In this episode of Perfectly Imperfect Love: The Relational Repair Podcast, Dr. Hazel-Grace sits down with Jessica, a relationship therapist, and her husband Rich for an honest, tender look at what happens when life stretches our relational skills beyond their limits.

Their love story began with an unexpected hug at a laundromat, but years later, marriage, parenthood, and living alongside three generations of family have brought challenges neither could have fully anticipated.

When a painful conflict with Rich's parents leaves Jessica feeling alone and unsupported, the couple finds themselves navigating much more than a family disagreement. Old wounds surface, loyalties become complicated, and even Jessica's decades of professional experience can't provide all the answers.

Together, they explore what it means to take responsibility for what we couldn't see in the moment, how repair can soothe our deepest attachment wounds, and why sometimes the most loving thing we can do is acknowledge that we need help.

This conversation is a reminder that knowing how to repair doesn't mean we won't struggle. It means we're willing to keep learning, growing, and finding our way back to each other.

Because even relationship experts are perfectly imperfect at love.

What if the goal of conflict wasn't to win, but to find your way back to each other?

In this episode of Perfectly Imperfect Love: The Relational Repair Podcast, Dr. Hazel-Grace sits down with longtime sexuality and relationship educators Lori Handlers and Michael Gibson for an intimate, funny, and refreshingly unpolished look inside their 11-year relationship.

They talk about the conflicts that actually happen behind closed doors: tone, forgotten tasks, ADHD, lights left on, taking out the trash, a badly timed comment, and the moments when one person's nervous system suddenly says, Nope. Not okay.

But underneath these seemingly small ruptures are much bigger questions: How do you set a boundary without turning your partner into the enemy? How do you take responsibility without collapsing into shame? What happens when your partner asks for something you're not sure you can promise? And how do you stop fighting to be right long enough to remember that you're on the same team?

Lori and Michael share the practices they've developed for interrupting escalation, making clear requests, creating agreements, taking responsibility, and what they call “returning to love.”

Because healthy relationships aren't relationships without rupture. They're relationships where two imperfect humans learn, sometimes gracefully and sometimes messily, how to find their way back.

And sometimes, repair really does begin with one word:

“Tone.”

Episode description

What if repairing a relationship doesn’t mean getting back together?

Monica and Aaron were romantic partners for seven years within a polyamorous relationship and built a deeply intertwined life together. But after repeated ruptures around broken agreements, their romantic relationship came to a painful and messy end.

What happened next is what makes their story so powerful.

Rather than cutting each other out of their lives, Monica and Aaron began the long, imperfect process of de-escalating their partnership while trying to preserve the love and connection underneath it.

In this episode of The Relational REPAIR Podcast, we get into the nitty-gritty of what that actually looked like: taking months of space, staying connected without forcing repair before they were ready, navigating anger, guilt, shame and defensiveness, and slowly learning how to see each other again.

One of the turning points came on Christmas, when they stopped trying to process their relationship for a day and simply remembered that they liked each other. That reconnection eventually created enough safety for Monica to share the depth of her hurt and for Aaron to truly understand the impact of his actions, rather than apologizing from guilt and shame.

And their repair wasn’t just words.

As Aaron says in the episode, “repair doesn’t happen in a conversation.” Sometimes repair looks like showing up consistently, over and over again. For Aaron, that included spending a year driving Monica’s service dog to training, a simple but profound restorative action that communicated: I am not abandoning you.

Today, their romantic relationship has ended, but their relationship hasn’t. They describe a deep love, friendship, compassion, and connection that has transformed rather than disappeared.

This is a conversation about polyamory, broken agreements, breakups, shame, accountability, restorative action, de-escalation, and the possibility that sometimes successful repair isn’t about going back to what you had.

Sometimes repair creates something entirely new.