Brenton Surgeoner on Why Most Couples Wait Years Too Long to Repair Their Relationship

Two people slide into a brand new car. The leather still smells like the showroom, every light on the dashboard glows the way it should, and they pull into traffic full of plans. About ten minutes down the road, they hit a speed bump. Nobody warned them about the speed bump. Nobody handed them a manual for it either.

That is the shape of nearly every relationship that comes through our door. Not a catastrophe. A speed bump nobody prepared them for, and then years of driving on as though the rattle will sort itself out.

So I sat down with Brenton Surgeoner, a couples therapist and counsellor based in Central, to work through the question most people carry quietly and rarely say out loud. Why do two people who genuinely love each other keep hurting each other?

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The person who's closest to us is also the person who provides the greatest threat.

Brenton Surgeoner, couples therapist

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Why loving couples still hurt each other

The answer is not a comfortable one. The person who can wound you the deepest is always the person you have let the closest. That is not a defect in your relationship. That is the arrangement you signed up for.

When you barely know someone they cannot really hurt you. There is nothing at stake. But the moment you attach to a partner, you hand them enormous power over your sense of safety, and your nervous system knows it. A sharp tone from a stranger rolls off. The same tone from your partner can drop you straight into fight or flight. Closeness and vulnerability come through the same door. You cannot open one without the other.

The reactions that come flooding in are almost never about the argument in front of you, and this is where couples get stuck blaming the wrong thing.

When a small disagreement about the dishes hardens into a cold war, the size of the reaction rarely matches the size of the event. That mismatch is the tell. The urge to stonewall, or the flat need to win, was usually wired in long before your partner ever walked into your life. As Brenton puts it, "some of those threat responses predate the relationship by 10, 20, 30 years." In my own sessions, naming that out loud is often the first real relief inside the room. Not because anyone is broken, but because you can finally see you are both reacting to something older than the two of you. Once you can see it, you can stop blaming each other for it.

Most couples I sit with are running some version of the pursuer-withdrawer pattern. One partner chases connection and pushes harder for a response. The other feels the pressure and pulls away to cool down. The more one pursues, the more the other withdraws, and round it goes. There is no villain in this loop. It is the loop itself that needs changing, and that is something two people can learn to interrupt together.

The myth that healthy couples do not fight

Ask most people what a healthy relationship looks like and they will describe two people who never really fight. That belief is false, and I watch it do real damage. It is the reason couples arrive convinced they are already failing.

The healthiest couples aren't the ones who never fight. As Brenton says, "all human beings, we have disagreements with other human beings." Teaching people that strong couples do not argue teaches them that their first serious fight is proof something is broken, when the truth is closer to the opposite. Two humans sharing a life will disagree. They will misread each other and tread on sore spots that have been tender for years. Conflict is not the failure. It is the price of caring about someone who is not simply a copy of you.

What matters far more is how you fight, and what the two of you do once the fight is over. Couples who can disagree without contempt, who can raise a hard thing without trying to flatten each other, are not conflict free. They have simply learned to fight in a way the relationship can survive. That is a skill, and like any skill it can be taught and practised. A good couples counsellor is not there to stop you ever disagreeing. They are there to help you disagree in a way that leaves both of you still standing, and still on the same team.

What waiting actually costs

The real damage is almost never the speed bump. It is the years of driving afterwards, which is where the car analogy earns its keep. Brenton describes a relationship as "two people getting into a beautiful, brand new, gorgeous car" who, about "10 minutes in," hit "a little speed bump." The car starts out perfect. Then the speed bumps arrive, because they always arrive, and most couples have no idea what to do with them. So they keep driving. They tell themselves it will smooth out on its own. They get used to the rattle and stop hearing it. Small hurts pile up into resentment. The resentment hardens into distance. And after a while the distance just feels like the weather. By the time most couples reach out for help, damage has been running quietly for years.

That lag is the part of this work that frustrates both of us most. Couples, he says, "generally wait till the car has come off the road and it's really a big disaster," when he really wishes they had "come in when they hit a little speed bump." You do not need to be in crisis to come in. Crisis is actually the hardest place to start from. When a couple arrives after the car has already left the road, there is wreckage to clear before any real repair can even begin, and a good deal of that wreckage did not need to happen. When a couple comes in at the speed bump, while there is still goodwill in the tank and both people still want to be there, the work is gentler and far more likely to hold.

So if some quiet part of you has been wondering whether it is too early to book, that hesitation is usually the clearest sign that that it is the right time. Booking early does not mean anything has gone badly wrong. It means you would rather deal with a small noise from the engine now than a seized gearbox later.

Repair is the dividing line

If conflict is unavoidable, then what separates couples who last from couples who slowly come apart is not the fighting at all. It is what happens in the hour after the fight.

This tracks with what relationship researchers like John Gottman have described as repair attempts, the small gestures that stop a fight from spiralling out of control. A repair attempt can be tiny. A hand on the shoulder halfway through. A bad joke that makes you both laugh despite yourselves. A plain "can we start that again." The couples who do well are not the ones who never rupture. They are the ones who reach back toward each other quickly after the rupture, before the silence has time to set.

Think of a couple of the kind I see most weeks. They have the same fight every few weeks. He goes quiet, she chases, he goes quieter, and by bedtime they are two strangers sharing a bed. The content of the fight barely matters anymore. What changes everything is one of them turning back an hour sooner than usual and saying, that got away from us, can we try again. Done enough times, that turning back becomes the habit, and it does more for a couple than a perfect apology that arrives a week too late.

Avoidance does the reverse. Leave a fight unresolved and the mind refuses to let it rest. It stews and replays, quietly building a case for prosecution. What could have been a two-hour repair becomes a two week freeze. This is why so much of what we teach in the room is the do-over. The do-over does not ask anyone to pretend the hurt never landed. It asks you to reach for each other before the gap between you quietly hardens over. A relationship that learns to repair well can come through a genuine crisis more solid, and more honest, than it ever was before it cracked.

Couples work in a bicultural city

Hong Kong adds its own layer to all of this. Cross cultural couples here, expat and HK-Chinese pairings, carry everything above plus the weight of in-laws and filial obligation that a purely Western frame tends to miss. That is often where the work actually starts, at the collision point between two families and two sets of unspoken rules. If that is your relationship, it does not make you incompatible. It makes you a couple with more to translate than most, and translation is a large part of what we do.

Where to start

If any of this sounds like your relationship you are further from a lost cause than it probably feels, and it is not too early to start. The best time to begin is at the speed bump, not the crash.

You can read our companion piece on the ten signs it might be time for couples therapy for a clearer sense of when to reach out. If one of you is carrying the withdrawing side of the pattern and wants to do some individual work alongside the couples work, our men's counselling services are a good place to look. And when you are ready, you can see our pricing or simply book a free 20-minute consultation with us.

Every car hits the speed bump eventually. Some couples keep driving until the noise becomes a breakdown on the hard shoulder. Others pull over while it is still just a noise. Neither is guaranteed to make it, but the second group gives itself a much better chance.