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Relationships
Why Patching Up Your Relationship Doesn’t Work
Crises are opportunities to make fundamental and needed changes.
Posted January 19, 2024 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- Patching up a relationship by accommodating and promising to do better is at best a short-term solution.
- Instead, it's important to focus on the underlying problems and to take stock of the overall relationship.
- Rather than watered down or lopsided compromises, create win-win ones where both are getting what they need.
You’ve had a horrible fight. You were having an affair and got busted. Your relationship is in crisis with emotional meltdowns; there’s talk of divorce.
In these crises, your focus is on putting out the emotional fire. Here is where you apologize, try and explain your side of the story, ask what it is you need to do to calm the emotional waters and stop the talk of divorce—conversations about being sorry, forgiveness, doing better, working on the problem. You want to patch things up, get back to where you used to be, get out of the dog house. The other person is in the driver’s seat; you’re willing to accommodate.
But despite your good intentions, this “being good” is usually not sustainable over the long term. At some point, you’ll get tired or resentful of feeling controlled, one-down, and will likely rebel, probably within a few months. More importantly, patching things up is what it is: a patch over a shaky infrastructure. The underlying cause and problem—what triggered the affair, the meltdown, the talk of divorce—isn’t really about some isolated, last-straw event or an episode of bad behavior but usually a culmination of months or years of piling up unsolved problems, resentments, and not getting what you want, and likely what your partner wants as well.
What to do instead?
Deconstruct the argument: the behavior.
It’s important to apologize—this is about taking responsibility for the emotional damage you’ve caused. But you don’t want to stop there; it’s time to drill down into the underlying issues that are the driving culprits. Here, you talk about mounting frustration at feeling unappreciated, tired of doing the heavy lifting or feeling criticized. Or maybe it’s more about you—feeling depressed or burned out on your job or being riddled with anxiety.
If the triggering event was an outcome or a bad solution, help the other person understand the source, not as an excuse for what happened, but to help them make sense of what happened, place it in a larger context, and isolate the moral of the story so you can both begin to formulate a solution. Being open and vulnerable and showing insight and responsibility will go a long way to calming the emotional waters and building trust.
Listen to what the other person wants and needs.
You don’t want this to be a one-sided conversation but an opportunity to take stock of the relationship and each other. If you’ve been unhappy, the other person has also likely been unhappy. Ask what they want, what’s needed to change the emotional climate, and what is missing from their life, not just in the past few months but further back. This is about getting everything that needs to be fixed on the table.
Both partners define your ideal solutions.
You want to start with the ideal to avoid pre-compromising—watering down what you want because you fear the other will shoot it down. Be bold, be honest, be clear. Holding back will eventually lead to accumulating resentment.
Create concrete win-win compromises.
Undoubtedly, you’re at this point in your relationship because one or both of you have been making lopsided compromises—more one person’s way that you grudgingly go along with. Time to stop doing that. Win-win is you both getting what you need that is not a go-along or too watered down. Make it concrete: I’ll do x, and you do y, and you both are clear on what x and y are behaviorally. “Try harder” and “help out more” are too vague.
Check-in and finetune.
Build into your plan ways to check in and finetune what unfolds: Once a week, we will sit down and see how it’s going and what we may need to tweak. Resist the urge to be the cop or keep score: I did x, but you didn’t do y, so the deal is off. The attitude you want to have is not me against you but us against our problems.
Put your heads down and do it.
It’s time to step up and work your side of the equation; speak up if something isn’t working, but focus on changing the climate, not fixing the other’s personality. After an agreed amount of time, stick your head up and see if things are better.
Get support.
What’s challenging about doing all this is that it requires you to do now what you avoided doing before. You both need to go against your grain and learn new skills—all easier said than done. If you’re struggling, get support—a mentor, a minister, short-term counseling, or even a good friend, someone who can help you keep perspective and stay on track.
Crises are opportunities for learning and change. Don’t patch it up, and hope it will get better. It won’t.
References
Taibbi, R. (2017). Doing couple therapy. New York: Guilford.
