FALSE “The question I’d ask a couple,” says Real, “is: who is your community? Who is supporting you, and how have you signalled you need that support, that you value it for your relationship?” Few rituals are left in modern life, he says, and a marriage ceremony is one that includes others as well as the couple themselves. “There’s something transformative about it being an experience embedded in the community,” he says. “That’s why it mattered to fight for the legal right for gay couples to marry.” If a relationship needs therapy, it’s too late You have actually got to find a way to deal with the domestic side of things, just rubbing along together,” says Harrison. “Then there’s a deeper level – it’s quite an easy stage for any difficult feelings to play out on.” This is undoubtedly true, as I often realise once I’m alone with the bins. Then I am free to explore what proportion of my resentment is about how undervalued I feel generally – I’m only really here to do the bins, I think – and how much of it is just about the bins. TRUE You can be playful with someone, says Real, “but if you look into their eyes, there’s a difference between the shades being down – ‘shop closed’ – and the signal ‘come hither’. And if you’re using the sexual energy between you and someone else to feel excited, that’s like a mini-affair.” The rule is this, says Real: if your partner could hear you, and the way you’re speaking would upset them, it’s not OK. People can’t change

Don’t see having to talk about your sex life as a failure – see it as an opportunity to understand each other better and connect better to each other’s bodies and the feelings around them, as well as to nip in the bud unhelpful narratives. Remember there’s no “right” way to have a sex life, as long as it’s safe and consensual. Even though you are no longer in a couple relationship, you are still modelling a relationship to your children. Matthew Fray says: “What is best for children is modelling healthy treatment of others to help them develop good relationships themselves”

And what happens to all of those messy feelings? Of course they need somewhere to go, and it is usual for there to be some conflict in the first year or two post-separation. Finding places to express this away from your ex and your children is not only helpful but also essential for you, and for children too, whether that is to friends, other family members, online support groups or a therapist. You might desperately want things to feel settled, but there are lots of new things to put in place. So slow down. It’ll take time (one to two years) for things to feel more resolved so allow yourself space for that. Be aware that your way of doing things may be very different from your partner’s, even on the small stuff. An open mind helps, rather than an idea that one of you is right. See arguments about each other’s family as a joint problem, not something that your partner has to deal with on their own. Both people’s feelings are important, even if hard to hear. TRUE If an argument escalates to violence or one partner feeling unsafe, that’s wrong, and you need expert help. But as you learn the landscape of your partner, says Harrison, arguments show you’re working each other out. “You’re finding out what your partner is passionate about, and sharing that. So these disagreements are full of useful information about what matters to each of you. If couples stop talking about what they care about, and sometimes arguing about it, they can start to feel disconnected.” The ‘one’ is out there somewhere And we offer support and solidarity to parents over at the Facebook community I run, The Village – A Parenting Community for Humans ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/visforvillage)

Either it’s: My relationship partner loves me, and I can trust them because the things they do and say are constantly reinforcing that I’m seen, heard, respected, and cared for. My partner’s actions add up to the experience of feeling loved. If your partner is telling you that you never listen to them it’s likely you’re going to hear the same complaint from them again and again. This indicates that couples need to adjust the way they communicate. This can improve the likelihood of getting through to each other. Having repairing conversations after an argument where you look at the argument from the outside and saying something like “what do you think made you feel so strongly about that?” can ensure that the important feelings have space to be heard. While we can be so fearful about the impact of separation on children, it is parental conflict that causes the most damage rather than separation itself. In fact, for children where there has been high conflict previously, separation can feel like a relief. Our relationship partners MUST be able to trust that they can tell us when something is wrong or when something hurts,” says Matthew. “And that we will seek to understand and cooperate in repairing whatever is wrong for them, if they’re ever going to be able to trust us and feel safe within the relationship. Relationship partners who consistently validate emotional experiences in conversation, and who consistently consider the individual needs and wants of their partner, are people who earn and retain trust, and who have long-lasting, fun, happy, intimate, and fully connected healthy relationships.”Jo believes there are five distinct issues that all couples have to work through if they are going to have a healthy, functioning relationship – inspiring her to write her new book Five Arguments All Couples (Need To) Have and Why The Washing Up Matters. A parent I know via the Village Parenting Community told me about their experience as an adult child of separated parents: “I’m convinced that if my parents had forced their marriage to ‘work’ for the sake of keeping our family unit together that this would have been an unhealthy environment for my siblings and I to grow up in. I’m glad that I’ve watched my parents find happiness separately and think that I’m a better person for that life experience, although it was hard at the time.”

Jo Harrison is FLiP’s in house therapist. She is extremely experienced in working with individuals and couples, including partners who are separating. Jo previously practiced as a lawyer, before becoming a couple therapist. Jo has featured in The Times and The Saturday Times talking about the value of couple therapy and she has made appearances on ITV’s This Morning (the Relationship Clinic) and Marina Fogle’s The Parent Hood. The division of labour within a relationship – the cleaning, the cooking, the daily grind of parenting – gives rise to endless arguments, partly because it’s a disputed space where the obligation to negotiate never ends – we’re talking, after all, about the jobs no one wants to do. You think you and your partner argue about this stuff too much, but chances are you’re not arguing about it enough, or at least not in the right way. “I do think it’s the area where resentment most obviously builds up,” says Harrison. “It’s the boil that needs bursting at times. I just think people get really pissed off and resentful about feeling they’re doing too much.”

Don’t expect to feel the same about what needs doing. One of you may think the house needs to be tidier; the other may think this isn’t an issue. This probably isn’t going to go away unless you both change your expectations of what is actually possible. Remember to comment on the good things – it flags up what works for you. If you like it when your partner takes the bins out, tell them! The little things add up. FALSE “This is demonstrably nonsense: you only have to look at the people who find love again after losing their partner,” says Real. “We tend to fall in love with a person who we subliminally believe is going to heal us, give us what we didn’t get in our early life. Relationships tend to replay situations we’ve been in before. We fall in love with what completes us, in other words. And it’s this feeling – that we ‘fit together’ – that makes us feel we’ve found ‘the one’.” A successful relationship comes down to rewriting the script, so you’re not playing out things that went wrong in the past. Once a cheater, always a cheater Before she trained as a couples therapist, Harrison was a divorce lawyer, which sounds like a pretty sharp career swerve. “I was obviously drawn to work with relationships,” she says. “I think I realised that I was in the wrong forum, because I was just much more interested in the relationship stuff. Often people get into the legal forum to deal with their relationship stuff, but it isn’t necessarily a very helpful way of dealing with it. I started training as a couples therapist thinking it would make me a better divorce lawyer, but it made me realise I didn’t want to do that.” But even the most ordinary arguments often mask feelings of greater significance. “Our deeper fears and frustrations, and the things we may find it difficult to express openly with each other can often express themselves in the domestic world,” writes Harrison. A row can be about the washing up, and also serve as part of an ongoing negotiation of the whole relationship.