Also this is a term that Terry Real has been using for at least five years to describe the phenomenon of brief bouts of rage brought on by intense, familiar irritation.
Here's 'normal marital hate' described in Newsweek in July:
Here's a therapist discussing it in a blog from their counseling practice in 2017:
Here is someone who has worked with Real discussing healthy ways to counter Normal Marital Hate early in the pandemic:
This WaPo does a pretty bed job of explaining it, but it appears to be poorly excerpted from an interview about an entire book about this subject.
Basically you know how some people have intrusive thoughts about doing really violent or cruel things and because they don't know that intrusive thoughts are pretty common and not an indication of actual desire to do violence that they start thinking they're a terrible, awful person who doesn't deserve comfort or help or friendship?
Real is using the term "normal marital hate" to normalize intrusive cruel/angry/bitter thoughts about a partner, because brains are kind of garbage and if you start having intrusive thoughts about how much you 'hate' a partner's behavior you may start to think that the relationship is unfixable/terrible/harmful when you're really just having some totally standard intrusive thoughts.
Nothing in the article describes 'normal marital hate' as ongoing resentment or cruelty, only as moments of strong emotion that shouldn't be translated to the relationship as a whole.
So you see it is a little frustrating seeing someone who is attempting to coin a useful term for a phenomenon that is very common in relationships that makes people think that they are bad or evil or that their relationships are unusually terrible when they are in fact experiencing something common and fixable and then seeing people say "no actually if you ever feel half a second of hatred for your partner you are in an abusive relationship and need to leave."
You know when I hated my spouse? When he was dying. When he was dying and he was scared and didn't want to be honest with his doctor because they might tell him how sick he was. I remember thinking "fine, if that's how you want to be about it, that's how it's going to be. You'll die and I won't have to deal with this anymore" because he was *so stubborn* and *wouldn't listen* and he has *always been so stubborn*
And then I took a breath and told him that he was going to the hospital and if he didn't like it he could divorce me when he got out.
Someday you're going to be planning a funeral with someone you love. Someday you're going to miss your flight in a foreign country with someone you love. Someday someone you love will get sick and the little differences you shrug off everyday or the one irritating joke they always make or the trait that you normally admire them for is going to make you want to strangle them.
And then you'll take a breath and choose a color for the urn or get a flight with three connecting stops or pick up your keys and go to the hospital and you'll get through it, and that one moment doesn't mean the relationship is over or that anyone is abusing anyone else, it means you need to have a talk about priorities and feeling respected and plans for the future later, when no one feels like strangling anyone else.
As described in all of the linked articles normal marital hatred isn't something that you should tolerate every day, but neither is it a death knell for a relationship. It is a symptom that you should follow up on. Headaches aren't always brain tumors, but you shouldn't just ignore them if you're suddenly having a lot of them.
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