Like a person's health, a relationship exists in one of three states. Couples fail to save theirs because they don't know which of the three they are in.
How do you save a relationship?
To begin with, you have to account for the fact that, just as a person’s health can be in one of three states, our relationships can also be in one of three periods.
1. We’re healthy. Nothing hurts.
We love and we hear each other. We want to take care of the person we love and make them happy.
2. Illness.
We feel bad in this relationship. We don’t hear or understand each other. We argue often and raise our voices. Thoughts of divorce flicker through now and then. There’s a sense of exhaustion — of walking the same vicious circle of mutual hurt and blame.
3. Intensive care.
Our relationship is barely alive. It’s hanging by a thread. Talk of divorce and shouting are constant. Dishes fly around the house. We separate, then give the relationship one more “last” chance.
People often fail to save a relationship because they don’t understand which of the three stages they are in.
When we’re healthy and want to stay that way, it’s enough to simply keep a decent lifestyle and healthy habits. As the English saying goes: “One apple a day keeps doctors away.”
When we’re ill, we need a doctor, we need tests and other diagnostics to understand what is causing the illness. Once we’ve found the root cause, we need the right medicine and the right daily routine.
In intensive care, a new habit or a new medicine won’t be enough. In a crisis we need the attention of many specialists and a whole set of measures to save the situation and stay alive.
The parallel with relationships is as direct as it gets.
When our relationship is good, we can maintain it through the right daily micro-decisions and the habit of giving each other time and attention.
When conflict has settled into our family and we’re “ill”, we need a detailed diagnosis to understand what mistakes we’re making. Which of our beliefs do we consider right, when in fact they are destroying our family? This takes openness — to admit your share of responsibility for the “illness” and to start looking for the right “medicine”.
When a marriage is on the brink of divorce, it needs full intensive care. That means forgetting about fairness, forgetting who owes what to whom, forgetting old grievances and saying goodbye to expectations.
It’s a critical situation in which you have to do EVERYTHING to keep the family together. Even apologise for situations where you don’t feel you were at fault. Even forgive the person you love if they haven’t apologised. Ask other people for help.
Temporarily put your work, your career, your business on pause in order to hold on to the last thread keeping you from filing for divorce.
In that situation, a new habit of paying compliments or bringing flowers every day won’t help. What’s needed is deep resuscitation and a radical change of course in your thinking and your actions. In everything.
It’s precisely this failure to understand the three stages of a relationship — and not knowing what each of them requires — that leads to more than 70% of marriages in our country falling apart. People don’t go looking for better when things are good. They leave a relationship when they stop getting what they need from it.
And which stage is your relationship in right now?
Articles do not fix relationships
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