The reflex in therapy culture is that relationships are work, and work can be done. Nicholas Purcell, a therapist writing in the Guardian’s Modern Mind series, spends his column on the cases where that reflex is wrong — and on why “our relationship issues” is sometimes a phrase that conceals harm rather than naming it.
He builds the argument on a gardening metaphor, which is more load-bearing than it first appears. “Not every plant gets to flower. Not every marriage should be saved.” The point is that from across the room, three quite different marriages look identical: quiet and unhappy. “Up close, the difference is everything.”
Cactus marriages
The first is neglect. “I call them cactus marriages: alive, but I couldn’t tell you how.” Care and attention are the fundamentals that keep both plants and relationships alive, and they are absent from many marriages that survive anyway. Neglect, he notes, takes longer to kill a marriage than a garden — when couples remember how to be loving, the cactus thrives, and sometimes flowers, “which surprises everyone, including me.”
Sour soil
The second case is contempt plus a broken repair cycle. He describes Diane and Thomas, married more than 30 years, whose fighting had hardened into a script neither could stop performing: she raised her voice, he corrected her grammar, she brought up his breath. “A trade economy where no one wins. There was no innocent party in that room.”
Underneath, Purcell identifies a mechanical failure rather than a moral one: “the repair cycle — the small, ordinary apologies healthy couples make without noticing — has broken down and nothing is ever absorbed.” Sour soil, he says, can be sweetened — good gardeners do it all the time. This is the marriage he fights for, partly because it very nearly didn’t need fighting: “if only they had come in sooner, before the habit hardened into the marriage’s personality.” The honest news is that it is often repairable when both partners are committed — and that “the window does not stay open for ever.”
Severed roots
The third is different in kind. This marriage “houses a person clinicians have names for: narcissist, abuser, controller, none of which quite closes over the thing itself: a way of being that depends on the other not fully having a self, let alone flourishing.” These are the marriages you will not see on a show like Couples Therapy — “the erosion of a life that’s hard to capture on film.” Purcell’s formulation of the distinction is the sharpest line in the piece: “The soured marriage saddens me; this one disturbs me.”
His account of Michael and Liz starts with a need to know where she was and escalates through counting the seconds she took to answer texts, then tracking devices, then violence. Confronted privately, Michael’s “breathing slowed and his eyes went black, the light stopped coming back out of them.”
The therapeutic conclusion follows from that: “This is not a relationship with a problem, the relationship is the problem. This marriage’s continuation requires one person’s diminishment, one person’s harm. To stay is a form of self-erasure.” On couples work in this configuration he is blunt — when only one person is being hurt, “calling it ‘our relationship issues’ launders the harm, and can keep a person in danger for years while they wait to become a better communicator.”
He is also sharp about why people stay. The arithmetic is not foolishness but a rigged sum: leaving costs money, housing, the children, shame; staying is paid “invisibly, in instalments of health and the self that keeps getting smaller.” And the children offered as the reason to stay are “there, absorbing what a husband is and what a wife is, and how one is allowed to treat the other.”
The caveat that matters most
The piece does not end at “leave.” Purcell insists on the part that gets skipped: “But leaving is not the same as safe. The part people rush past, because it’s frightening to hear: the time around leaving is often when this kind of partner is most dangerous.” What that calls for is specific — a safety plan, a domestic violence service, a friend or counsellor who knows the whole truth rather than the version easiest to say out loud.
Client details are fictional amalgams, and the column is an argument rather than evidence. But the triage it proposes is a useful piece of clinical reasoning to hold onto: the marriages with two people behaving badly worry him less than the marriage with one person doing real harm, and the two require opposite prescriptions.