The Cycle You're Not Supposed to Escape
I meet a lot of couples, partners and individuals who think something has gone wrong the moment their relationships leave harmony.
It hasn't. Every relationship moves through three states, on repeat, for as long as the relationship lasts.
Harmony — connected, attuned, on the same team.
Disharmony — misunderstanding, defensiveness, the quiet distance that shows up when neither of you is quite yourself.
Repair — where responsibility gets taken, needs get named, and you find your way back.
The mistake isn't landing in disharmony. It's expecting to skip it.
I've been married twenty years, across three languages and cultures. I've been in all three states more times than I can count, sometimes in a single week. What changed over time wasn't the frequency of disharmony — it was how quickly we learned to recognize it, and how willing we got at repair.
That's the actual skill. Not conflict-avoidance. Repair.
Harmony isn't the absence of conflict. It's what you build a capacity to return to, again and again, because you've practiced the way back.
Adapted from the Relational Life Foundation's Harmony, Disharmony & Repair framework.
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