Some couples have found a fairly calm way of talking about their differences. Others have gradually learnt to steer clear of touchy subjects. From the outside, the result can look much the same. Yet life together does not have quite the same flavour.

That is why I am wary of the few markers people cling to for reassurance: we don’t fight, we’ve been together for a long time, we’ve built a family. All of that matters, of course. But I need to understand how each partner feels within this shared story.

Sometimes, after too many discussions that go nowhere, people give up on making a part of themselves heard. They already know how the conversation will end. So they let it go. They keep their wish, their disappointment or their disagreement to themselves, and the evening carries on peacefully.

Making that choice from time to time is part of ordinary life. I pay more attention to the moment when it becomes the only way to keep the peace in the couple. When someone constantly has to hold back what matters to them, part of the relationship slips out of the conversation. The other partner may even go on believing that everything is fine.

I am not looking for perfect equality in every decision. Some couples work very well with a division of roles that their neighbours would find lopsided. What interests me is whether each partner is comfortable with it and whether the arrangement can be discussed. The problem begins when keeping the couple together requires one partner to set their needs aside for good.

The years spent together do not, on their own, answer that question. I have seen couples with a long shared life who still reproach each other for not being the person the other had imagined. People can stay together for a long time while stubbornly waiting for the other to become someone else.

That length of time still deserves attention. It also tells of hardships weathered and ways of holding on that the partners sometimes no longer even think about. Here I return to Guy Ausloos’s attention to the competence of families: taking seriously the resources of the people we work with.

A couple that lasts through the years also needs to be able to revisit its agreements. What suited the relationship at the start can become a burden twenty years later. We evolve, our wishes change, and it sometimes takes time to accept that our partner has changed too. I find it a pity when a shared history ends up being used to prevent that evolution.

There is also the moment when compromises start to leave a bitter taste. You agree to something, but come away feeling you have given up yet another part of yourself. Today’s disagreement may seem trivial. Yet it comes after many other sacrifices that nobody, it seems, has ever really registered.

The balance of giving and receiving, developed in Iván Boszormenyi-Nagy’s contextual approach, helps us look at what is at stake here. This thinking about justice in relationships runs notably through Between Give and Take, written with Barbara R. Krasner.

Each partner arrives with their own perception of what they have given and received. These perceptions can be very different. One feels they have supported the couple enormously; the other may feel exactly the same, for other reasons. When each partner’s efforts become invisible to the other, resentment can take up a great deal of space.

From there, it becomes tempting to look only at what the other should change. We know their faults by heart. We could explain for hours why they make life so difficult. Our own way of reacting becomes, in our eyes, a perfectly justified consequence.

In therapy, I try to reopen reflection on what each partner’s reactions produce in the relationship. This does not mean responsibilities are always equal. The aim is to regain some room for manoeuvre where everything seems to depend on the other changing. Sometimes we also have to recognise that we are asking our partner to heal a wound they did not cause.

Another expectation seems to me particularly heavy to carry: having to guess. “After all these years, they should know.” I understand this wish to be known well enough not to have to explain everything any more. There is something comforting in that idea.

But we never share exactly the same experience of the world. A situation that hurts me may seem trivial to my partner. A gesture that means a great deal to them may pass me by. Our closeness erases neither our history nor our differences.

Saying what we are going through therefore remains necessary, even after a long time. It can take effort, especially when we would have liked the other to understand spontaneously. Our partner can nevertheless learn to take into account what affects us, without feeling exactly the same thing. That attentiveness is already worth a great deal.

If I talk about these situations, I also do so with a certain caution. I have no wish to turn five clinical observations into a new roadworthiness test for couples. Recognising several of these patterns in your own relationship does not make it possible to predict how your story will unfold.

In a systemic reading, I try to understand what a pattern helps to preserve. Silence may have prevented confrontations that had become exhausting. A rigid division of roles may have helped the couple through a difficult period. Before wanting to change everything, I need to know how this balance was built and what it costs each partner today.

My work then consists in helping the couple regain enough freedom to re-examine their arrangements. This can begin modestly, by returning to an abandoned subject or by acknowledging an effort that had stopped being noticed. What interests me is the possibility, for each partner, of talking again about what matters and seeing whether the relationship can make room for it, today.

I develop these five markers in the video below.