Three Days That Change How You Fight, Love, and See Each Other

What actually happens at the Getting the Love You Want workshop, day by day, and why it holds where other things don’t.

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Three days will not fix your relationship. They will teach you how to.

Let’s be honest about what this workshop is and what it isn’t. It is not a miracle cure. It is not a weekend of massages and candles and being told you’re both doing great. It is not a group therapy session where you have to perform your marriage in front of strangers.

It is three days of real, hands-on work, with your partner, in a small group, guided by an experienced Imago therapist. You watch live demonstrations of each skill, then you practise it yourselves, at your own table, with us coaching you when you get stuck. It is structured. It is practical. It is sometimes uncomfortable, and almost always quietly moving. For most couples who come, it is the most useful three days they have ever given their relationship.

The reason it works is not because of anything dramatic that happens in the room. It works because you leave with a method — a way of being together that you can use for the rest of your lives, every time the old pattern tries to come back.

You don’t leave the workshop fixed. You leave with a method that keeps working long after the weekend is over.

Who comes to this

The couples who come are not in crisis, and most are not on the brink of leaving. A few are. Most are couples who have been together for years — five, ten, twenty, sometimes more — and who have noticed, quietly, that something has gone flat between them. Or that the same argument keeps coming up. Or that they’re living more like housemates than partners. Or that they still love each other but can’t quite reach each other the way they once did.

Some are newly engaged or newly married, building on solid foundations before the patterns set in. Some are in second or third relationships and are determined not to repeat what happened last time. Some are working through something specific — an affair, a loss, a move, a child leaving home — that has shifted everything.

What they have in common is not the problem. It is the willingness. They are willing to give the relationship three full days of their attention. They are willing to try something new. They are willing to be, for a short while, students of their own marriage.

What actually happens, day by day

The three days build on each other. Each one opens up the next. You can read the theory in books — what can’t be read in a book is what it feels like to do it, with your partner, with someone in the room who knows how to help when you get stuck. Every skill is shown to you in a live demonstration first, then practised by the two of you.

Day one: learning to really talk to each other

Most couples think their problem is that they don’t communicate well enough. The truth is closer to this: ordinary conversation between two people who are hurting is just two monologues taking turns. You speak. They wait, badly, for their turn. Nobody changes. Nobody feels heard. The space between you gets more crowded, not clearer.

Day one teaches you a different way of talking — the Imago Dialogue. It is a structured way of being with each other where, when one of you speaks, the other’s only job is to understand. Not to correct. Not to defend. Not to prepare a comeback. Just to cross the bridge into your partner’s world and see what they see. Then you swap. Same rules. Same patience.

You’ll watch it demonstrated, then practise it yourselves on real things between you. It feels slow and clumsy at first, like learning to drive. By the end of the day, most couples have said true things to each other they have never managed to say before — and, just as importantly, have been heard saying them.

Dialogue is not a communication technique. It is what becomes possible once the space between you is finally safe.

Day two: finding the root of the fight — and healing it together

Once it is safe enough to talk, you can go where the real work is. Day two is about why your fights hurt so much more than the size of the issue should warrant.

Here is the thing almost no couple is told: the argument on the surface is rarely the real argument. Underneath it, something old is being touched. Long before you met your partner, each of you learned what it felt like to be loved, to be ignored, to be too much, to be not enough. You carry those early experiences into every close relationship you ever have. And your partner — precisely because they are the closest person to you — ends up standing right on top of your oldest sore places. So do you, on theirs. That is why the fight feels so big. You are not just reacting to what happened tonight. You are reacting to everything that old hurt remembers.

This is the part many couples expect to be sent off to do alone — go away, process your childhood, come back fixed. We do the opposite. The wound was relational; it happened in connection, and it heals in connection. On day two you learn to see how each of your histories has been shaping the fight between you, and then — using the dialogue you learned on day one — you become the people who help each other heal. Not by playing therapist. By being safe enough, present enough, and understanding enough that the old pain can finally be felt, spoken, heard, and slowly released.

The hurt began in connection. It heals in connection. Your partner is the one person who can reach it.

Day three: turning your differences into creative fuel — and falling back in love

By day three you can talk, and you understand where the pain comes from. Now you learn what to do with the differences themselves — the tidiness, the money, the time apart, the way one of you feels everything out loud while the other goes quiet.

Most relationship advice tells you to manage the tension of difference. Smooth it over. Compromise. Keep the peace. We teach you something harder and far more alive: not to avoid the tension, not to suppress it, not to merely manage it — but to use it. The friction between two genuinely different people is not a fault in the relationship. It is the raw material of growth. When you stop fighting your differences and start working with them, you build a life neither of you could have imagined alone.

You’ll work directly with your frustrations — the recurring ones, the ones that have worn a groove in your relationship — and learn to turn each one into a clear, specific request for the growth you both actually want. And then comes the part couples are often most surprised by: re-romanticizing. Rebuilding the warmth, the play, the desire, the small daily acts of care that drained away during the years of struggle. Not as a performance, but as the natural result of a space between you that is finally safe again.

Don’t avoid the tension of your differences. Don’t suppress it. Use it. It is the fuel for everything you can become together.

Why this works when other things don’t

Couples come having tried other things. Books. Podcasts. Therapy. Weekend getaways. Serious conversations over wine. Some of it helped a little, for a while. Most of it didn’t hold. There are three reasons this workshop tends to.

First, you do the work together. Nearly everything else you take in alone, then meet your partner in the kitchen where nothing has changed because they weren’t on the same journey. Here, both of you learn the same skills at the same time. You leave with a shared language.

Second, it’s hands-on and structured. You don’t just hear about the skills — you see them demonstrated, then practise them with real material from your own relationship. Most couples don’t have a communication problem in the usual sense. They have a safety problem: when things get tense, the old pattern takes over. Structure creates safety. It holds you both steady when the conversation gets hot, so you’re not improvising your way through the hardest topics.

The work happens between the two of you. We don’t interpret your marriage. We teach you how to hold it.

Third, we stay in the background. We are not there to analyse you, diagnose you, or tell you what’s wrong with your marriage. We demonstrate the method, coach you through it when you get stuck, and hand the relationship back to you in better working order. The work is between you. We just know how to help you hold it.

What you’ll take home

By the end of the three days, you will have:

• ¸A structured way of talking — the Imago Dialogue — that works on almost any difficult topic
• ¸A clear understanding of where your fights actually come from, and how the two of you can heal those old places together
• ¸A way to turn recurring frustrations into specific requests for the growth you both want
• ¸The ability to use the tension of your differences as creative fuel instead of a source of war
• ¸Concrete ways to bring back the warmth, play, and desire that the years of struggle drained away
• ¸A different picture of your partner — and of yourself — that makes sense of things that used to seem impossible

You will not go home with every problem solved. No-one can promise that, and anyone who does is selling you something. You will go home with a way of working on your relationship, together, that actually moves things. Most couples find the shift continues for weeks afterward, as they use the skills on issue after issue that used to send them straight into the old fight.

The practical details

The next Getting the Love You Want workshop runs over three days, on 5 to 7 June 2026, in Pretoria. Tea, coffee, and light refreshments are provided; lunch is on your own so you can use the break however you need to.

The group is kept small — usually around six to eight couples — so every couple gets proper attention. Your dialogues happen at your own table, with your partner, not in front of the group. You are never asked to share your story publicly. What happens between you and your partner stays between you and your partner.

This is the kind of work most couples will only do once or twice in their lives, if they do it at all. When they do, they tend to look back on it as one of the most useful things they ever gave their relationship.

Book your place

If the two of you have been meaning to do something about the state of things — and keep putting it off, or keep hoping it will sort itself out — this is your invitation. Not to a miracle. To three days of honest, hands-on, well-structured work with someone who has helped many couples out of exactly the loop you are probably in.

Spaces are limited by design. The group stays small so the work stays deep. If you want to come, book early.

Your differences are not the enemy of your relationship. They are the material you are building with. Come and learn how to use them well.