Reflection
The Six People in the Room
Two people sit down opposite me. They have agreed to come. They have found a time, arranged the money, and taken an afternoon out of a working week, which is not nothing.
Then they begin to speak, and within twenty minutes something becomes clear that neither of them expected. They have not agreed what they are here about.
He thinks the problem is that she is angry all the time. She thinks the problem is what he does that she is angry about. He thinks it is about money. She thinks money is merely where it shows, and the problem is that she has not been looked at properly in four years. Neither is lying. Neither is being difficult. They have simply arrived with two different accounts of the same marriage, and until now nobody has put the two accounts side by side.
That moment is not a preliminary to the work. It is very often the work beginning.
There are six people in the room
Two partners sit in front of me, and with each of them come their mother and their father.
Not as figures of speech. How you conduct yourself in a couple, what you expect to be given, what you assume you must earn, what a raised voice means, whether silence is safety or abandonment, what a man does when he is upset, what a woman is allowed to want, when love is withdrawn and what it costs to get it back — almost none of this was decided by you. It was learned, early, by watching, in the only relationship you had no choice about.
So the room contains six people. Two of them are talking.
How you fell in love
Consider what happens at the beginning, because it explains a good deal of what happens at the end.
You meet someone and something extraordinary occurs. They seem to hold qualities you have wanted and not found: an ease you lack, a confidence, a warmth, a decisiveness, a capacity for pleasure. You feel more yourself in their company. Everyone who has been in love recognises this.
What is largely happening is that you are seeing the best of yourself in them.
Not because they lack those qualities. They may have them in abundance. But the intensity — the sense that this person is the answer, that they are unlike anyone — comes from the fact that you have placed something of your own into them. Something real, but yours, and unlived. The parts of you that were never encouraged, never permitted, never developed. You meet them outside yourself, in another face, and it is overwhelming.
This is not an argument that love is an illusion. Projection of this kind is how most relationships begin, and it does something useful: it binds two people together long enough for them to find out who the other actually is. But it is worth knowing what you were looking at.
The division of labour
Then something quieter happens, over years, and it is the pattern I see more than any other.
Most couples are made of one person who leans slightly towards thinking and one who leans slightly towards feeling. At the start the difference is small and rather attractive. He is calm when she is upset. She is warm where he is measured.
Then it begins to feed itself.
When he does not know what to do with his own distress, it goes somewhere. It goes into her. She becomes the one who is upset — on behalf of both of them, though nobody has said so. And relieved of it, he becomes calmer still, more reasonable, more able to think. Which leaves her holding more, so she expresses more. Which makes him more reasonable.
Ten years on there is a man who says he does not really feel things and a woman described, by both of them, as too emotional.
Neither of them arrived like that. They made each other like that. Each has outsourced half of themselves to the other, and each has become progressively less able to do the half they gave away. This is why the argument they have is always the same argument. You are cold. You are hysterical. Both are accurate descriptions of a job the other person is doing on their behalf.
When a partner becomes a parent
There is a further turn, and it follows from the exclusivity.
Two adults meet, and fairly quickly agree that this person and no other will meet a set of needs: for tenderness, for sex, for being known, for being cared about when ill or frightened. Each hands the other something like a monopoly.
But there was one earlier arrangement in which another person held the whole key to your needs, and you were an infant, and the person was your mother or whoever stood in her place.
And the psyche does more than recognise the shape. Handing one person the whole of your needs constellates the parental imago.
The imago is not your mother. It is the internal image of the parent, laid down before you had language for it, and it has been carrying that role inside you ever since — largely unrevised by anything your actual parents did or failed to do in the forty years since. Give somebody the monopoly, and they become the place where that image lands.
This matters because an archetype, once activated, arrives with its own energy. That is the part worth understanding, and it is the part couples cannot make sense of on their own: the sheer disproportion of what follows. A remark about the dishwasher produces three hours of something, and both people know afterwards that it was not about the dishwasher. It was not. Something considerably older was constellated by a tone of voice, and it came with a charge that has been accumulating since childhood.
So one partner slowly occupies the position of the parent and the other the position of the child, without anyone deciding it. It alternates by subject — the same person can be the child about money and the parent about the children’s schooling, in the course of a single evening.
What follows is therefore not really adult conflict. It is someone who feels, without being able to say so, that they have just been told off by their mother. It is someone else pleading for an approval they stopped needing thirty years ago.
When the children arrive
A child is born, and something is overthrown.
The romantic couple — the two people who stayed up late, went away for weekends, and had a great deal of unstructured time in which nothing in particular had to be achieved — is displaced almost overnight by the parental couple. This is not a misfortune. The parental couple is a real and necessary organisation, and one in which the needs of a third person are quite correctly placed above the needs of both adults.
What nobody mentions is that the first couple does not survive this automatically. It has to be deliberately kept alive, in far less time, by two people who are tired.
Eroticism is what suffers first, because eroticism needs exactly what parenthood removes: unhurried time, a degree of separateness, some remaining mystery, and the ability to see the other as somebody other than your co-manager.
Here I would say something that surprises people. When sex is working, it occupies perhaps ten or fifteen per cent of a couple’s life. When it stops working, it becomes eighty-five per cent of the problem. It expands to fill everything, colours every other conversation, and is somehow both the thing that cannot be mentioned and the thing underneath every argument that is being had instead.
The difficulty underneath this has almost nothing to do with technique. It is hard to hold two registers in one person: the one you build a life with, who is safe and respectable and thoroughly known, and the one you desire, who is none of those things. Familiarity is what makes a home, and familiarity is also what quietens desire. No couple escapes that tension entirely.
Parenthood sharpens it considerably, and for a reason that connects to everything above. The person opposite you is now visibly a mother, or a father. Which is to say they now occupy the one role that in your own history was the least erotic of all.
What has to stay sacred
A good many of the gay couples I see are in some form of open relationship. The arrangements vary: encounters a few times a year, sometimes separately, sometimes together, generally with terms that have been discussed at considerable length.
I want to be careful, because this is an observation from one consulting room rather than a claim about anybody’s community. But it has taught me something that applies a long way beyond the couples it comes from.
The ones that work are not the ones with the best rules. They are the ones who have managed to keep something sacred between them.
By sacred I mean set apart. Some part of the relationship that is available to nobody else, not discussed outside it, not offered elsewhere in any form, and understood by both of them to be inviolable. What it consists of differs entirely from couple to couple. It is rarely the sex.
Where that holds, a surprising amount can happen around it without damage. Where it has gone, no rule protects anything, and the arrangement simply becomes the machinery by which two people who have already lost each other make the loss official.
And this is why I include it here, in an article mostly about ordinary heterosexual couples with children and mortgages: fidelity and the sacred are not the same thing.
There are entirely monogamous couples in whom nothing whatever is set apart. Every thought is relayed to a sibling, a colleague, a group chat. There is no interior life held in common, nothing withheld from the general traffic of their days, no room that only the two of them are in. They have kept the rule perfectly and lost the substance completely.
The question is never really what a couple permits one another. It is whether anything between them is still treated as sacred.
Conflict is not the problem
This morning I was awake in bed and did not want to get up. Part of me needed the lavatory. Another part wanted twenty more minutes of sleep. Two positions, incompatible, both mine, and nobody else in the room.
If a single person lying alone in the dark is in conflict with themselves before the day has started, what could we possibly expect from two people who have merged their finances, their sleep, their families and their futures?
Conflict is not a sign that something has gone wrong in a relationship. It is a consequence of there being two people in it. The couples who last are not the couples who avoid it. They are the couples who have some way of doing it that does not cause damage they then have to repair.
A structure for disagreeing
So I generally suggest something that sounds mechanical, and is meant to be.
Thirty minutes, maximum. Nothing useful has ever been said in the fourth hour of an argument.
If either of you becomes agitated, stop. Not as a punishment or a walkout — say plainly that you are stopping and when you will return to it. Later the same day is right. Next week means it goes underground.
And never at eleven at night, in bed, in the dark.
That last one is not fussiness. It is the most important of the three, and here is why it matters rather than being merely sensible advice about tiredness.
Late at night, exhausted, in the room where you are least defended, you stop arguing with your partner. You start arguing with your mother. With your father. With the whole of your own disowned material now visible on a face eighteen inches from yours. The person you are shouting at is not entirely in the room, and no agreement reached with someone who is not in the room will hold in the morning.
The structure is not about communicating better. It is about stopping while the person opposite you is still a person.
Fifteen minutes a day
The structure above is for the difficult conversations. This is for all the other days.
Fifteen or twenty minutes, deliberately set aside, in which the two of you talk. Not logistics. Not the children’s schedule, the boiler, the bins, or whose mother is coming at the weekend. How the day actually was. What happened at work. What was irritating, what was good, what is sitting on your mind.
It sounds far too ordinary to be worth prescribing, and I prescribe it constantly.
Couples do not usually come apart during a crisis. They come apart across several hundred evenings on which every exchange was administrative. The information stops moving first and the feeling follows it out of the room. By the time somebody tells me they no longer know their partner, they are describing something quite literal: nobody has told them anything for two years.
Call it hygiene, which is what it is. It is not romantic and it does not need to be. You clean your teeth without it meaning anything either, and the cost of not doing it accumulates slowly, and then all at once.
How it ends
If love begins by projecting the best of yourself into another, it very often ends by projecting the worst.
The same face that once held everything you admired and could not reach now holds everything you cannot bear and will not look at: the selfishness, the coldness, the neediness, the rage. And it is unbearable in them precisely to the degree that it is unexamined in you.
This does not mean your grievance is imaginary. They may have behaved badly; people do. But when the intensity of a feeling outruns the event that occasioned it, something older has attached itself, and that something belongs to you.
What the work is
Taking it back. All of it.
The unlived best you handed them at the beginning, so that you might live some of it yourself rather than admiring it across a kitchen table. The thinking or the feeling you subcontracted, so that you become a whole person rather than half of an arrangement. The parent you have been asking them to be, so that you can talk to an adult.
What is left, when the projections are withdrawn, is a real person: less magical than the one you fell in love with, and less monstrous than the one you have been living with. Some couples find they want that person. Some find they do not. Both of those are real outcomes and I do not regard the second as a failure.
But at least it is decided by the two people in the room, rather than by the four who never spoke.
The relationship underneath all the others
If I could give a couple only one thing to work on, it might not be the couple at all.
The relationship you have with yourself is the template for every relationship you will have. If you are not generous with yourself, you will not be generous with your partner for very long. If you speak to yourself with contempt whenever you fail at something, that contempt is loose in the house and it will eventually be aimed at somebody else. People who are relentless with themselves are almost never gentle with the person closest to them, whatever they intend and however much they love them.
This is why a good deal of couples work turns out, quietly, to be individual work happening in front of a witness.
It is given in small things
And love, in practice, is almost never transmitted through the large gestures.
It is in how a cup of tea is made, and whether it is made at all. It is in coming home with the ice cream somebody mentioned once, three weeks ago, and being pleased to have remembered. It is in the small daily evidence that the other person is held somewhere in your mind while you are going about your day.
These things are far too minor to raise in an argument, which is exactly why they matter. They are the actual currency, and they are spent or withheld dozens of times a week without either person consciously noticing.
When a couple tells me the love has gone, something else has usually gone first. It is generally the tea.
If any of this is recognisable, couples therapy is available in London at Harley Street and online. Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst with twenty-five years in practice, working in English and French. Get in touch.
