Making Up Is Hard to Do : If you can patch things up after a big blowout, your relationship might actually improve. But the road to resolution is full of potholes.

It happened right here, in the breezeway of Georgetown’s Four Seasons Hotel. On a cold December night in 1991, Marla threw her shoe--and her 7.5-carat diamond engagement ring--at the Donald and told him that she never wanted to see him or any of his billions again, ever.

The Donald, strong but seldom silent, had some words of his own. Best not to think about printing them.

Things looked bleak in the house of Maples-Trump. Who could imagine reconciling after such an angry, public explosion? Yet the last time we checked, there they were, having a baby and marching down the aisle, in that order. Love--and reconciliation--had triumphed.

Patching things up after a huge and horrific argument is not a subject most couples like to talk about. (Unless you’re Roseanne and Tom Arnold.) Our culture, after all, continues to base its expectations of marriage around romantic notions that do not often hold true in real life. Mythology holds that after the Big One, we kiss and make up.

But for most couples, the reality is not so simple. Sooner or later, the giant fight is likely to take place--the confrontation where you reach into the deepest well of rage to hurl insults and imprecations designed to wound and that do so with great effectiveness. The five-alarm fight is a nasty fact of life--so much so that Michael Albano, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, keeps a plaque on his wall that reads: “Marriages are made in heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.”

In the face of such fury, said USC psychology professor Constance R. Ahrons, “reconciliation is hard work. It’s incredibly hard work.”

Certainly that was the case for Dennis and Mary, who agreed to talk about their own personal moment of marital Armageddon provided that neither their actual first nor last names were used. Dennis and Mary live in Los Angeles; he’s a businessman, she’s a teacher. They have two young children, and normally, in the five years they have been married, they coexist in relative tranquillity.

But one Saturday night not long ago, after the kids were asleep and the house should have been calm and quiet, things somehow got out of hand. “I’m not even sure what started it,” said Mary, although Dennis said he was irked when Mary complained about the division of labor in their family--a familiar theme, as it turns out.

With the doors closed so as not to wake the kids, they were soon shouting at each other. Mary, enraged, made an unflattering comparison between Dennis and his father, whose idea of cooperation was lifting his feet when the vacuum cleaner came by.

“And you’re no different than your (bleeping) mother,” Dennis fired back.

Mary countered with an unkind description of her husband’s anatomy, another family trait, she added for bad measure. Dennis dived right into the domestic gutter as well. His wife’s rear end, he told her, could be used as a retaining wall the next time the San Gabriel Mountains fell down.

And so it went, spiraling into the kind of family faceoff that happens “for most of us,” said Santa Monica psychiatrist Dr. Mark Goulston, because “there is a longtime buildup of unexpressed disappointment, which hardens into frustration and anger, and smolders into bitterness and belligerence.”

Mary and Dennis did cool down--and, it’s a relief to report, did stay married. But they admit that at that white-hot moment, when the marital ceiling threatened to crumble, it was hard to imagine even wanting to be friends again--never mind partners or, God forbid, lovers.

As Goulston promised: “If you can get to the other side, you do develop a different level of closeness. You become the kind of couple that other people gravitate toward.”

In researching his book “Staying the Course,” an examination of the careers and marriages of 80 highly successful men, University of Massachusetts-Boston psychology professor Robert S. Weiss found that the impact of nuclear-level domestic disputes is “really severe. It just lays people out.”

In most cases, it’s the little irritants that add up to the big, bad brouhaha, domestic law specialist Albano observed. “They start saying things they wish they hadn’t said--and should not have said.

“The next thing they know, they’re saying, ‘Oh, and by the way, so-and-so made a pass at me’ “--a real red flag, in Albano’s experience--”or, ‘You’re overweight.’ Or, ‘You don’t look as good as your best friend.’ The next thing you know, you’re talking about getting a divorce.”

No. 1 in the marital insult hall of fame is “You’re lousy in bed,” said Albano, who practices in Independence, Mo. Next comes the affront that sends most grown people into major tantrum mode: “You’re more and more like your mother/father every day.” Finally, Albano said, out comes the handy-dandy, all-purpose “I never really loved you anyway.”

As trite as such aspersions might appear, their effect can be devastating. “I don’t think we do forget these things,” said USC’s Ahrons, who has just completed a book called “The Good Divorce” that addresses many of these issues.

“They are sort of always there,” Ahrons said, building up into what she calls the scar tissue that is part of any intimate relationship. Still, she said, “I do think you can forgive, even without forgetting.”

Reconciliation turns out to be a kind of art. It takes practice. It takes skill. And it comes in many packages.

For example, Ahrons cautioned, “there’s pseudo-reconciliation, where people get scared” of what has just happened between them, or of the possibility of ending up alone. In these circumstances, she said, “often they will pull back together and reconcile temporarily without resolving anything.”

For some couples, Ahrons said, this kind of high-conflict drama becomes part of their domestic fabric. They feed on the Sturm und Drang , “and then, of course, there is the big apology and they make up, and usually there’s good sex after that,” Ahrons said.

“People get into getting back together,” she said. What they say, invariably, is “this time it will be different.” But of course, Ahrons said, “Nothing is different.”

True reconciliation, specialists maintain, requires recognition that some change is needed. “There has to be some sense that the way we work together isn’t working,” Ahrons said. “It’s not just an apology for an event. It’s a real sense that we’ve got some big problems, and we don’t know if we’re going to make it, but we’re going to try.”

A genuine armistice also means acknowledging that no one is blameless, said Goulston, who teaches at UCLA. “In explosions of this magnitude,” Goulston said, “it takes two to tango--and it takes two to tangle.”

Owning up to some degree of responsibility for the battle is critical, said Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

“All of us tend to allocate blame,” Fisher said--when in fact, “apologizing for what I did wrong tends to be better if done honestly than saying, ‘I forgive you for what you did wrong.’ ” The latter response has a “point-scoring quality,” Fisher said, “and it says, ‘Not only are you a bastard, but I’m an angel.’ ”

Sometimes it helps to pull pride out of the picture as well, said Albano, who, as a divorce lawyer, admitted that he does not see men and women at the height of connubial bliss. “I always suggest that you have to get beyond the hurt and look at the facts, the circumstances, the motives that led up to the argument,” he said.

And even then, Fisher cautioned, a cool-headed resolution may not necessarily mean the end of a communications crisis. When Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, it was an extraordinary miracle of mediation, Fisher said, “but it did not solve the trouble in the Middle East.”

Honest resolution, he explained, implies an understanding that “we’re still going to have disagreements” from time to time--but perhaps we can avoid breaking all the wedding china when we do.

Even the most steadfast of relationships--what social scientists call a “validating” partnership--has a “5-to-1 ratio of positive to negative events,” said University of Washington psychology professor John Gottman, author of “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail.”

“Most people just kind of go on,” Gottman said, even when a massive flare-up occurs.

Reconciliation often takes time, and always takes tenderness, Albano has found.

“But most people can get beyond a single big blowup,” he said, “and realize that no one is perfect.”

Just ask another fun couple, Dudley Moore and Nicole Rothschild. Just a few weeks ago, Rothschild had Moore arrested for allegedly attacking her. On April 16, the pair got married and beamed happily at each other for photographers.