I broke my favorite mug last Tuesday.
It was a heavy, hand-thrown stoneware piece I brought back from a trip to Yosemite National Park years ago. It had that signature drip glaze where deep forest green fades into the color of granite, and a clay medallion of Half Dome stamped on the front.
I collect mugs from everywhere I travel. Because I drink tea throughout the day, I have a ritual. Every morning I carefully select the cup that fits my mood and the work ahead.
I reserved the Yosemite mug for a particular kind of day. It was for the days when I was fully immersed in my home office, enjoying the flow of writing and consulting calls. I love my work, yet sometimes I crave the forest when I cannot get to it. Holding the weight of that mug felt like holding a little piece of the wild.
I was rushing to the kitchen between calls. I was moving too fast, my mind still on a client’s email.
It slipped.
The sound was sickening. A sharp, heavy crack echoed off the wooden floor. I looked down to see the thick stoneware shattered into five distinct, jagged pieces.
My immediate reaction was frustration. I scolded myself for being careless. I knelt down to sweep up the shards and assumed the mug’s life was over. In my mind, “broken” meant “ruined.”
But as I held the pieces in my hand, I remembered the Japanese art of kintsugi.
For centuries, Japanese craftsmen have repaired broken pottery by illuminating the cracks. They use a special lacquer dusted with powdered gold or silver. The result is a repaired object considered more beautiful and more valuable than the original.
They treat the break as a piece of history to be honored rather than an error to be erased.
I sat on the kitchen floor for a long time. I held the shards of my Yosemite mug and thought about how we treat our relationships.
In my work with couples and executive teams, I often observe a deep, paralyzing fear of “breaking” things. We avoid difficult conversations because we are terrified of the crack. We think that if we fight, if we disagree, or if we hurt each other, we have failed. We aspire to a relationship that looks like that pristine mug: smooth, flawless, and completely safe.
I believe the opposite is true. Relationships that have never been broken are actually quite fragile. They are untested. You don’t know if they can hold weight because they have never had to hold the weight of a repair.
The strongest relationships I know are the ones that know how to repair.
Years ago, Jerome and I went to see a marriage counselor named Todd. He taught us a practice based on attachment theory that changed everything for me. He told us to bookend our fights with safety.
He suggested that before and after a difficult conversation, we say one specific phrase to each other:
“I love you, and we are going to be ok.”
It sounds simple. It is also incredibly hard to say when you are angry.
When we say this, we are pouring gold into the crack. We are reminding our bodies that the relationship is bigger than the conflict. We are establishing safety so that we can be honest without being destructive.
I now use this practice beyond my marriage. I use it in difficult conversations with my kids, my parents, and my friends. I even use a version of it with business partners and clients. I remind them that we are on the same team and we will solve this together.
I glued my Yosemite mug back together. I am not a master craftsman, so I didn’t have gold dust. The lines are a bit uneven and you can see exactly where it broke.
But now, when I drink tea from it in the mornings, I don’t see a ruined object. I see a survivor. I see something that broke, fell apart, and came back together.
We don’t need to be afraid of the cracks in our relationships. As Leonard Cohen famously sang, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
