I’ve killed every garden I’ve neglected, which is all of them: bring me a struggling houseplant and watch it die. But bring me a struggling marriage, and I will sometimes encourage it back to life. Other times, when the conditions are right, by which I mean when something is wrong, I will kill it. Intentionally. Or, in more professional language, I will advise it to end. Not every plant gets to flower. Not every marriage should be saved.

I have come to realise that care and attention, the fundamentals that keep both plants and relationships alive, are absent from many marriages that survive anyway. I call them cactus marriages: alive, but I couldn’t tell you how.

Jess* and Pete* came to see me: they had raised their kids and always turned up for their jobs – at least with work someone writes down what is required of you. Neglect, it turns out, takes longer to kill a marriage than it does a garden. When couples remember how to be loving, the cactus thrives, and sometimes it even flowers, which surprises everyone, including me.

But not every struggling marriage I see is a neglected cactus. Sometimes the soil has gone sour. And sometimes the roots have been severed, intentionally, and no water reaches a severed root. From across the room, neglect and its harder cousins, soured and severed, look the same: quiet and unhappy. Up close, the difference is everything.

Sour soil looks like Diane* and Thomas*, married more than 30 years, whose fighting had become a script neither could stop performing. She raised her voice. He........

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