At your perel

My guess is the market for counselling to couples that are trying to repair their relationships is much bigger than that for couples that just want to split.

Couples that want to repair their relationship might do 6 months of weekly counselling whereas a couple that split might just reserve their cash for the pub.

Thus it would appear to me that most of the literature and talks on the subject have a hidden assumption that ‘repair’ is the desired outcome. Simply because this is the more lucrative market.

What most commentators don’t mention is that there must be times when the loss of self is too much, or the personalty mismatches too extreme, or when a new person genuinely offers much more.

I can’t imagine any a priori reason why the past has greater merit than the future, other than an attachment to invested (or sunk) emotional capital.

In my game of venture capital and start-ups we learn the hard rules of business without safety nets; one rule that we learn is that an attachment to sunk capital is one sure-fire way to fail – when practised by CEOs it gets in the way of the pivot, and it gets in the way of new funding when practised by shareholders.

Indeed, to succeed in start-ups one needs to remove all unnecessary risks (which takes great skill, mentoring and experience), have no emotional attachment to a particular outcome, be open to the ideas of others, and have both persistence and great luck.

I wonder if relationships aren’t in fact quite similar – all the four horseman and other behavioural insights for couples under duress are all about removing unnecessary risks; but even the best practitioners of these skills aren’t guaranteed a happy relationship if the sense of self is not satisfied, or if one party has not dealt with some major issues, or if there is not a sufficient degree of simpatico.

That is, removing all the behavioural risk patterns is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for a happy relationship.

I would add that an attachment to or a reliance on sunk emotional capital in a relationship may breed laziness which can be the seed that leads to a loss of self and eventually maybe the relationship.