The Gold in the Crack: When a Relationship Can't Go Back

I Don't Believe in Going Back. I Believe in Resetting.

If you have ever been in my Peekskill office, you probably know that there is very little in the room that is there by accident.

I have carefully curated the space over time, and many of the things in it have been given to me by people I have worked with. There are plants everywhere, each a gift of gratitude from clients, and I love that because plants have roots. They need care. They change. They outgrow the container they started in. Sometimes they need to be moved. Sometimes something needs to be cut back so something healthier has room to grow.

I think about all of that when I look around my office.

Because the conversations that happen in that room can get hard. And heavy.

There are moments when someone has just said something they have been holding for years. Moments when a spouse hears something they were not prepared to hear. Moments when I ask a question and I can see that the person sitting across from me needs a minute before they can answer it.

And when that happens, people look away.

I actually want them to.

Sometimes your mind needs somewhere to go while you figure out whether you are ready to say the next thing. So when your eyes leave me, or your partner, I want them to land somewhere that gives you something to think about. There are books, objects, plants, words, pieces of art. Some have stories I chose. Others came into the room carrying someone else's story.

This piece is one of them.

Between Us

A couple I worked with gave me this artwork after our work together and it has become one of my favorite things my office.

The piece is Between Us, by artist David Popa, and knowing how he created it makes me love it even more.

Popa creates enormous portraits directly in natural landscapes using natural pigments and materials from the places where he works. Between Us was created on the frozen surface of Abraham Lake in Alberta, Canada. He found a dramatic natural fissure in the ice and painted a man and woman on opposite sides of it, facing one another. The line of gold running between them came from a natural earth pigment, and Popa intentionally drew from the Japanese tradition of kintsugi as he thought about fracture, healing, and reconciliation.

And then nature took it back.

That is part of Popa's work. These enormous pieces are temporary. They are created in places where wind, water, temperature, and the movement of the landscape eventually erase them. In the case of Between Us, the wind quickly removed much of the portraits, leaving behind remnants of that golden line.

There is something about that I find extraordinary. The original existed for a moment on a frozen lake thousands of miles away, knowing it was never meant to remain exactly as it was, and now number 36 of 60 hangs in my office because a couple I worked with saw it and thought of the work we had done together.

When they gave it to me, they included a card thanking me for helping them save their marriage. That means more to me than they probably realize.

And every time I look at the piece, I see so much of what I believe about relationships. Two people are still there, facing one another. Something has happened between them. The fracture is visible. No one has tried to pretend otherwise.

And there is gold running through the space between them.

I don't believe the goal is to erase the crack, and I don't believe the goal is to go back.

You Really Don't Want Your Old Marriage Back

Couples will sometimes come into my office after betrayal or years of disconnection and tell me that they just want things to be the way they used to be.

I understand that. Of course you want the ease back. You want to stop questioning everything. You want the version of your relationship where a look did not immediately mean something, where a phone wasn't loaded with meaning, where every conversation didn't somehow find its way back to the same hurt.

But I don't want your old marriage back for you and deep down neither do you.

Something wasn't working there.

That does not mean everything was bad, nor does it mean the love wasn't real. And it certainly does not mean betrayal was inevitable or that one person's choices become the other person's responsibility.

It means we have information now that we did not have before.

If we spend all of our energy trying to get you back to who you were, we miss the opportunity to ask a much more useful question:

Who are you going to be now?

That is where Relationship Reset is very different for me.

I am not interested in helping two people patch things up well enough that they can tolerate each other again. I want to understand what happened between you. Where did you stop hearing each other? Where did assumptions replace questions? Where did resentment start taking up space? Where did words and actions stop matching? Where did you begin protecting yourselves from each other instead of protecting the relationship?

And then we look at what is actually possible from here.

The Crack Still Exists

This is also why I am careful with some of the language we use around resetting relationships. I would never tell someone sitting across from me after betrayal that it was a gift, that everything happens for a reason, or that someday they will be grateful it happened. When your world has been turned upside down, you do not need someone rushing you toward the meaning of it. Sometimes things hurt simply because they hurt. Choices have consequences, trust can be profoundly changed, and there are losses that need to be acknowledged before we start deciding what comes next.

That is another reason I love the gold in this piece. The artist did not make the fracture disappear. You can see exactly where it runs between these two people, and for me, that's what's most important.

The Gold Between Them

When I learned more about this piece, I discovered that the connection to kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold, was intentional. Popa was inspired by kintsugi when creating the gold-filled fissure between these two people.

I love that, and I also see something slightly different when I look at his work hanging in my office.

With kintsugi, the repair becomes part of the object that was broken. The history remains visible rather than being disguised.

With Between Us, what catches me is where Popa placed the gold.

The gold here is between them.

I keep coming back to that because relationships live in that space.

When a relationship has been fractured, there is work that belongs to each person individually. There are choices you made, things you carry, things your partner carries, and responsibilities that cannot simply be handed back and forth depending on who is hurting more that day. But there is also the relationship itself, this space the two of you create every time you come together.

That space is shaped over time by thousands of interactions. How you speak to each other. What you avoid. What you assume. Whether you ask the question or decide you already know the answer. Whether an apology changes anything afterward. Whether your words and your actions begin to tell the same story.

This is the space I find myself watching so closely when a couple is sitting in my office. I am listening to what you are telling me, but I am also paying attention to what happens between you while you tell me. Sometimes I see an expression change before either person realizes it. I hear the moment a question lands as an accusation, or when someone begins responding to what they believe their partner meant rather than what their partner actually said.

There can be an enormous amount happening between two people that neither one can see anymore because they have been living inside the pattern for so long.

And one person cannot change that space alone.

You can take responsibility for what belongs to you. You can become more intentional about how you communicate. You can tell the truth, change your behavior, ask better questions, and become clearer about what you need. All of that remains important. But if the relationship itself is going to become different, eventually both people have to participate in what happens between them.

That is why I want us to be able to look directly at what happened and stay with it long enough to understand what it changed. What are you still carrying? What has been apologized for but never really understood? What keeps entering conversations that seem to be about something completely different? What are you asking your partner for, and do they actually understand what you are asking?

These are not questions we answer in one conversation. Sometimes what we uncover is very uncomfortable. There may still be love and a tremendous desire to make the marriage work, while one person is exhausted from doing most of the reaching. There may be sincere apologies that have not yet been accompanied by enough change to make them believable. There may be two people trying very hard and still unknowingly repeating the same pattern that brought them into my office.

This is why I don't walk into the room assuming that every marriage should stay together. I want to understand what is actually happening well enough that the questions become clearer:

Can this work? What would it take? Am I willing? Are they capable?

And there is one more part of Popa's work that stays with me. The original artwork was created on ice. It was never going to remain exactly as he created it. The wind came, the landscape changed, and the portraits eventually disappeared.

There is something about that impermanence that feels very connected to what I believe about relationships. We spend so much energy wanting to get back to what was, even when what was no longer exists in the same form. Time has passed. Things have happened. You know things now that you did not know then. You have both been changed by what you have lived through.

The original artwork could not go back to the moment before the ice changed, and neither can we.

What we can do is look honestly at what remains, what has changed, and what the two of you are willing to create in the space between you now.

Why This One Is Personal

There is another reason this piece belongs in my office, and that is my own marriage.

I know what it is like to stay married after betrayal. My husband and I are still married, and I am grateful for the marriage we have today. We did not get here by recreating the marriage we had before everything changed. We had to look at what had happened, what existed before it happened, what came after it, and then decide whether we were both willing to participate in creating something different.

That experience is part of why I pay so much attention to the difference between wanting a relationship and participating in one.

I have sat across from people who desperately want their marriage to work and are exhausting themselves trying to do the work for two people. I have also sat with couples who clearly love each other but have spent so much time defending their own experience that neither one feels understood anymore. Love matters enormously, but when a relationship is struggling, I also want to know what each person is doing with that love.

That answer does not come from what someone promises me during a session. I learn much more from what begins happening outside my office. When an apology is offered, does the behavior that follows make it more believable? When someone says communication needs to change, are they beginning to communicate differently when the conversation gets difficult? When someone says they want trust again, are the two of them beginning to understand what trust would actually require from each of them?

I know from my own marriage that some of those changes are small enough that another person might never notice them. You notice them because you know what used to happen in that moment. The conversation that once would have exploded doesn't. The question that once would have sounded like an accusation gets asked differently. Someone stays present instead of leaving the room emotionally. Someone tells the truth sooner. Someone listens long enough to realize they misunderstood.

That is the kind of change I pay attention to.

What Lives Between Two People

The piece is called Between Us, and I smile every time I think about how appropriate that is for the work I do because I spend so much of my time paying attention to exactly that space.

When I am sitting with a couple, I want to understand each person's experience. There are always two histories sitting in the room with me, two ways of remembering, two people reacting to what is happening, and two people trying to explain something that may have been building for a very long time. Somewhere in the conversation, I also need to understand what happens when those two experiences meet.

A spouse may say, “I need some time,” while the person sitting next to them hears, “I don't care enough to work this out.” Someone may ask a question because they are scared and looking for reassurance, while their partner hears interrogation and immediately becomes defensive. Someone may be trying to explain their hurt, but the explanation becomes so focused on proving the facts that the hurt disappears from the conversation altogether.

This is how the space between two people gets crowded.

There can be years of history sitting between you while you are arguing about what happened this morning. There may be fear, pride, resentment, betrayal, old comparisons, the argument from six months ago, something said by a former partner, an apology that never quite landed, or a story you have repeated to yourself for so long that you no longer recognize it as an interpretation.

Then two people who genuinely care about each other sit across from me completely frustrated because they cannot understand why they keep having the same conversation.

This is often the moment when I want to slow everything down and ask, “What was actually said?” Then, “What did you hear?” And finally, “What did you understand it to mean?”

Those answers are not always the same. When we can see that, we have something to work with.

And this brings me back to the artwork hanging in my office.

When I look at it, I see two people facing each other with something visible between them. I see that what happened has altered the space they share, and I don't need the fracture to disappear in order to imagine that something meaningful can still happen there. What matters to me is what they do with that space now.

The couple who gave me this piece probably had no idea how often I would look at it and think about the work that happens in that room. They certainly could not have known how naturally it would find its place among everything else that has accumulated there over the years.

But it did.

It sits among the plants with their roots, the books, the objects I chose because they made me pause or think, and the gifts that came from people who once sat on my office loveseat and trusted me with some very difficult parts of their lives.

I want my office to feel warm and comfortable, of course, but that has never been the only reason I have been so intentional about what is in it. I know there will be moments when the conversation gets heavy and your eyes need to leave mine. There may be a question that makes you look across the room because you are not ready to look at your partner yet. Sometimes we need a few seconds for our minds to catch up with what our hearts have already heard.

So there are places for your eyes to go, intentionally.

Maybe you notice the plant clippings in beakers with the card that reads, “our gratitude can't be measured.” Or the clock beside a card that reads, “time spent with you was time well spent.” Maybe your eyes find the cast iron scale, perfectly balanced between a love ball and a flying pig. Or it's the plush cactus that sparks your curiosity.

Maybe you read something on the wall differently than you did when you first walked in. Or your eyes land on two people with a line of gold running through the space between them.

And maybe you sit with that for a minute or two.

Because that, for me, is the heart of a Relationship Reset. We look honestly at what is between you now and how it got there. We make room for what happened without allowing it to automatically decide what happens next. We pay attention to whether both of you are participating, whether the words and actions are beginning to match, and whether the relationship you say you want is one you are actually capable of creating together.

You do not need to walk into my office already knowing the answer.

Sometimes the most important place to begin is finally being able to see the question clearly.