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5 hours ago
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I’ve killed every garden I’ve neglected, which is all of them: bring me a struggling houseplant and watch it die. But bring me a struggling marriage, and I will sometimes encourage it back to life. Other times, when the conditions are right, by which I mean when something is wrong, I will kill it. Intentionally. Or, in more professional language, I will advise it to end. Not every plant gets to flower. Not every marriage should be saved.
I have come to realise that care and attention, the fundamentals that keep both plants and relationships alive, are absent from many marriages that survive anyway. I call them cactus marriages: alive, but I couldn’t tell you how.
Jess* and Pete* came to see me: they had raised their kids and always turned up for their jobs – at least with work someone writes down what is required of you. Neglect, it turns out, takes longer to kill a marriage than it does a garden. When couples remember how to be loving, the cactus thrives, and sometimes it even flowers, which surprises everyone, including me.
But not every struggling marriage I see is a neglected cactus. Sometimes the soil has gone sour. And sometimes the roots have been severed, intentionally, and no water reaches a severed root. From across the room, neglect and its harder cousins, soured and severed, look the same: quiet and unhappy. Up close, the difference is everything.
Sour soil looks like Diane* and Thomas*, married more than 30 years, whose fighting had become 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, this is mechanical failure. Contempt has become the default; the repair cycle – the small, ordinary apologies healthy couples make without noticing – has broken down and nothing is ever absorbed. But sour soil can be sweetened. Good gardeners do it all the time.
This is the marriage I fight for because it so nearly wasn’t necessary; if only they had come in sooner, before the habit hardened into the marriage’s personality. Despite bitterness and distance, these marriages often contain two people who would each say they would be lost, not relieved, if the other walked out. And the honest news is that they are probably repairable if both are committed, and the equally honest news is that the window does not stay open for ever.
The severed root marriage is different. 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 won’t see on TV shows like Couples Therapy: the erosion of a life that’s hard to capture on film. The soured marriage saddens me; this one disturbs me.
The marriage with two people behaving badly worries me less than the marriage with one person doing real harm. Here the question is not how to love better. It is when to leave.
An ordinary-looking couple came to me, Michael* and Liz*. It had begun small enough to mistake for love: his need to know where she was. He counted the seconds it took her to answer his texts. The tracking devices came next. Before long he was throwing her against walls, and worse. I challenged Michael privately: is your behaviour making your marriage more or less likely to last? His head turned to me, his breathing slowed and his eyes went black, the light stopped coming back out of them. I hesitate to use the word evil, but I’ve sat with it, there isn’t a better one. It is the look of someone who does not care whether you are alive, or whether they are the reason you stop being.
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. For anyone inside one, couples therapy is the wrong tool entirely. 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.
Almost everyone inside a marriage like this does the arithmetic and gets it wrong, not because they are foolish, but because the sums are rigged. The cost of leaving is concrete: money, housing, the children and even shame. The cost of staying is paid invisibly, in instalments of health and the self that keeps getting smaller. And the children, so often the reason given for staying, are there, absorbing what a husband is and what a wife is, and how one is allowed to treat the other.
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So let me say it plainly, because this kind of marriage depends on it never being said plainly: some relationships must be left.
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. Which is exactly when you need a safety plan, a domestic violence service, a friend or counsellor who knows the whole truth, not the version that’s easiest to say out loud.
Liz left Michael. She survived. He repartnered.
Sometimes I advise couples to end their marriage.
*All clients are fictional amalgams
In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. The Domestic Violence hotline is 1800 RESPECT. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org
