As a therapist, here’s why I sometimes advise couples to end their marriage

Despite bitterness and distance, many marriages contain two people who would each say they would be lost, not relieved, if the other walked out, writes Nicholas Purcell. Photograph: Prostock-studio/Alamy

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.