The Couples Who Make It
Updated: 9 minutes ago
by Minnie Chang K.B.;P.A. | Associate therapist at the Andolfi Family Therapist Centre
Editor's note: Minnie holds a Masters in Counselling from HELP University and a Graduate Certificate of Family Therapy from the Andolfi Family Therapy Center. When working with clients, she tends to utilize the systemic-focused approach to guide clients in sessions. Minnie has worked with individuals, couples and families. Some of which includes individuals with experience of trauma, loss, addiction, relationship concerns and work-related concerns as well with children with learning needs in schools.
People ask me all the time: do you still believe in marriage? Yes. And here's what I've noticed working with couples — the ones who make it aren't the ones who never fight, or who agree on everything, or who had an easy start.
They're the ones who did the harder, quieter work of understanding themselves.
Not attachment theory. Not communication skills.
Just the honest (and uncomfortable) work of asking: what am I bringing into this relationship?
Do you really know your partner? Actually, do you know yourself?
Every person who walks into a relationship carries luggage they didn't pack themselves.
In family therapy, we call this your Family of Origin (FOO) — the family you grew up in. It is the first place you learned what love looks like. What conflict looks like. Whether feelings were safe to express or better kept hidden. Whether asking for help was allowed. Whether affection was given freely or had to be earned. You did not choose these lessons. They were absorbed through thousands of small moments, dinners, silences, arguments you overheard, the way your parents looked at each other (or didn't).
And here is the part that surprises most people: you brought all of it into your relationship.
Not because something is wrong with you. But because that's what humans do.
We love the way we were taught to love.
The couple who argues about trash, it’s rarely about the trash. It is almost always about whether "I matter to you." And where that question comes from is almost always somewhere far older than this relationship you are currently in.
The Work of Knowing Yourself
Murray Bowen, one of the founders of family systems therapy, described something he called self-differentiation. and it may be the single most important concept in understanding why some relationships thrive.
A differentiated person is not someone who is cold, independent, or emotionally unavailable. It is almost the opposite.
It is someone who can be deeply close and still know where they end and the other person begins.
It is someone who can hold their own values, their own feelings, their own sense of self — without needing their partner to agree with them in order to feel okay.
It is someone who can hear "I'm upset with you" without it triggering a complete collapse or a wall going up.
Low differentiation in a couple looks like this: every disagreement feels like a threat to the relationship itself. One person pursues, the other withdraws. Emotions are contagious. If one person is anxious, the whole relationship becomes anxious.
High differentiation looks very different. There is warmth and closeness and the ability to be two separate people. They can say "I see it differently" without it meaning "I don't love you."
So… what now?
When you understand your Family of Origin, when you can see the patterns you inherited and choose consciously which ones you carry forward, you become more differentiated.
You stop reacting to your partner as if they are your mother, your father or your sibling.
You start to respond to who they actually are.
This is the quiet work that couples who make it tend to have done or are willing to do together.
They know that when someone goes silent in an argument, it is not manipulation — it is what she learned to do as a child to stay safe. They know that when the other needs to win every disagreement, it comes from a place where love feels conditional on being right. Now the information on family of origin becomes the map. With a map, you can find your way back to each other.
Three questions you can start asking today
Whether you are single, newly together, or twenty years in — these questions are worth returning to:
1. What did you see in your family of origin that handled conflict?Did people shout and repair, or go quiet for days? Was disagreement allowed, or was keeping the peace the priority? How does that show up in how you fight today?
2. What did love look like in the house you grew up in? Was it expressed openly? Was it conditional on performance or behaviour? What did you learn love feels like? Is that the love you are recreating now?
3. Where do you lose yourself in the relationship — and where do you disappear from it?The times where you give in quickly, or where you shut down entirely? Those are the places where your differentiation is being tested. They are also the places where the most growth lives.
Couples who make it aren't lucky. They're honest.
Honest about where they came from. About what they learnt about love growing up and whether that's actually working for them now. About the moments they shut down, or push too hard, or need too much. That honesty is uncomfortable, and it is also everything.
If you're not sure where to start, that's where a therapist comes in.
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