Repair: The Most Elusive Skill in Relationships

I was thinking today about working with couples, but also about being in relationship generally. We’re all in relationship, and the same fragility keeps showing up everywhere. If I had to name the single most important thing missing in most relationships—the soft underbelly of the system—it’s the ability to repair.

Two people can disagree, argue, clash, even hurt each other. That isn’t the problem. The real issue is whether they can arrive at a shared narrative of what actually happened. Not a narrative shaped by the louder partner, or the one with more therapy behind them, or the one fluent in psychological language. A genuinely shared narrative that both can stand in and say, yes, this is what happened between us.

And this goes hand-in-hand with ownership. Not blaming. Not scripted apologies. Not the partner who always says sorry because that’s the role they’ve absorbed. Real ownership means both people can acknowledge how they contributed to what unfolded. This is where most couples get derailed. The argument becomes a battleground over who is right, who is wrong, who started it, and whose version of events should dominate. None of that produces movement.

Two nervous systems collided. Two histories, two stress responses, two internal narratives. Somewhere in that collision there was frustration, hurt, something said too sharply, something received too personally. True repair requires both people stepping into the middle and acknowledging that what happened wasn’t constructive—without turning it into a courtroom. It’s not about assigning cause. It’s about recognising that the escalation could have gone differently on both sides.

This is the space Rumi pointed to—out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, the field where repair becomes possible. Most couples find it incredibly difficult to reach that space. It requires really listening to the other and acknowledging what the moment felt like for them—not agreeing with it as objective truth, but recognising their subjectivity as real. It also requires taking ownership for the ways you contributed, even unintentionally, while still bringing your own experience into the conversation. When both people listen and both take ownership, repair becomes possible. Without that dual movement, couples stay trapped in the loop of who is right instead of finding their way back to each other.