Essays on conflict, closeness and repair
Would you rather be right, or be close?
Most arguments are two people defending themselves against someone they love. These essays look at what changes when a couple stops asking who is right and starts asking what would work for both.
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Reactivity · Inheritance
Who Is Speaking When You Lose It?
You promised yourself you would stay calm. Then a voice you know too well came out of your mouth.
Read the essay · 3 minTeamwork
Are You Trying to Change the Wrong Person?
You have told them, reasoned with them and sent the articles. There is one move you have not tried.
Read the essay · 2 minConflict · Reactivity
Why Do You Keep Having the Same Fight?
The subject changes. The script does not. What is going on when two cartoons argue for nine years.
Read the essay · 2 minPower
Can You Love Someone You Look Down On?
Contempt does not need a raised voice. Sometimes it is only a look, and it costs the one who gives it.
Read the essay · 2 minConflict · Repair
Is It Normal to Hate the Person You Love?
Harmony, disharmony, repair. Why the night you cannot stand your partner may be the start of the real marriage.
Read the essay · 2 minDistance
What If You Never Fight?
The calmest couple in the room may be the loneliest. On good manners, full calendars and slow drift.
Read the essay · 2 minRepair · Power
How Do You Say the Hard Thing?
Four sentences for raising what hurts without starting a war, and what to do when you are on the receiving end.
Read the essay · 2 minInheritance · Power
Whose Marriage Are You Living In?
A daughter flinches, and a father recognises the flinch. How a childhood gets into a marriage, and how it stops.
Read the essay · 2 minDistance · Inheritance
Why Is It So Hard to Ask for a Hug?
Strong at work, sulking at home. The need underneath the silence, and the ten words that replace it.
Read the essay · 2 minAbout
You and your partner are on the same seesaw. What you do at your end moves theirs.
Common Ground is a collection of essays about how couples fight, drift and find their way back. Each one ends with questions to sit with and one small thing to try.
The ideas come mainly from the work of the family therapist Terrence Real, set out in his book Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (2022). The cases he describes are his own composites, and they are retold here only briefly.
Each essay also draws on other research, from couples studies to brain science, listed at its end. Diagrams show the ideas as well as tell them.
The letters and stories that open each essay are composites. Names and details are invented. These essays are for reflection and do not replace counselling. If you are afraid of your partner, your safety comes first.