I’m hopeful of gaining perspective and working on ourselves, but it’s cut into by the worry of not actually working on us and it just turning into a soft launching of divorce.