You have no doubt already heard plenty of advice on how to find a partner, how to stay with them, and on the famous secrets of longevity. You will find none of that here. If, on the other hand, you are interested in glimpsing what therapists look at when they receive a couple, you are in the right place.

That is considerable: experiencing life as a couple is or will be part of the life of the vast majority of us.

The couple is more than the sum of its parts

If there is one social institution that has existed for millennia, it is the couple — even if the way we conceive of it today differs from Antiquity, the Middle Ages, or even a few decades ago. Across time, one common notion remains: the essential function of the couple for individuals and for society. Seen through a sociological lens, the couple is a stable social unit, extremely useful to society as a way of organising itself.

Over the past few decades we have seen more and more divorces; yet statistically, the majority of those people form a new couple afterwards. So they have not lost faith in the institution: living as a couple remains an ideal of our society. The great difference lies perhaps above all in the fact that separating is far more readily accepted today, and that meeting someone at a certain age is easier than it used to be.

In the systemic approach, the couple is considered to be more than the sum of its parts. Take two people, put them together: the couple they form is different from the sum of one person’s characteristics plus the other’s. It produces something new and unique. Matchmakers, consider yourselves warned: the alchemy between two individuals is baffling every time. We see remarkably functional couples emerging from utterly improbable pairings, and pairings one would have thought ideal producing incredible disasters.

This is also why, in couple therapy, we take an interest in the couple as an entity rather than in the individuals who compose it. That obviously does not mean we take no interest in the people, quite the contrary: it means that everything they do and say is looked at through the effects it produces on the couple. If one of them goes through a difficult situation or a trauma, we will look at that event through its effects on the couple.

The three forces of the couple

A couple is the product of three types of forces. Identifying them already means seeing the points of support as much as the points of fragility.

Forces of attraction

They are made of several elements, from the most basically biochemical and genetic to far more complex layers: the desire felt for the other, the interest in sharing one’s life with someone different, singular and unique, the curiosity of discovering a world, a continent to explore — for some, to colonise, to exploit —, a territory that may represent the promised land. One may also desire what one lacks, what one would like to possess, and see in the other what they will bring or fill. One may again feel a strong attraction for someone who reflects a positive image of ourselves: someone who admires us, in whose eyes we feel we exist and are recognised.

These forces often drive people to form a couple, but not always. In some settings or cultures, it is families or society that decide who will form a couple: if two people begin to know each other once they already are one, attraction cannot be said to have generated the couple. It may, however, develop afterwards.

Forces of cohesion

When attraction weakens — and it does weaken, at certain points in life — another force takes over. Forces of cohesion are made of all the projects the couple builds: travel, children (some couples say that without them they would no longer be together), but also the simple fact of living under the same roof, sharing costs and rent, having a common organisation that makes daily life easier. It is also buying property, taking out loans, shared professional projects, or collaborating on each other’s individual projects. You have a typical example in the series House of Cards, where the two protagonists collaborate very effectively to achieve their respective goals. And in a way, therapy itself can become a force of cohesion.

This is what gets built on top of the soil of attraction and cements the couple beyond the ups and downs of desire. These forces come from what plays out and what is created inside the couple: that is precisely what sets them apart from the third one.

Forces of coercion

These are exerted from the outside: culture, religion, customs, family, friends. If you live in a context where separation is viewed very negatively, that contributes powerfully to keeping you in the couple — and it is precisely because these societal forces of coercion are decreasing that we see more divorces. But without going that far: having a shared group of friends, or getting on very well with your in-laws, already acts as a powerful factor of coercion. You think twice before leaving, for fear of losing some of your friends, of cutting ties, of facing reproaches or the incomprehension of those around you.

Some couples go through extremely serious periods of crisis and hold on thanks to it; then, once the crisis has passed, the other forces rise again, and the couple will have come through something precisely because that last force was at work.

The key: communicating vessels

What must be kept in mind is that what matters is not the intensity of any given force, but the balance between them. As soon as that balance is lost, a threat weighs on the couple. And this balance works like communicating vessels.

There are periods of life in which it is perfectly normal for attraction to decrease and to be compensated by increasing cohesion. The most emblematic case is the arrival of a child: attraction goes down, cohesion goes up, and it is cohesion that allows the couple to hold on through those first exhausting months. But some people over-invest the forces of attraction: they cope very badly with their partner’s drop in desire, and the couple is endangered because cohesion has not risen accordingly. If coercion does not compensate either, some people will leave, or invest in relationships outside the couple.

Sometimes things rebalance and attraction rises again. Sometimes the couple gets stuck, crystallised in the imbalance: think of Tom and Lynette Scavo in Desperate Housewives, five children, a house, a business — and a separation, for lack of attraction, when nothing is left but cohesion and coercion. Conversely, some couples are subjected to far too strong a coercion: the most famous case remains that of Diana Spencer and Prince Charles, whose engagement interview has gone down in history — asked whether he was in love, his answer amounted, in substance, to saying that it all depended on what one meant by that.

When the forces tip into their negative counterpart

One can imagine that these three forces, which hold the couple together, sometimes turn the other way. It is a useful conceptual refinement: we would then speak of a force of attraction-repulsion, of a force of cohesion-exclusion, and, for coercion, of centripetal and centrifugal coercion — the first constraining people to stay together, the second constraining them towards separation.

Some couples are subjected to a very strong centrifugal coercion, pushing them apart. Think of Paris and Helen in mythology, or of Rose and Jack in Titanic: everything around them, the whole context, is designed to keep them from being together; and despite the power of attraction, it is not enough.

As soon as a force tips into its negative counterpart in this way, a massive over-compensation from the others is needed for the couple to hold. And generally, when the balance starts to waver, that is precisely the moment when people come to consult. Another, more underground question then remains: that of the path by which a couple moves from the idealised other to the real one — what is called mariation.