Pink Credits Her Marriage To 17 Years Of Therapy...Here's Why That's Important
Turns out, Pink and I actually have a lot in common. We’re no strangers to the old bleach when it comes to our hair, we’ve both two kids and we credit the continuing existence of our marriages to therapy. Clearly, we’re meant to be best mates. In an interview this week, Pink discussed her 17 year relationship with husband Carey Hart saying, “He speaks Polish, I speak Italian and she [our therapist] speaks both. We do not speak the same language,” she said. “We come from broken families and we had no model of how are we supposed to keep this family together and live this crazy life? And there’s no model. There’s no book that says, ‘Here’s how to do this.’ So we go to counselling and it works.”
I’ve written about my marriage before and, I think the importance of Pink ‘confessing’ to this could be easily missed. Relationships are ever-changing entities and throw in things like kids, money issues, work, life admin and sleep deprivation and it would be surprising if a few cracks didn’t begin to show.
Like most things, I believe in the power of pulling back the curtain and revealing what’s really there. Just like everything else that social media touches, we’ve got a distorted version of events when it comes to other people’s marriages and that can have a devastating effect on our confidence in our own relationships. On the surface, other people’s relationships can look idyllic but it’s rarely perfect and even if it’s close, it’s never easy. My relationship with my husband survives to this day due to therapy - when we were in crisis we were either in therapy or not talking to each other. Now that things have improved, we dip in and out. We do therapy when we can, even if it feels like we’re in a great place, because what I’ve learned is that complacency is insidious and its true what they say, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”
Like many things I talk about here, couple’s therapy is another thing that isn’t really discussed. Like many things I talk about on here, I don’t really give a shit about that. Instead, I give a shit about saying that it’s ok, always and forever, to ask for help in whatever area of your life you require it. It’s ok to say, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’ It’s ok to admit that you’re doing well at something - even if that something is your marriage - because not saying that out of fear can lead a relationship down a path from which it is incredibly difficult to return.
For a relationship to work, both people have to be 100% committed. It’s can’t be a hokey-cokey, one-foot-in-one-foot-out approach. You have to be balls deep, totally vulnerable and 100% honest for a relationship to work. Of course, some relationships aren’t meant to work. We simply don’t get it right every time and there’s never any good reason for someone to stay in a relationship that they don’t want to be in anymore. But if you’re struggling to connect with your partner, if you’re struggling to remember what it was that you loved about them but there’s a small part of you (teeny, tiny perhaps) that believes there’s a chance, that wants there to be a chance, then I can’t recommend therapy enough.
I’m a better person for going to counselling, I’m a better mother and I’m a better wife. It’s so easy to get bogged down in the day to day monotony of running a family and a house and work and all the other things, that resentment can grown without us even realising it. Explosions of anger are often fuelled by a desperate love while we ask, “Where have ‘we’ gone amid all this real life stuff?” but it took me going to counselling to realise that when I was screaming about how much I hated him, what I was actually saying was, “I’m so sad because I don’t know where we’ve gone and I miss us and I just want you to come back to me.”
Private therapy is expensive but charities such as Relate can offer counselling for free. You may have to wait but it might just be the one thing worth waiting for.