At a glance
A relationship crisis is rarely the row you had on Sunday; it is the moment the two of you stop being able to reach each other at all.
Most couples arrive at this point without a single event to blame, which is part of what makes it so disorienting. This article is about what the breakdown is made of and what you can still do with it.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The crisis is usually late, not sudden. By the time clients call it a crisis, most of them can name a quieter stretch two or three years earlier when something stopped being discussed.
- Both partners are frightened, and only one of them shows it. I often sit with a couple where one is visibly distressed and the other looks composed, and the composure is the more worrying of the two.
- The fight is almost never about the subject of the fight. Clients can describe the same argument in four different settings and not notice that the subject changed each time.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
How do we know this is a crisis and not a bad month?
A bad month wears you out. A crisis changes what you expect from each other.
The marker I listen for is not how loud it has become but whether you still assume good intent. In a difficult patch you are tired of your partner; in a crisis you have started reading them. A late reply means something. A sigh means something. That shift from hearing to interpreting is usually the real change, and it tends to happen slowly enough that neither of you can date it.
The second marker is repair. Most couples have some way of coming back after a bad exchange: a joke, a cup of tea, someone touching the other’s shoulder on the way past. When those stop working, or stop being offered, the arguments do not get bigger so much as they stop ending. That is when people start using the word crisis.
Why does every attempt to fix it make it worse?
Because the two of you are usually trying opposite repairs at the same time.
One of you wants to talk now, while it is live, because leaving it unresolved feels unbearable. The other needs to get out of the room, because staying in it means saying something they cannot take back. Each of you is doing something reasonable. Together the two reasonable things form a loop: the more one presses, the further the other goes; the further they go, the harder the first one presses.
In a study of 175 couples in Spain, one partner’s reported tendency to withdraw during conflict went with the other partner’s more demanding or sharper response, and this held in both directions.1 It was measured at a single point in time by self-report, so it cannot tell us which came first, and it was a single community sample. The shape of it is familiar in the room, where it is often the first thing a couple can see together.
What makes this loop so hard to stop from inside is that each of you has evidence. You are both right about what the other does. Neither of you can see what you are doing to produce it, because you are busy responding to what has already been done to you.
What is actually broken between us?
In most couples I see, it is not love that has gone. It is the belief that the other person will come towards you.
That belief is built from hundreds of small moments, most of them unremarkable: you say something slightly vulnerable and your partner turns towards it, or does not. One miss is nothing. Several hundred misses, spread over a few years, teach you not to say the thing. By the time you reach a crisis, both of you may have stopped offering, and both of you experience that as the other one withdrawing.
This is why couples in crisis often argue about chores and money. Those subjects are safe enough to have the fight in. The thing underneath, which is usually some version of do I matter to you, is too exposed to say directly to someone you have stopped trusting with it.
Can we come back from this, and do we both want to?
Those are two separate questions, and the second one is often the one neither of you will ask out loud.
In my experience the couples who recover are not the ones with the fewest problems. They are the ones where both people are still willing to be affected by the other. That willingness can be buried under a great deal of anger and still be there. It can also be genuinely gone in one partner while the other has not been told, which is a different situation and needs saying rather than guessing at.
It is worth being honest with yourself about whether you want the relationship or want the crisis to stop. They are not the same want, and they lead different ways. Working with couples I draw on emotion-focused therapy, which is largely about getting underneath the positions each of you has taken to the feeling that put you there. That is slower than agreeing new rules, and it lasts longer.
What can we do this week, and when is that not enough?
Stop trying to resolve it and start trying to understand it; the resolution is downstream of that.
Some things that tend to help couples in the middle of this:
- Name the loop, not the fault. Agree between you that there is a pattern you both take part in. It is the only sentence in this situation that neither of you has to lose for the other to be right.
- Agree how to stop a conversation. Not to avoid it. To come back to it at a stated time, so that leaving the room is not experienced as abandonment.
- Say one true thing that is not a complaint. Most couples in crisis have stopped offering anything that is not a case for the prosecution.
- Notice the moments that go well. They are there, and in a crisis they stop registering because both of you are scanning for the opposite.
There are limits to what you can do between you. If one of you has already decided and is waiting for the other to work it out, no amount of better conversation will meet that; it has to be said. If something significant is being kept from the other, the work usually cannot proceed around it. And if there is intimidation or fear between you, the idea that you are two equal partners in a loop does not hold, and that needs looking at on its own terms before anything else.
Questions people ask
Is it too late for couples therapy if we are already in crisis?
No, and a crisis is when most couples actually come. What matters more than how bad it has become is whether both of you are still willing to be affected by the other.
What if only one of us wants to come?
Then come on your own, because one person changing what they do changes the pattern. It is also often how the other partner eventually becomes willing.
Will you take sides?
No, and I will also not pretend that both of you contribute equally to everything. Being even-handed is not the same as treating every difficulty as shared in equal measure.
How long does this take?
I cannot tell you honestly before I have met you, and anyone who gives you a number has not. What I can say after a first session or two is whether the work has somewhere to go.
What happens in a first couples session?
You both describe what is happening, and I pay as much attention to what goes on between you in the room as to what you tell me. By the end we usually have one shared description of the pattern rather than two competing accounts.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
