Repair Doesn't Prevent Ugly, It Builds Beauty

​Most marriages-and meaningful relationships in general-don't suddenly fall apart. It is most often a series of little breaks between two people who have no idea how to repair little breaks along the way toward one giant explosion. The mistake in the breakup is to believe the relationship blew up in the explosion and not in the little breaks along the way.

I find it interesting that when two people get married they are often asked if they will take each other for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health - but what I've never heard anyone ask is do you even know how to do worse or poorer or sickness?

In a wedding ceremony, two people are never asked, do you have any idea how to fix this when it starts falling apart, because it indeed WILL start to fall apart? No, two people are asked to promise to hold something together that in all likelihood they have no practice or experience or witness to what it means to hold something together slowly falling apart.

They make a promise in a moment that feels like beauty that can often become a promise held over the heads of a connection that has begun to feel more like hell.

Dr. Curt Thompson says, "repairing ruptures is the way we create beauty and goodness in the world every bit as much as the way in which we create beauty in those places where it's easy to do."

Thompson is saying that learning to repair small and big breaks isn’t just about preserving a promise—it’s about deepening and expanding beauty itself.

In relationships, we often assume that conflict or distance is a sign of weakness or failure, but secure relationships aren’t those without rupture; they are the ones where repair happens consistently.

Culturally, we celebrate love in its initial beauty—romance, friendship, connection—but we don’t talk enough about how love is just as much (if not more) about staying at the table when things get hard, when leaving feels easier, and when everything in you wants to walk away.

We don't talk enough about love as owning our part, seeking understanding, and doing the slow, sometimes painful, work of rebuilding.

I will admit, I was never good at the slow, sometimes painful, work of rebuilding. How could I have been? Most of the relationships in my life during the critical periods when I was learning about relationships looked far more like rupture than repair. It wasn't until after my marriage had completely fallen apart several years ago that I first heard about the kind of repair I'm writing about here.

I don't know how it is, really, that when it comes to relationships we don't spend much time talking about rupture and repair. The way we build stronger brains is when neurons get disconnected and then reconnect with stronger signals. Our muscles grow when fibers tear and then rebuild stronger. Winter comes along in order to build a stronger spring.

So much of life is about falling apart and coming back stronger. Yet, when it comes to relationships, we often simply rely on the promise of happily ever after.

You know, Jesus came to earth because there was a rupture between God and us. Jesus died a brutal death on a cross to demonstrate there was no measure too painful for him to take to repair that rupture.

Maybe we learned the lesson on that cross that repair is important and that God is always willing and quite anxious to repair our relationship with him. But maybe we overlooked an important part of that lesson, the part where God was telling us that the best way we can practice repairing our relationship with Him is to get good at repairing our relationships with one another.

Repair not because God wants to prevent something beautiful between us from falling apart, but because repair is the foundation on which many of the strongest and most beautiful things are built.

I live a life that is ruptured in many ways.

I live in a world that is rupturing all around me, it seems.

It all feels so challenging to many.

I wonder if that's because we are so prone to see and feel rupture as a sign things are falling apart and not as an invitation to repair.

I understand that.

Many of us are much more experienced at rupture than repair. But I also know, all the way to death on the cross, repair is always worth fighting for.

Rupture feels like the end. Repair is the promise that nothing ever is.