Repair: A Story in Couple’s Therapy

“I could have reached for you,” he said, finally.

The words came slow, like they had to drag their way out of him.

She exhaled sharply. “That’s not the point.”

The space between them was taut, charged with everything unspoken. It wasn’t an argument, not exactly. But it wasn’t not one either.

I sat back, watching. They weren’t looking at each other. He had moved his body close to the camera. She stayed further away, pushed into the background, like two people sitting in different rows at the theater. They used this distance to cut the tension. To soften the effect they had on each other.

Waiting to see who would fold first.

She did. But not in the way he expected.

“I always reach first,” she said. “Every time. I push for the conversations, I notice the disconnection, I make sure we don’t drift. And I just… this time, I needed to see what would happen if I didn’t.” 

He shifted even closer to the screen, and his mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. It flickered, awkward, uncertain. Like his body was trying to signal warmth while his mind braced for impact.

“And?”

She let out a humorless laugh. “Nothing. That’s the problem.”

He inhaled, a sharp breath, his shoulders tensing as if preparing for defense. But then—he stopped. Checked himself. Maybe because I was there.

She pressed on.

“You don’t reach for me with words. You reach for me with your body. And I don’t want to be married to a rock: I want to be married to an evolving organism.”

The words landed heavy. His expression barely moved, but something in the air between them shifted.

“I don’t…” He started, then stopped. Raked a hand through his hair. “It’s not that I don’t care. I just… I don’t think the way you do. You feel the disconnection immediately. I don’t even realize it’s happening until we’re already deep in it. I’ve forgotten what I did to upset you and can’t possibly dissect it the way you would. And by then, it’s like… what’s the point?”

She stared at him. “The point is that we don’t move on, we pretend nothing happened.”

A flicker of recognition. He blinked, fingers pressing lightly against his lips, like he wanted to swallow the thought before it could escape.

I leaned forward. “When you reach for her at night, is that your way of repairing?”

A pause. Then a small nod.

I turned to her. “Does that feel like repair to you?”

She shook her head. “No. It feels like skipping over what I actually need.”

Silence. He shifted in his chair, glanced away. When he spoke again, it was quieter.

“If I try,” he said, “and I get it wrong, then what?”

Her eyes flashed. “Then at least you fucking tried.”

And there it was.

The thing he had been avoiding. The thing she had been waiting for.

We sat in the weight of it.

Some people don’t repair because they don’t care. But some people—so many people—don’t repair because they have never learned how to survive being wrong. They grew up in homes where being wrong meant being punished, humiliated, made small. So they avoid it entirely.

She watched him, waiting for something, anything… but he was still caught inside himself, stuck in that limbo between realization and action.

And for the first time, she didn’t reach for him. She didn’t fill the silence. She just let it sit where it belonged.

This is the part of the story people don’t talk about. The waiting. The discomfort. The raw, instinctive pull to smooth things over: resisted.

He would either step into it or he wouldn’t. But she wasn’t going to do it for him this time.

And that, not the repair itself, but the letting go of the automatic role was where the real shift began.

Are you looking for help with your relationship? Do you feel that a relationship coach could help you working on your couples skills? Is communication an issue? Have you ever considered couples therapy or counseling? As a psychotherapist and relationship coach, I am uniquely positioned to help you through these moments of disconnect and conflict.

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