Relationships come in three stages: healthy, ill, and intensive care. The biggest mistake is not knowing which one you are actually in right now.
I see it constantly when I talk to my clients in online consultations.
Before I name it, I need to give you some context.
Broadly speaking, a relationship between a man and a woman exists in one of 3 stages:
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“Healthy”: everything is good, we love and hear each other, we want to make our partner happy. Harmony and joy fill us up.
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“Ill”: we quarrel from time to time, we get angry and irritated now and then, but most of the time we find common ground and live together reasonably well.
Once a fight is behind us, we forgive our partner. We know how to make peace and how to apologise. The relationship can bring pain and joy at the same time. It depends on the period.
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“Intensive care”: we don’t hear and don’t understand each other. We go over the same situations dozens of times in circles. Constant conflicts and fights. Exhaustion and helplessness. Resentment has piled up into an unbearable weight.
We don’t understand our partner’s motives and often think they are doing it all just to spite us. We tried to agree on something, but after a few normal days everything collapses again into the same vicious circle of blame, frayed nerves, shouting and hurt.
Thoughts of divorce come often, and you want to run away from all of it.
Those are the 3 main stages a relationship can be in.
One of the biggest mistakes I see in my clients is not understanding which of the 3 phases they are actually in right now.
I often have to explain to one person in the couple that they are in “intensive care”, while he or she thinks it is just a temporary “illness” and that soon everything will go back (the way it used to be) to a “healthy” relationship. They simply try to wait out the storm.
Talking to a man, I might point out that if his work schedule doesn’t change and he doesn’t start finding time for his wife, he could end up alone. I try to show him that she is already 99% ready to leave.
He looks at me in surprise and says: “But everything used to be fine!” And I explain that it was never fine before — she was just enduring it and hoping, and now her strength is running out.
If he hears me and grasps the full depth of the problem, there is a chance.
Sometimes I explain to women that if they don’t build a regular sex life with their husband, he will end up dependent on pornography, and in the long run that too can lead to cheating and divorce.
Some women think there is nothing terrible about him satisfying himself and liking porn.
And then those same women cry in my consultations and tell me they don’t understand how he could cheat.
I have to explain that for a man, sex is a key thing in a relationship, in exactly the same way that a man’s attention is for a woman.
The moment a person realises how serious it all is, they can start acting in a way that matches the situation.
When someone close to us ends up on the operating table in intensive care, we are ready to throw everything we have into saving their life.
It works the same way with our marriage, so it is better not to let it get to those extreme measures and decisions.
On the “Healthy Relationships” course at my school we spend several hours going through all 3 of these stages in detail and learning how to move out of “intensive care” into the “ill” state, and from there into a “healthy” relationship. We go through 30 practical exercises (one for each day of the course) to repair the relationship and learn to hear and understand each other on a completely different level.
It takes a lot of work. It requires awareness in at least one of the partners, commitment, and a genuine desire to build harmony in the relationship.
It isn’t easy to do — but being in “intensive care”, or living in the “ill” state, is a hundred times harder than learning to build a “healthy” relationship.
Have you ever been in a situation where the other side didn’t realise you were already ready to leave? How did you get out of “intensive care”?
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