After years of sitting with couples, I found myself becoming increasingly interested in a question that had less to do with relationships and more to do with the individuals.
What parts of our suffering actually belong to the relationship, and what parts belong to the self?
By the time most couples arrive in therapy, they have usually become experts on each other. They know each other's wounds, childhood histories, insecurities, attachment styles, blind spots, defenses, and communication patterns. They can often explain exactly why a fight happened.
What they cannot always explain is why they keep having it.
And increasingly, I began to wonder whether modern relationship culture was making that problem harder to see.
A generation ago, relationships suffered from too much silence. Today, they suffer from a different illusion.
The illusion that enough communication can solve almost anything.
Communication has become the universal remedy for relational discomfort.
And for good reason. Many people grew up in families where feelings were dismissed, difficult subjects were avoided, and entire relationships were built around what could not be said. The corrective was necessary.
But as often happens, a corrective can slowly become an ideology.
Somewhere along the way, communication stopped being a tool and became a virtue.
The assumption now seems to be that the healthiest relationships are the ones in which everything is spoken, everything is processed, and everything is understood.
I am no longer sure that's true.
Beneath much of modern relationship culture sits an idea that sounds compassionate, even enlightened. If two people communicate honestly, vulnerably, and skillfully enough, they can eventually arrive at a place where they feel fully seen and connected.
And when that feeling of complete understanding fails to arrive, they assume something must be wrong.
But what if being fully known isn't actually available to us? And not even necessary?
What if some of our disappointment comes from asking intimacy to accomplish something it was never designed to do?
Part of this expectation may come from the culture that shaped modern psychology itself.
Western psychology emerged from a society deeply invested in the individual self.
Our inner world became something to explore, understand, articulate, and express. Psychological health increasingly became linked with self-awareness, and self-awareness became linked with language.
If you can name it, you can understand it.
If you can communicate it, you can heal it.
If someone understands it, you will feel closer.
There is tremendous wisdom in this.
There is also a hidden limitation.
Not everything becomes meaningful through expression.
Some experiences cannot be resolved through greater understanding because understanding was never the issue.
Some of life's dilemmas are not problems waiting to be solved. They are realities waiting to be lived with.
Many of life's problems have no solution. All you can do is come to terms with them—and with yourself.
I sometimes think one of the great unspoken anxieties of modern life is our difficulty accepting separateness. The realization that no matter how deeply we love another person, they will never fully inhabit our experience.
No one can.
There will always be rooms inside you that no partner can enter completely. And nobody should.
Something is humbling about this realization. And even liberating.
Your ultimate happiness is not in the hands of another person, who likely has the same limited—if not more limited—access to their own emotional world.
What strikes me about contemporary psychology is how much emphasis it places on expression and how little it places on containment.
Again, there is wisdom in this.
But there is another psychological capacity that seems increasingly rare.
The ability to sit with an experience before speaking about it.
To tolerate uncertainty without immediately seeking reassurance.
To move forward without permission or complete understanding.
To ask, "What do I need?" before asking, "How do I communicate this?"
The strongest couples I worked with were rarely the ones who communicated the most.
They were the ones who knew the difference between what belonged to the relationship and what belonged to themselves.
They understood that love cannot replace self-knowledge.
That reassurance cannot cure existential uncertainty.
That intimacy cannot eliminate the fundamental reality of being a separate person.
There was a humility to them.
A recognition that another person will always remain partly mysterious.
And that intimacy is not the elimination of mystery but the willingness to stay in relationship with it.
The older I get, the more I suspect that the goal of adulthood is not finding someone who understands you completely.
It is developing a relationship with yourself sturdy enough that another person's love becomes a gift rather than a requirement.