Burn the old cliché. Burn it to the ground. "If you're too emotional or too tired or too stressed, your rational brain goes out the window," Taibbi says. You can't accomplish anything productive when you're in such a state (and no, the fight isn't "over" when one of you just gets too tired to go on anymore and gives up altogether). Going to bed angry doesn't mean shelve the issue indefinitely, or give each other the cold shoulder and then pretend it never happened the next day. It just means you sometimes need to take a step back and call a long pause. "Say, 'This is not a good time to talk about this — this is important, but let's talk about it in the morning when we're both less tired and can think clearly,'" Taibbi says.