Few relationship accusations are as unsettling as hearing your partner say, “You’re gaslighting me.”

It can make an argument feel much bigger than you thought it was. While your partner is telling you that something about the way you disagree is affecting how much they trust their own mind, you may feel horrified by the idea while also being convinced they’ve misunderstood what happened. Although it may also leave you wondering whether there’s something about the way in which you defend your version of events that you just can’t see. You’d never considered that you could be gaslighting them.

Gaslighting as a term can make it more difficult to consider because it’s so frequently used nowadays. It can be applied when two people remember something differently or when someone feels dismissed. Neither experience tells us, by itself, that gaslighting is taking place.

Maybe the term itself matters less. Arguing over whether your partner has chosen the right word can pull attention away from what they’re trying to describe. Gaslighting involves a repeated pattern in which one person’s version of events holds authority while the other person starts to doubt their own experience. Your partner doesn’t have to end up believing your account, they may simply lose confidence in theirs.

What keeps happening between you when you disagree is more revealing than the label alone.

What happens when you remember things differently?

Imagine your partner tells you that a joke you made in front of friends humiliated them. You remember the evening differently and thought the joke was affectionate, so their reaction feels hard to understand. There’s nothing unusual about that kind of disagreement.

The problem more likely stems from what happens next. If arguments like this repeatedly turn into discussions about whether your partner is good at judging situations, old misunderstandings may be used as proof that they often take things the wrong way or blow them out of proportion. Gradually, less attention is paid to what upset them and the focus shifts to whether their judgement can be trusted. They may continue believing the joke was hurtful at the same time as doubting if their belief is reliable.

People often question themselves in relationships. What deserves attention is a recurring pattern where the same person ends up feeling less sure of their memory or understanding in disagreements, while the other person’s account remains comparatively secure.

Your partner has their own version of you

Being close to someone means being known by a mind you can’t fully control.

Jessica Benjamin’s idea of recognition asks us to accept that a partner has a mind of their own that can’t be controlled simply because it conflicts with ours (Benjamin, 1990). Your partner has their own experience of you, and it exists independently of the way you understand yourself or the relationship. This is often difficult when they see you in a way that feels unfamiliar.

You may have gone silent during an argument because you were trying not to lose your temper, which your partner may experience as frightening or punishing. In this situation, your knowledge of your intention is relevant, as is their experience of being with you at the time. Those accounts can remain in the conversation even when you disagree about what the silence meant.

Britton calls this mental room triangular space (Britton, 2004). It describes being able to think about what is happening between you while you’re still caught up in it. Your partner’s view can then be considered without having to immediately decide that either theirs or yours must disappear.

This can be tough when your partner describes you in a way that feels completely at odds with how you see yourself. Being told that you were controlling or cruel may make you want to prove they’ve got you wrong. Sometimes they have. However even then, the way you try to establish that can tell you something important about the relationship.

What might you be protecting?

A partner’s criticism may challenge something you value about the kind of person you believe yourself to be. This threatens more than your memory of what happened.

For example, someone who believes they’re thoughtful may find it hard to hear their behaviour has repeatedly felt dismissive. If the criticism feels unfair, defending yourself likely makes sense to you. At the same time, you may find yourself looking for reasons to give your partner’s judgement less credence.

Calling them ‘too sensitive’, for example, can make their hurt easier to dismiss. A history of “getting things wrong” can make their latest complaint far easier to doubt. They may genuinely be mistaken, but if you already doubt their judgement, you don’t have to think as deeply about what they’re saying.

This is often the difficult part of looking at your own behaviour. Your certainty in an argument may be protecting your memory of events, but it may also, and more importantly, be protecting how you need to see yourself.

Some gaslighting is deliberate and coercive, with one person knowingly distorting events to gain control. It’s also important to remember that it can happen in relationships where someone sincerely believes their own account and repeatedly treats disagreement as evidence that their partner’s judgement is poor. If you’re the one feeling accused of doing it, it may feel like correcting the record rather than undermining another person. Although the effect can still be that one person has much more freedom to define what happened.

Looking beyond both versions of events

You don’t have to agree with everything your partner says to take their experience seriously.

Marcia Cavell argues that two people can understand the same situation differently, even though they’re both trying to make sense of the same event. Something happened, even if neither person has perfect recall of it (Cavell, 1998). Bear in mind, a partner may misremember part of an argument while accurately describing how it felt to them. You may remember the words correctly and still miss their effect. Neither may hold the full picture.

The difficulty stems from one person repeatedly beginning these conversations with greater credibility than the other. If your version is usually treated as the reliable one, it leaves your partner having to prove their memory deserves consideration before the disagreement can even be discussed.

Factual accuracy is only part of what someone may be talking about when they describe feeling gaslit. They may also be describing what happens to their confidence whenever their memory conflicts with yours.

How self-doubt grows

Repeatedly having your understanding questioned can change how confidently you use your own experience.

Bion (1959) described attacks on the mental links that allow experience to be thought about and given meaning. He was writing about far more disturbed states of mind, though the underlying idea helps explain why persistent doubt from someone close can make thinking more challenging.

A memory that has often been challenged may feel inadequate without supporting evidence. Someone who once trusted what they recalled may start rereading old messages before bringing something up because written words offer something concrete that is harder to argue away.

Checking messages doesn’t show that someone is being gaslit. In a relationship where a person already expects their judgement to be questioned, it can show how cautious they have grown about relying on themselves.

Repeated patterns also teach people what to expect from each other. Ogden describes how something created between two people can limit how freely each person thinks from their own position (Ogden, 2004). In a coercive relationship the responsibility for that pattern may be very unequal, but repetition can still influence what the more doubtful partner expects from the next disagreement. They may start second-guessing their memory before you challenge it because they already know how these conversations tend to go.

In Frankel’s account of trauma, a powerful other can come to have a profound influence over how someone understands what has happened to them. People may find themselves seeking reassurance from others about experiences they once felt able to judge for themselves (Frankel, 2002).

Gaslighting doesn’t always produce anything as extreme as this. Frankel’s work helps explain how another person’s view can eventually influence the way someone judges their own experience, even when that person is not there.

In other words, your partner may start doing some of the doubting for you.

What your partner may be trying to tell you

Your partner may indeed be using the word gaslighting inaccurately. Turning every disagreement into an accusation of abuse makes ordinary relationship conflict harder to think about clearly. But proving they’ve chosen the wrong word may still leave their experience untouched and can miss the point all together.

They’re trying to tell you that something about the way the two of you disagree affects how much they trust themselves. The next disagreement may tell you more about that than debating the definition ever could. What may be more useful is noticing whether the conversation stays with what happened or shifts towards a debate around if your partner is capable of judging it properly.

Your own certainty is part of the picture too. There may be very good reasons for it, although there may also be something about your partner’s version of you that’s difficult to bear. If their account has to lose credibility every time it threatens how you see yourself, that is worth thinking about. You don’t have to decide if you’re “a gaslighter” in order to take that possibility seriously.

The word may remain disputed between you. But the relationship still needs to find a way for two people to disagree without one person gradually losing confidence in their own mind.

References

Benjamin, J. (1990). An outline of intersubjectivity: The development of recognition. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7(Suppl.), 33–46.

Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40, 308–315.

Britton, R. (2004). Subjectivity, objectivity, and triangular space. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 47–61.

Cavell, M. (1998). Triangulation, one’s own mind and objectivity. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79, 449–467.

Frankel, J. (2002). Exploring Ferenczi’s concept of identification with the aggressor: Its role in trauma, everyday life, and the therapeutic relationship. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(1), 101–139.

Ogden, T. H. (2004). The analytic third: Implications for psychoanalytic theory and technique. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 167–195.

You said you posted the parcel, but you hadn’t.

Had you admitted forgetting, you’re pretty sure your partner would have been annoyed, and there’d have been a familiar conversation about why they always have to remind you to do stuff. So instead, you just say it’s been done. A few days later they find the parcel still in the car, and now they’re more annoyed than they may have been had you just told them the truth.

The forgotten parcel now means something to your partner that it previously didn’t.

They’re questioning why you told them you’d posted it when you hadn’t. And are now wondering, if you can lie about something so small and inconsequential, what else might you lie about?

The purpose of the lie

Understanding why we lie may tell us more than the lie itself. I think many people who opt to tell a white lie instead of telling the truth do so for one of two reasons: to save the other person from hurt, or to save themselves from shame.

I call these the virtuous lies and the self-protective lies. There is, of course, another lie, the malicious lie which is purposely designed to do harm to the other person, however that isn’t what I’m focussing on here. Here, I’m talking about the type of lying that rolls off the tongue in a moment of panic and often without much thought.

You may not always perceive the panic, but it can often be lurking somewhere underneath when you’re faced with that moment of knowing that the honest answer to the question you’ve just been asked probably won’t go down well.

It creates an incongruence between what you believe and what you believe the person asking wants to hear, which can be difficult to reconcile in a split second.

So, to alleviate the discomfort, a lie emerges to save everyone’s blushes. It may seem like a good idea at the time, after all, it’s only a little white lie, right?

But what it creates in its wake can have far worse consequences for your relationship.

The ‘virtuous’ lie that keeps the peace

We use “white lie” to describe the type of deception we deem harmless. Like when your partner proudly serves a meal they’ve spent hours cooking, and you tell them it’s delicious even though the sauce is far too salty. Very little depends on you liking the sauce, but it does on you saying that you don’t like it. So you’d rather lie to spare their feelings.

Research by Levine and Schweitzer (2015) into what is known as “prosocial lying” suggests that people respond differently when they believe a lie was told for their benefit. They may even see the person who lied as more benevolent. However, the research also shows that, yes, they may view you with benevolence, but they may also end up trusting your honesty a little less.

However, good intentions don’t necessarily remove the cost of the lie. Research has also found that people who reported more “relational lies”, meaning lies intended to protect relationships or spare someone’s feelings, also reported more loneliness. Sprigings et al. (2023) found that people instructed to lie throughout a conversation with a stranger felt less close to them than truth-tellers did. A well-meant lie may therefore still have a relational cost.

The deception of a self-protective lie

There is another kind of white lie that isn’t about protecting the receiver, but is instead designed to protect the teller.

This is the self-protective lie.

You say the parcel has been posted because admitting it hasn’t means dealing with your partner’s annoyance. Perhaps you remembered the moment they asked and, in a split second to avoid their disappointment, you said yes. The exposing conversation has been avoided and you’ll remember to do it first thing tomorrow. Problem solved. So it seems…

People describing why they deceive romantic partners give reasons such as avoiding conflict, protecting how they’re seen by a partner and retaining some control over an interaction (Guthrie & Kunkel, 2013). “I didn’t want an argument” may be true, although as a relationship therapist, I’m more interested in why the potential fallout made lying preferable.

Facing an altered self-perception

Self-protective lies run deeper than social politeness.

Forgetting to post a parcel is hardly a serious offence, but admitting it can still feel too exposing to declare. Once you say, “I forgot”, you have revealed something about yourself, and then you’re out of control of how someone else might take it or what they think of you.

Deceptive lies can reveal a crack in self-perception that the teller is attempting to avoid. You may find yourself thinking: if I admit the truth, will my partner still see me as the person I want them to see? They may see you as careless or incapable, or connect it with the last time they asked you to do something you said you would do, but didn’t.

And this can go further: what if I’ve also been lying to myself about who I really am? This can feel harder for some of us than we’d like to admit. Being criticised can quickly turn into feeling ashamed. A complaint about something we have or haven’t done can feel like a judgement about the kind of person we are.

We may believe that if we can keep our partner seeing us as the person we need to believe we are, we avoid exposing something less flattering. Revealing the lie therefore risks dispelling that fantasy and having to face your partner, and probably yourself, seeing you as flawed.

This is where shame enters the picture.

Shame is closely tied to identity and to the experience of being seen by another person (Weiss, 2015). If being unreliable is already something you fear about yourself, a small mistake can feel as though it has exposed something much bigger. The fear can shift from I forgot the parcel to this is what you now think I am, or worse still, this is now who I think I am. The parcel then comes to mean something it never meant on its own. Saying it was posted provides a brief emotional escape.

A very small lie can serve to protect an important version of ourselves. If it’s important to me that you see me as reliable, saying I forgot risks changing how I think you see me. Saying I posted it lets me keep that version of myself in place for a little longer. It also protects me from the possibility that you may see something in me that I already struggle to accept myself.

Anticipating a bad outcome

“I knew you’d be annoyed.”

This can often be the response after a lie is discovered.

It may seem like a reasonable conclusion based on your relationship history. Maybe your partner does get annoyed when you forget things. The two of you may have had versions of this conversation many times before.

The better we know someone, the easier it is to assume we already know how they’ll react. Although drawing this conclusion leaves very little room for the possibility that they might say or do something else this time. When their response has already happened in your head, along with the argument that follows, by the time you’ve said the lie, you may already feel certain the argument is coming.

Mentalising means staying curious about what your partner might be thinking, while accepting you can never know for certain. You’re making a best guess, however well you know them.

Stronger mentalising tends to go with greater relationship satisfaction and less conflict, although we still don’t know exactly how one influences the other (Hurman et al., 2026). Leaving room to be wrong about your partner means you can respond to what they actually say instead of the reaction you’ve already imagined.

The problem comes when you start treating your guess as a fact.

If you already ‘know’ your partner will be unreasonable, angry or disappointed, being economical with the truth can seem justified. After all, they can only respond to what you tell them, right?

But part of being close to someone is accepting that they have a mind of their own. They may see things differently from you, and you can’t decide how they will react. Benjamin (1990) describes this as recognising the other person as separate from us, rather than assuming they will fit what we expect of them.

That sounds obvious until someone we love thinks something about us that we wish they didn’t.

Their separateness is much easier to enjoy when they’re pleased with us. The little white lie tries to keep some control over the discomfort of this. If I can influence what you know, I have a better chance of influencing what you think of me.

When the lie is found out

The person who lied knows exactly how far the deception went. Their partner doesn’t.

Perhaps this really was the only time. The person who told the lie can be completely certain of that. The difficulty is that reassurance now depends on the same source that has just proved unreliable.

A small lie can leave your partner questioning things they previously trusted. An ordinary answer that would’ve once ended a conversation can prompt another question: “Is that really true?”

Most intimate relationships depend on thousands of claims that are never checked. Someone says they paid the bill and you assume they paid it. They tell you what happened during their day and you listen rather than investigate. Living together would be almost impossible without this basic willingness to take another person at their word.

This is where “it was only a little white lie” doesn’t really cut it. The smallness of the lie may even make it harder to understand. If something so trivial was worth lying about, the other person is left wondering what happens when the truth carries a much greater weight.

This is no longer about getting yourself off the hook. The lie has made trust itself part of the problem.

The irritating truth

So what if the conversation you’re avoiding isn’t actually the disaster you imagine?

Levine and Cohen (2018) suggest the conversation we’re trying to avoid may not go as badly as we imagine. Their research found that people expected honest conversations to be more damaging than they were, and those who actually had them often felt more socially connected than people predicted.

Honesty can still go badly. A partner may have good reason to feel angry. How that anger is expressed becomes part of what each person learns about telling the truth in the relationship.

Honesty is easier when your partner knows they can tell you something you won’t like and still be heard. You can be annoyed that the parcel is still in the car and still make it possible for the other person to admit it.

The person who lies has to ask why being seen as disappointing felt so hard. The person being lied to may also have to ask what tends to happen when their partner tells them something they don’t want to hear.

The lie, of course, remains the responsibility of the person who told it. But it may reveal a question that you both need to think about: What have you come to expect will happen when the truth is inconvenient?

References

Benjamin, J. (1990). An outline of intersubjectivity: The development of recognition. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7(Suppl.), 33–46.

Guthrie, J. A., & Kunkel, A. D. (2013). Tell me sweet (and not-so-sweet) little lies: Deception in romantic relationships. Communication Studies, 64(2), 141–157.

Hurman, K., Shaikh, M., Greene, T., & O’Driscoll, C. (2026). Mentalization and couple relationships: A systematic review of associations and interventions. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice. Advance online publication.

Levine, E. E., & Cohen, T. R. (2018). You can handle the truth: Mispredicting the consequences of honest communication. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(9), 1400–1429.

Levine, E. E., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2015). Prosocial lies: When deception breeds trust. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 126, 88–106.

Sprigings, S., Brown, C. J. V., & ten Brinke, L. (2023). Deception is associated with reduced social connection. Communications Psychology, 1, Article 19.

Weiss, H. (2015). Introduction: The role of shame in psychoanalytic theory and practice. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 96(6), 1585–1588.

Sometimes we can only acknowledge how unbearable a relationship had become once it ends.

Your partner leaves and, alongside the hurt, you notice that you have also changed, for the better.

You’re no longer waiting for the next difficult conversation or trying to work out what the atmosphere between you means. The loss hurts. But the relief is harder to explain.

It can feel especially uncomfortable if the relationship was, by any ordinary measure, decent. There may have been love, affection and a shared life you genuinely valued, which you may still want back. So why does some part of you feel lighter now they’ve gone?

Relief can easily be mistaken to mean that you struggled to admit to yourself you wanted the relationship to end. I think it can tell us something more interesting about what staying in the relationship required of you.

Losing the life you knew

When someone leaves, you lose the ordinary structure that you both developed around being together. There’s no longer another person whose presence features in your plans, decisions or thoughts about the future.

This type of familiarity can feel reassuring, and therefore difficult to give up. Even when a relationship is disappointing, frustrating or increasingly difficult, it can still give life a recognisable rhythm. You know what the problems are and roughly how the week works. You may even know the argument you’re likely to have before it begins. None of this makes the relationship reliable, but it does make it known.

Liza Catan (2011), drawing on the psychoanalyst Henri Rey, has described the end of a relationship as a falling away of familiar structures. While Rey’s work focused on more severe psychological states, the core idea he illuminates still applies to ordinary relationships . A relationship can feel both secure and constraining over time, while leaving can expose us to a freedom we’re not entirely prepared for.

This helps make sense of why someone can spend months feeling hemmed in by a relationship and still panic when it ends. Sometimes the fact that the relationship is simply there offers enough security to stay, even when other needs are being compromised.

The freedom you were afraid to want

There are times when people want more space long before they want separation. They look forward to being alone, then feel hurt when their partner seems too comfortable without them. They imagine having fewer obligations to another person, but the idea of no longer mattering to that person strikes a different chord.

Rey was interested in what happens when being close to someone starts to feel too much, but being apart from them doesn’t feel comfortable either. Catan (2011) describes how the wish for more freedom can quickly be followed by anxiety once that closeness is gone. Sometimes we want more space and still feel uneasy when we get it.

Then your partner leaves and the space you had been wanting arrives all at once.

Home may feel calmer, or perhaps there’s some relief in making a decision without having to imagine how it will land with somebody else. At the same time, you can miss them badly and still hope they’ll call. Both things can be true at the same time.

For some people, another uncomfortable thought shows up too: I’m relieved they did what I couldn’t.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you had been planning to leave. It may mean you had been living for some time with a conflict you couldn’t work out how to resolve. You may have felt that ending the relationship would have made you responsible for the hurt that followed, whilst staying meant continuing with something you were no longer sure you wanted. When the other person ends it, the decision is painful, but the indecision is over.

Who are you when they’re no longer there?

In a long relationship, your partner becomes one of the people who helps you know who you are. Certain parts of you become more familiar because they are frequently seen, expected and responded to by them. When they leave, that way of knowing yourself may also disappear.

Ringstrom (2018) suggests relationships help us know ourselves. When a partner notices certain parts of us and responds to them, over time, this can help make those parts feel more familiar to ourselves. We partly learn who we are through the people we are close to. Over time, a relationship can bring out certain sides of us, while others become less visible.

You may, for example, have become the person who kept things steady. If your partner often felt uncertain, competence may gradually have become an important part of how you understood yourself with them. Once the relationship ends, you haven’t only lost the person, you’ve lost the environment in which that version of you made sense.

Goldner (2014) writes about intimate partners becoming deeply involved in one another’s psychological regulation. This is one reason the same person can be experienced as both reassuring and exhausting. Their presence may be difficult at times while also helping to hold a familiar emotional world in place.

So the space after a breakup can feel oddly disorientating. There may be more freedom after the relationship ends, but you have also lost someone who helped make certain parts of you feel familiar and known.

The relationship starts telling you who you are

Over time, people in relationships can develop patterns that don’t fully belong to either person.

Ringstrom (2018) describes the relationship as coming to have “a mind of its own”, where each person responds to the other, who responds in turn, until the interaction becomes difficult to separate into a simple story of cause and effect.

Jessica Benjamin’s idea of complementarity gives this another dimension. Two people can become caught in positions that depend upon one another and become harder to step out of. One person may experience themselves as pursuing because the other withdraws; the other may experience their withdrawal as a response to being pursued. Both feel as though they’re reacting to something the other person has started (Benjamin, 2004).

The important point is less about who started it than about what repeatedly happens to each person once the pattern gets going.

A relationship can make it harder to be anything other than the version of yourself you have become simply by being in it. You know how your partner sees you, and eventually you may start anticipating yourself through that expectation. You become the needy one, perhaps, while they become the distant one. Even attempts to behave differently can be pulled back towards something familiar.

When the relationship ends, the pattern is no longer being repeated between you. You may still carry the expectation that somebody will respond to you in the old way, but the person whose responses helped keep that version of you in place is no longer there.

This may be where some of the relief comes from. You no longer have to keep falling into the same role.

Why you might feel relieved

Relief after a break up can leave you questioning whether the relationship was ever good, or if you should have left sooner. If you’re relieved, perhaps you were never happy. If you miss them, perhaps the relationship should have continued. Neither conclusion gives much room for ambivalence.

You can have loved somebody and become tired of who you were with them. The relationship may have made life feel secure, even though you needed more space than you realised. So when it ends, you may still feel the loss, but also relief that those old patterns are no longer being played out between you

Relief doesn’t determine whether the relationship was good or bad, and it doesn’t tell you that you should’ve left sooner. It may simply draw your attention to what had become difficult in the relationship.

So after someone leaves, it may be more useful to ask: what changed in you once the relationship was over?

The answer may take a while to become clear. The relief is simply one place to begin looking.

References

Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition and the Intersubjective Third. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46.

Catan, L. (2011). Panic and flight: Claustro-agoraphobia in the consulting room. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 27(3), 242–257.

Goldner, V. (2014). Romantic bonds, binds, and ruptures: Couples on the brink. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 24(4), 402–418.

Ringstrom, P. A. (2018). Relational psychoanalytic perspective on couples psychotherapy. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 38(5), 399–408.

“I miss being single.”

It’s a sobering thought if you’re already in a relationship, and can be hard to think, let alone say, even to yourself. Acknowledging it can feel like an admission that your feelings have faded and you prefer your previous relationship status. It may indicate this, although it may also be pointing to something that is even harder to acknowledge.

It is possible that we may miss versions of life that we wouldn’t really want to revive. For example, childhood may be remembered fondly without wanting to return to school, or an old friendship can be mourned despite it becoming unbearable. Yet, singlehood seems not to allow for the same ambivalence. Missing it can feel like a repudiation of the person beside us, as though gratitude for one life should remove all appreciation or attachment to any other version.

Although rather than trying to draw a conclusion on if you want single life or not, maybe a more pertinent question to ask yourself is: What does being single represent to you now that you no longer are?

The single person you remember

For one person, singlehood may represent erotic possibility. For another, freedom from being observed or depended upon. Someone else may miss the sense that their life could still surprise them. The thought tells us more once we understand what singlehood means to you specifically.

Memories of single life can become quite creative if a current relationship starts to feel repetitive. Remembering how lonely Sunday evenings could feel as a single person fades away when met with the imagined history of spontaneity that at the time was not quite as fulfilling as memory would have you believe. This distortion doesn’t make the longing meaningless. If anything, it makes the meaning more personal. We can idealise the part of the past that speaks most clearly to what now feels missing.

You may miss making a decision without first thinking about how someone else may be affected by it. Or missing feeling unknown by someone eager to discover who you are. Potentially even excited to discover parts of yourself in yet unknown scenarios. Singlehood may even have contained the possibility of becoming someone new without having to explain yourself to your partner.

Autonomy in a relationship allows us to feel as though our choices belong to us and don’t need to be co-signed by someone else. Genesse et al. (2025) found that greater autonomy was associated with higher relationship satisfaction. This complicates any assumption that commitment is demonstrated by how readily two lives become one. The strength of a relationship may partly depend on how much separateness it can handle.

The agreement neither of you made

It is quite common for relationships to develop unspoken rules of engagement as they progress. It may turn out that spending every weekend together ends up meaning that separate plans can only be made by mutual agreement. Or a supportive partner over a difficult time unwittingly ends up becoming responsible for maintaining the other’s emotional stability.

This can also be fuelled by the loaded expectation we have of each other and the relationship itself. We may believe that a loving partner should always be available to us, a wish for privacy may be translated into withdrawal, or wanting something different may cause unnecessary discomfort. The wish to protect our partner from emotional harm can feel virtuous, however it can leave us feeling as though we are sacrificing ourselves for something that the relationship may or may not be asking of us.

Yet our partner may never have requested the sacrifice.

They might equally feel stuck in the role this also requires them to play and worried that changing the arrangement could rock the boat. It can leave each person playing a role for each other that neither person is particularly enamoured by.

Psychodynamic relationship therapy describes how partners can recruit one another into corresponding roles that address wishes and fears neither person fully understands. Nielsen (2017), drawing on earlier psychoanalytic work, describes these arrangements as “unconscious marriage contracts.” Once established, the roles seem to take on a life of their own. For example, the more one person anticipates that independence will cause hurt, the more carefully they hide their need for it. Their partner may, in turn, sense a withdrawal without knowing its source and attempt to close the gap by seeking greater closeness, thereby confirming independence is dangerous.

No one is purposely ‘doing’ it to the other. However, each person may feel unconsciously recruited into maintaining a particular role out of fear about what a change in dynamic could lead to.

Some relationships however, are actively restrictive, and a partner may well respond to autonomy with punishment or contempt. This type of dynamic requires a separate conversation. But in the more ordinary sense that we are talking about here, it is worth asking whether the feared consequence of asking for more freedom belongs mainly to expectation or experience. If the fear carries no evidence, then maybe it can be thought about together to understand where it may be coming from so it can be worked through and put down.

The excitement of not knowing

Single life can feel alluring because it can suggest boundless possibilities when it comes to sexual or romantic encounters. A first date can hold excitement and anticipation about who we may meet, what might happen and what side of us may be drawn out in the encounter. We have yet to learn the other person’s habits or the limits of their interest. If we will be delighted or disappointed by them. The future is not yet written.

A long-term relationship offers a different kind of pleasure. Knowing someone deeply and feeling equally known by them can create a sense of safety and comfort. However, this is the very thing that can feel restrictive if that knowledge doesn’t leave space for discovery. If we anticipate the reply before asking the question and assume that our partner already knows what we will say, eventually there seems little reason to ask.

This is where long-term love may start to lose its thrill. Desire often stirs when something remains somewhat enigmatic. Established relationships so often lose this, and partners can treat each other as familiar characters with pre-determined story lines. Singlehood, then, can come to represent a life unscripted.

Research on personal growth suggests that experiences outside of an established relationship can sometimes bring vitality back into it. In two studies, Carswell et al. (2021) found that daily increases in personal growth were associated with greater positive emotion and romantic passion. However sustained personal growth separate from the relationship was also associated with lower passion through reduced intimacy if it could not be incorporated back into shared life.

This, then, highlights a relational tension. When it comes to committed relationships, people need enough freedom to remain interesting to themselves, without creating so much distance that our partner is only interesting to us from afar, when we have less access to them. The task is to create room for experiences that can change each person without requiring the relationship to prevent change from happening or needing to deny that it has.

Who wrote the rules?

Consensually non-monogamous relationships rarely form based on preordained expectations in the way that monogamous arrangements do, which means there is a greater requirement for relationship agreements to be explicit. Rodrigues (2024) describes how monogamy functions as the cultural default in Western societies, therefore many of its expectations go unsaid. In CNM relationships, partners may rely on open communication to establish relationship agreements beyond what is culturally assumed.

This isn’t to say that CNM relationships can’t become restrictive or go unexamined in their own ways. But there can often be an openness around establishing joint agreements that make space for what each person wants from the arrangement.

Monogamous couples may have fewer obvious reasons to ask. Conjoined lives can often be treated as a fait accompli, leaving little room for discussion about how much independence either person may wish to retain. There may be no prior discussion around what privacy means, how much togetherness feels loving versus smothering, or whether a change of mind is permitted without being experienced as a change of heart.

The statement “I miss being single” may in fact reveal the quiet discomfort of a partnered person who wishes to reclaim some freedom or some aspect of themselves without this needing to threaten the relationship. It may be whispered as a statement, but it may actually be a question: can this relationship make space for me to change, to be different, to reveal different sides of me that have not yet found a place to settle between us?

Sometimes the answer will expose a life that has become too limiting. Sometimes it will reveal that both people have been waiting for permission to change an agreement neither remembers making. Commitment remains a choice only while the life created by it can still be questioned.

References

Carswell, K. L., Muise, A., Harasymchuk, C., Horne, R. M., Visserman, M. L., & Impett, E. A. (2021). Growing desire or growing apart? Consequences of personal self-expansion for romantic passion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(2), 354–377.

Genesse, D., Brassard, A., Vaillancourt-Morel, M.-P., Muise, A., Raposo, S., & Péloquin, K. (2025). Being me while loving you: The role of autonomy in the association between insecure attachment and relationship satisfaction. Journal of Marital & Family Therapy, 51(4), e70079.

Nielsen, A. C. (2017). Psychodynamic couple therapy: A practical synthesis. Journal of Marital & Family Therapy, 43(4), 685–699.

Rodrigues, D. L. (2024). A narrative review of the dichotomy between the social views of non-monogamy and the experiences of consensual non-monogamous people. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 53, 931–940.

People are rarely prepared for feeling attracted to someone who isn’t their partner.

At some point in a long-term relationship, you may feel sexually drawn to someone else. You may do nothing about it. You may have no wish to do anything about it. Even so, the attraction can feel loaded, because many people have internalised social scripts that suggest desire for someone other than their partner is proof that something is up.

But that may not be the case.

Being in a committed relationship requires honest conduct, respect for relationship agreements and care around anything that affects consent. A private sexual thought is different to that.

You your mind still gets to freely engage with the world.

Loving one person doesn’t stop you from finding other people sexually attractive. If you haven’t established shared consent to explore with other people emotionally or sexually, relationship agreements should understandably change how you act on desire. But acting and thinking are not the same. Every internal sexual response you have to someone else doesn’t need to be erased to make good on a relationship commitment.

Early love can make desire feel exclusive

At the beginning of a relationship, mutual desire can mean you both feel chosen by each other, which may change how you feel about yourself.

Sex may feel connected to being picked by this particular person, at this particular time, in this particular way.

Hazan and Shaver (1987) help to explain why early sexual attraction can feel emotionally significant because romantic love can work as an attachment process. Which means you may feel reassured when the person you want gives you their attention, signalling to you they want you in return. So when your partner feels like the focus of your desire, it’s easy to assume you won’t want anyone else in the same way again.

Falling in love involves feeling and fantasy working together. Fantasy fills in the gaps at the beginning, which is partly why early love feels so intoxicating. However the beginning shouldn’t set the bar for every sexual thought or feeling that follows.

Real life changes the intensity of desire

Over time, your partner may not remain the only person you desire.

As they become part of your everyday emotional life, their moods can affect your day and their disappointments can become tied to yours. Sexual desire then has to work with this familiarity, which isn’t always very sexy. While it may deepen attachment, it may simultaneously change the sexual intensity between you.

Mitchell (2002) writes about the tension between security and desire in long-term love. As a partner becomes someone you depend on, sex may get tangled up with the needs and hurts already present in your relationship. Therefore someone else, someone outside your relationship, may feel sexually arousing precisely because they’re not part of your shared history.

Attraction to another person can feel threatening because it may raise an unnerving question: has something between us gone unspoken for too long? Sometimes the question does need addressing. It can shed light on sexual unhappiness, avoidance or draw needed attention to a familiar conflict. Although many attractions are less dramatic than that. They show that being in a relationship hasn’t eradicated your capacity to feel desire for other people.

No partner can be expected to hold every part of another person’s sexual desire throughout a lifetime. Long-term intimacy eventually reveals the difference between loving someone deeply and expecting them to feed every sexual thought, fantasy or response.

Private fantasy is part of adult life

A committed relationship doesn’t give either person automatic access to every private thought. This is especially important when the thought is sexual because attraction to someone else can easily be mistaken as a sign that something in the relationship has gone wrong.

A fantasy about someone else doesn’t necessarily mean it will be acted on. It may involve someone you would never approach. It also doesn’t always tell you something about your own desire, especially if you’ve started to feel sexually stunted. It may also be something quite ordinary and fleeting, with no deeper hidden message at all.

Person (1988) has written about fantasy as part of psychic life, rather than it being an escape from reality. Perel (2006) also writes about separateness inside erotic intimacy. These ideas help make sense of why private fantasy doesn’t have to threaten a relationship. Private erotic thoughts don’t always need to be shared. Requiring every attraction to be confessed and examined just creates more anxiety instead of more honesty.

Privacy and deception are different

It seems important here to establish the difference between privacy and deception. Privacy means keeping an internal life. Deception means hiding behaviour that would change your partner’s choices if they knew about it.

A private attraction kept inside the mind doesn’t materially change the relationship. A sexual exchange, emotional affair, secret dating profile or repeated private contact with someone you are pursuing changes that, if your partner hasn’t agreed to it.

Once attraction starts moving into choices that compromise relationship agreements, consent becomes an issue. Consent it an essential distinction between consensual non-monogamy and infidelity, according to Hangen et al. (2020). Beyond CNM, this distinction keeps the attention on what gets enacted rather than what is thought about.

For monogamous couples, the agreement may exclude sexual or romantic involvement with others. For consensually non-monogamous people, other connections may be part of the relationship agreement. Either way, the ethical question and the distinction remains: what has been agreed, what has been thought, and what has been done?

Disclosure needs a purpose

Telling your partner about a desire for someone else isn’t automatically the responsible choice. Before saying anything, it’s worth asking yourself why you want to have what the conversation. What’s its purpose.

Some couples are able to talk about the attraction the feel for other people without it threatening their relationship. The conversation may help them address sexual boredom, jealousy or a change in their own desire. For others, the same information may cause unnecessary hurt.

Sometimes a person can feel anxious about their own fantasy and try to solve it by telling their partner. The disclosure may be framed as honesty, but the emotional aim may actually be relief, which leaves the other person now carrying the distress. The timing and purpose of the disclosure needs to be handled with clear purpose and care.

Disclosure may indeed be necessary if behaviour breaches an agreed arrangement, or if the attraction has started to affect sexual health, consent or a partner’s understanding of the relationship. Privacy can’t be used to hide conduct that affects someone else’s right to choose or changes their reality.

Your partner can’t carry all your desire

One person can’t be made responsible for all your sexual vitality. When a partner is expected to generate all your erotic feelings, every dip in desire can feel like their failure. The expectation makes the partner responsible for a task no one person can sustain.

Your sexuality is also yours to nurture. It is affected by your history, mood, stress, confidence, body and whether you feel desirable or not. A partner can help awaken desire, but they can’t be made responsible for keeping it alive on their own. You have to be in on that, which is where private sexual thoughts may come in.

A private attraction may be useful if it acts as a reminder to you that your desire still exists. Perhaps because you miss being looked at differently, or because you miss a version of yourself that you no longer encounter as frequently. Sometimes the thought is enough. Action may add unnecessary harm without additional benefit.

Fancying someone else shouldn’t be pathologised just because it feels uncomfortable or because your partner might find it painful to know about. However, to caution, if the attraction becomes obsessive, starts to dominate daily life or pushes you toward risky behaviour, it needs more careful attention than can be offered here.

After the honeymoon

After the honeymoon, as a relationship settles into the groove of every day life, you may still love and want your partner while feeling sexually drawn to other people. This can feel confronting if you expected to only have eyes for your partner, and them for you in return.

Committed people can still have sexual responses to others that don’t have to threaten your relationship. What protects the relationship is knowing and respecting the difference between fantasy, disclosure and behaviour.

You don’t need to punish yourself for every private attraction. It’s also not fair to use “desire is natural” as an excuse to cross agreed lines. Both truths are necessary if this topic is to be approached with care.

You will fancy other people.

Your partner probably will too.

Pretending otherwise protects very little. Consent, care and a realistic view of the erotic mind protects far more.

References

Hangen, F., Crasta, D., & Rogge, R. D. (2020). Delineating the boundaries between nonmonogamy and infidelity: Bringing consent back into definitions of consensual nonmonogamy with latent profile analysis. The Journal of Sex Research, 57(4), 438-457.

Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524.

Mitchell, S. A. (2002). Can love last? The fate of romance over time. W. W. Norton & Company.

Perel, E. (2006). Mating in captivity: Unlocking erotic intelligence. HarperCollins.

Person, E. S. (1988). Dreams of love and fateful encounters: The power of romantic passion. W. W. Norton.

The Summer Cure

Every year, as the summer holiday season approaches, there is usually at least one couple I work with who will suggest that all they need is time away to fix their relationship. There is a belief that if they are to go on holiday and suspend their troubles for a week or two in favour of more sunny climes, then their relationship will be restored and they can get on with managing life together again come September.

I’m not denying that a beach can be a great tonic for short-term relief. And for some, their relationship can feel like such a pressure cooker that any relief is better than no relief. But a beach isn’t going to fix things. It may possibly put things on hold, but probably not offer the resolution that is hoped for from time spent in an alternative setting.

This is because, underneath the holiday dream there’s typically something a lot more complicated going on. Often when people in relationships start therapy, they can hope for a magic wand that will wave away the difficulties they’ve been experiencing without having to face them. A holiday is often imbued with that same hope: “If we can just pretend the problems don’t exist, maybe they won’t.” If only that were true. Most often, the difficulties are so entrenched that the holiday spell is broken before most couples even get to the airport.

What a Beautiful Place to Bring the Same Problems

It isn’t as though a break from the old routine isn’t helpful. A new environment can facilitate a new experience of each other. Not having to worry about the washing, the bills, that work deadline etc. can help reduce some of the stress that can build up in everyday life. Research also shows that when couples have new and exciting shared experiences on holiday, it can lead to more romance, satisfaction and even physical intimacy after the trip (Coffey et al., 2024). Similarly Aron et al. (2000) discovered that couples who do stimulating things together tend to be more satisfied with their relationship. So there is important merit in a holiday. Just that it’s not, in itself, a panacea.

Rest is one thing, but repair is something different. It may well be possible to overlook your partner’s irritating habits for a week or two, but beyond that, surrounded by the pressures of daily life, it may be a different story. Much of the time, the things that are annoying at home also tend to be a problem away from home, even if the new location does include a beach and a that book you’re only just finding the time to read. The wish to “just enjoy it” on holiday can mean that disagreements are put down without truly being worked through. This can leave them mounting and adding to resentment that is already entrenched, or in you feeling unheard and unloved.

Resentment Travels Well

Resentment can be rather insidious if left unchecked. On holiday, it can show up in the most innocuous of moments. If someone who wants to plan an excursion while the other wants to relax by the pool, it can awaken a familiar feeling of needs not being acknowledged. If someone feels left to make the dinner plans that the other person simply turns up to, it can create a sense that, once again, the mental load is left to one person. Or if someone thinks time away is a chance to rekindle a sexual relationship, but the other person is looking forward to catching up on sleep, feelings of rejection or abandonment may rear up again. A new setting can’t resolve these familiar fights once the trenches have been dug.

At home, the busyness of life can become a convenient disguise for difficulties. In the normal runnings of life, it can feel as though there simply isn’t time to tend to the hurt with anything of substance. On holiday, the distractions are diminished and the familiar problems have less places to hide. It can make for a sobering return home, now carrying the uncomfortable realisation that the setting wasn’t the main obstacle after all.

When the Holiday Becomes a Verdict on Relational Health

The wish for a holiday to run smoothly may also be loaded with an unspoken test to determine the relational health between a couple. If things go well, it provides evidence that the relationship can survive. But if the same old difficulties come up, then the relationship can feel doomed, confirming that not even a beautiful setting can improve the quality of the relationship.

The pressure for the holiday to perform can mean that every moment holds more meaning that it can carry. When every interaction is a sign of something going well or not, the simple pleasures can start to feel as though they are being stripped away. A lay in can be interpreted as inconsideration for your partner’s time. A sunset stroll by yourself may come to represent wanting time away from your partner. Talking to other people may leave the other person feeling as though they’re not enough. All simple things, but not always with simple meanings.

It can feel like a pressure to have these differences worked out before check-out. Which can mean needing to face the same difficulties in a new setting, or swallow them and feel the holiday hasn’t done what it was meant to do. The problem is, the holiday was never really going to be able to right the wrongs of domestic life. That’s a lot to ask of a beach!

A More Realistic Outlook

A better holiday may begin with a smaller demand. Before a holiday, it may be more useful for a couple to wonder what they are hoping it will rescue them from. A little honesty before departure can protect the trip from being asked to do too much.

Sex, rest, closeness may mean different things to each person. Naming this may be less romantic than waiting for the sunset to fix everything, but it gives the holiday a more realistic chance.

At its best, a holiday gives a couple enough distance from ordinary life to become curious about who they have become. That curiosity is often the beginning of repair, when two people stop asking the setting to change the relationship and begin to wonder what the relationship has been asking of the setting.

Two weeks in the sun can give a couple rest, privacy and perspective. It may also remind them that the life they manage together is not the only version of what or who they are. But it can’t make the avoided conversations disappear, or make good on what has long since felt bad just because the sea is nearby.

A holiday still has worth. It’s most helpful when it’s not seen as a fix, but rather as time for a couple to look at their issues with more honesty and kindness, and understand what they keep packing in their baggage.

References

Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273–284.

Coffey, J. K., Shahvali, M., Kerstetter, D., & Aron, A. (2024). Couples vacations and romantic passion and intimacy. Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights, 5(1), 100121.

There are moments in therapy sessions when the person sitting opposite me is truly devastated, yet I find myself feeling hopeful.

At a glance, this seems almost indecent, especially when they are beginning to wonder whether their relationship has been a mistake. Yet the thought that often accompanies this crisis aimed at their partner - “you’re not who I thought you were” - may, in fact, signal that something important has finally become possible.

The partner who had previously been understood through a familiar role may have actually started to appear as a more complicated person.

The force of the disappointment can be difficult to explain from the event alone. It may emerge when someone who had always seemed certain begins to doubt themselves, or when a partner who is known for accommodating others reaches the point where they can no longer do so. What feels so disturbing is the discovery that a quality once treated as part of the person’s character may have been less stable than the relationship required it to be.

The Role Hidden Inside Attraction

We rarely tell a new partner what emotional job we hope they will perform, partly because we may have no idea that we’re assigning them one at all. Attraction can often begin with the relief of encountering a quality that feels scarce in ourselves.

For example, for someone who has spent years managing uncertainty, a self-assured partner can make life seem easier. Their decisiveness may initially feel like one appealing part of who they are, though over time it may become woven into the way the relationship manages anxiety. Once this happens, the partner’s confidence begins to carry more weight than either person had consciously agreed to. Their apparent certainty allows difficult decisions to feel less burdensome, while the person who relies on them gains some distance from their own doubts and anxieties. The confident partner may also value the arrangement because being needed in this way offers a sense of competence and importance. The relationship can then gradually organise itself around the difference between them, until what began as attraction becomes a burdensome division of emotional labour.

These types of arrangement can stay hidden for a long time, especially when both people have a reason to keep it going. But it often becomes painful when, say, the person who has always seemed certain begins to feel unsure, or when the one who has always been accommodating realises their generosity has started to cost them too much. At that point, their partner may feel misled. In reality, it may simply be that one person can no longer keep carrying a role the relationship had quietly asked them to play.

“You’ve changed” can sometimes carry the more hidden accusation that the other person has stopped holding something we had become accustomed to leaving with them.

When a Partner Falls Out of Character

Disappointment has an uncanny way of altering the past.

Once a partner behaves in a way that conflicts or goes against our understanding of them, earlier memories can begin to look different. Tenderness may be reconsidered in the light of a recent coldness, while generosity becomes recast as something given reluctantly or with concealed resentment. The mind searches for a continuous explanation because the idea that we failed to recognise the person beside us can feel more disturbing than the injury itself.

A simple verdict offers relief from this confusion. If the partner was always selfish, false or emotionally unavailable, then the relationship can be reorganised around a truth that was previously hidden.

The difficulty is recognising that people can fail us without every good experience becoming fraudulent or tainted. Someone may have loved sincerely and still reached the limits of what they are now able to give. Their care can have been meaningful even when it proves insufficient at the very moment we most depend upon it.

This is one of the harder demands of intimate life: the person who has disappointed us remains the same person who once gave us pleasure, security or hope. Anger often presses us to choose between these versions because a divided picture is easier to manage. The fuller picture may leave us with the anxiety of a partner whose good qualities coexist with failings that matter enormously.

Some discoveries clarify that a relationship has become unsafe or unliveable. Persistent cruelty, coercion and deception require a judgement that takes harm seriously. However, many disappointments offer us less certainty. They reveal an ordinary person whose needs may conflict with ours, whose capacity may be inconsistent and whose limitations may never be transformed by hope alone.

The question then becomes whether the relationship can bear a more complete view of them.

The Hope Preserved by Grievance

Disappointment can become a grievance when it feels too painful to accept what has been lost. James Frosch describes grievance as a state that keeps mourning at a distance, which is particularly useful in thinking about relationships. The repeated complaint may seem to be about the need for an apology, an explanation or a change in behaviour, while beneath it lies a wish for the partner to return to the version of them we once expected.

As long as the grievance continues, the disappointing partner remains under pressure to make up for what has been lost. They can still be summoned to understand the injury properly and to recover the qualities that once made the relationship feel secure. This gives grievance a certain vitality. It preserves the hope that reality might yet be persuaded to reverse itself.

The same argument can therefore continue for years because its true purpose stretches beyond the disagreement at hand. The disappointed person is trying to retrieve a former relationship in which the partner still knew their role. Letting go of the complaint would mean accepting that this version of the relationship has already ended, even if the two people remain together.

Grief begins when the hoped-for restoration loses charge. The person must then reckon with the loss of the partner they expected, along with the future attached to that expectation. There may also be a loss of self, since we often become used to feeling a particular way beside someone who occupies a familiar role. The strong partner allowed us to feel protected, while the endlessly interested partner helped us feel valued. When they stop doing that, the version of ourselves supported by them can feel less secure.

Meeting the Person Who Remains

My hope as a therapist lies in the possibility that both partners can be freed from an arrangement that had become too rigid.

The person once relied upon for certainty may begin to speak about fear, allowing the partner who depended on that certainty to recover some capacity to live with doubt. Such changes can initially make the relationship feel less secure because the old organisation, however limiting, had made both people predictable to one another.

A relationship becomes more honest when each person can move beyond the character they were unknowingly invited to play at the beginning. This asks the disappointed partner to become curious about what the other can genuinely offer, where their limits lie and how much of the relationship had depended upon qualities that could never be permanently guaranteed.

Closeness inevitably reveals aspects of another person that resist our account of them. Their wishes will not always support our own, and their private experience may remain difficult to understand even after many years together. Love must therefore make room for a degree of uncertainty, since the alternative is to require the other person to remain familiar at the expense of becoming fully alive.

Some relationships become more substantial after this revision because each person gains greater freedom to be known outside the old arrangement. Others discover that the assigned roles had been holding together people whose actual needs and temperaments are too far apart. Separation may then become the clearest response to what has been learned.

“You’re not who I thought you were” can mark the end of a relationship organised around expectation. Whether it also marks the end of the relationship itself depends on what is possible once the expectation is removed.

The disappointment lies in meeting a person who no longer functions solely to meet our needs. The possibility lies in discovering whether two people who have fallen out of character can still choose one another.

After the Honeymoon explores what becomes visible when familiar ideas about love begin to fail.

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References

Frosch, J. (2014). “From Grievance to Grief: Narcissism and the Inability to Mourn.” Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 22(2), 259–275.

Birthdays have a distinctive talent for making otherwise completely competent adults feel like they’re twelve years old again.

We may insist, quite sincerely, that we don’t need much. We may say we’re not bothered about presents, that a quiet evening is fine, that the whole thing has become a bit childish anyway. Then the day arrives, something small goes wrong, and the adult position collapses. Nothing catastrophic has happened. No one has betrayed anyone. Yet something has changed.

This is the kind of ordinary disappointment After The Honeymoon is interested in. The domestic moments that look minor from the outside and feel quietly devastating from within.

The trouble with birthdays is that they expose a wish many of us would rather keep hidden: the wish to be known without having to explain ourselves. A birthday is rarely just a birthday. It is one of the occasions on which adult love is asked to present the perfect package.

The wish to be held in mind

The central difficulty is that many people don’t want a birthday so much as they want evidence. They want to feel that their partner has been paying attention in the particular way they deem love is supposed to pay attention. A birthday becomes a test of whether familiarity has made them blurrier or more vivid in the mind of the person they love.

From a psychodynamic perspective, this makes sense. Birthdays can be tied to old experiences of being seen or missed. For some people, birthdays carry a memory of childhood magic, of being gathered around, anticipated, delighted in. Their adult disappointment may come from the painful discovery that romantic love doesn’t automatically reproduce that atmosphere.

For others, birthdays carry a history of absence. The day may have been ignored, misjudged or treated as an inconvenience. In adult love, the birthday then becomes secretly reparative. This time, someone will know what to do, and the day will make good on what was missing back then. This is why partners so often fail around birthdays. They are being asked to respond to a history they may never have been told.

The private script of the birthday wish

The disappointment often begins with the collapse of a hope that has been privately rehearsed. We imagine our partner knowing what kind of gesture would reach us. We imagine them understanding the emotional weight of the day without needing to be briefed. The fantasy is that love should have made it possible for our partner to preempt our wishes.

Romantic relationships depend, to some extent, on idealisation. Murray and colleagues’ work on idealisation in marriage suggests that seeing a partner generously can help sustain satisfaction, especially when the idealisation supports emotional investment rather than denial (Murray et al., 2011). Birthdays can reveal the strain inside this arrangement. The imagined partner knows exactly what is needed, though the actual partner may love sincerely and still be clumsy with execution.

This is where the let down can become an injury. The disappointed person may say, “You didn’t make an effort.” Underneath that complaint may be the more vulnerable statement: “I don’t feel important to you.” A disappointing birthday can feel like a failure to picture the other person’s inner world with enough care.

Fonagy and Target describe reflective function as the capacity to understand behaviour in relation to underlying mental states (Fonagy & Target, 1997). In intimate life, we want our partners to behave in ways that show they have thought about who we are from the inside. This is why a perfectly adequate birthday can still feel wrong. The expense may be there. The date may have been remembered. The gesture may be perfectly defensible. Yet something in it feels emotionally inaccurate. The partner has marked the occasion without quite capturing its meaning.

When disappointment becomes a trial

Of course, the disappointed partner is not always simply wounded. Sometimes the birthday becomes a stage on which old hurts are silently restaged. A partner is examined against an invisible standard. The day acquires the atmosphere of a trial, while neither person has quite admitted that a trial is taking place.

Adult attachment research shows that insecurity can inform how people interpret and respond to stress in romantic relationships, especially when a partner’s availability feels uncertain (Simpson & Rholes, 2017). A birthday can become precisely this kind of stress. It asks, with unusual concentration: are you there for me?

This can create a painful bind. The person who longs to be known may refuse to say what they want because saying it would spoil the proof. The partner, sensing danger but not understanding the rules, may retreat into defensiveness or practicality. Both people then become lonely in different directions. One feels unloved, the other feels set up.

Why the ritual matters

Part of the power of birthdays is that they are rituals which can give ordinary gestures symbolic weight.

Garcia-Rada and colleagues suggest that relationship rituals can strengthen positive emotion, satisfaction and commitment because they organise meaning between partners (Garcia-Rada et al., 2019). A birthday is one of the annual rituals through which a couple shows how well they know the emotional world of one another.

A successful birthday does not need to be impressive. It needs to be accurate.

Some disappointment may be inevitable wherever love is asked to carry memory, fantasy and proof. The question is whether the wish can be admitted before it hardens into resentment. There can be a particular embarrassment in saying, “Birthdays matter to me more than I like to admit.” But there can also be liberation in it, since a wish that can be spoken has less need to become a hidden trap.

There is also work here for the partner who finds birthdays sentimental or excessive. Dismissing the whole thing as childish may be a way of avoiding the vulnerability inside it. The adult wish to be celebrated is not necessarily vanity. It may be one of the remaining ways a person asks to be cherished without having to say it out loud.

After the honeymoon phase

After the honeymoon phase, love is rarely proven by grand, generic instinct.

It is more often shown through careful attention that has had time to become detailed and specific. Birthdays reveal how difficult this can be. They ask one person to risk wanting, and another to risk getting it wrong. Perhaps the real birthday wish is rarely for the gift itself. It is for the relief of feeling that, for one day at least, someone has taken the trouble to imagine us.

If After The Honeymoon is about anything, it is about these deceptively small moments in love: the birthday, the argument after dinner, the silence in the car, the disappointment that seems too minor to mention and too painful to ignore.

Subscribe if you want more essays on what relationships reveal after the romance has become real life.

References

Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (1997). Attachment and reflective function: Their role in self-organization. Development and Psychopathology, 9(4), 679–700.

Garcia-Rada, X., Sezer, O., & Norton, M. I. (2019). Rituals and nuptials: The emotional and relational consequences of relationship rituals. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 4(2), 185–197.

Murray, S. L., Griffin, D. W., Derrick, J. L., Harris, B., Aloni, M., & Leder, S. (2011). Tempting fate or inviting happiness? Unrealistic idealization prevents the decline of marital satisfaction. Psychological Science, 22(5), 619–626.

Simpson, J. A., & Rholes, W. S. (2017). Adult attachment, stress, and romantic relationships. Current Opinion in Psychology, 13, 19–24.

“Communication problems” have become one of the most convenient explanations for relationship distress.

The phrase sounds sensible, neutral and faintly hopeful.

It suggests that the difficulty lies somewhere in the exchange of words: one person is not saying things clearly enough, another isn’t really listening carefully and the relationship might improve if both people could learn to speak with more patience, accuracy and maybe a little restraint.

There is some comfort in this idea. Communication feels practical.

It turns the mess of love into something that can be worked on. It gives emotional pain a respectable name. People in relationships can say, “We have communication problems,” when what they may mean is harder to admit:

I don’t feel important to you…
I don’t trust what happens between us when I’m vulnerable.
I’m frightened that I need you more than you need me.

The problem

Many people who describe communication difficulties are (ironically) already communicating constantly. They return to the same conversation again and again, refining their points, explaining their intentions, apologising for tone, disputing memory and trying to reach an ending that never quite arrives.

If communication itself were the central problem, repetition would (in theory) solve it. Yet in many relationships, the more people talk, the more entrenched the difficulty becomes.

This suggests that communication problems may not really exist in the way we imagine them.

The conversation is real.

The words matter.

Tone can injure and silence can punish.

Yet the deeper difficulty often lies beneath the exchange itself. Most ‘so-called’ communication problems are meaning problems. The pain is carried by what an event appears to reveal about the relationship.

A forgotten agreement may be annoying in itself, but its deeper sting may come from the suspicion that one person’s needs matter less than another’s. A partner’s silence may frustrate because it interrupts conversation, but it may hurt because it feels like emotional absence. A disagreement about sex, money, parenting or openness may begin with a practical concern and quickly become a question about value, priority or belonging. The argument gathers meaning as it moves through the relationship.

What’s really happening

Relationship research supports this distinction between the subject of conflict and the emotional process surrounding it. Gottman and Levenson’s work suggested that the emotional pattern of conflict can matter greatly for later relationship outcomes, beyond the specific topic being discussed (Gottman & Levenson, 1992). This helps explain why people can resolve the practical detail and still feel injured.

The issue may have been clarified, while the meaning of the issue remains untouched.

This is one of the quieter tragedies of intimate life.

People are often arguing about the thing they can name because the thing they can’t name feels too exposing. A person may complain about a partner coming home late, while struggling to say that waiting alone made them feel foolishly dependent. Someone may criticise a lack of sexual initiation, while finding it unbearable to say that they no longer feel desired. The visible complaint becomes a kind of emotional decoy. It speaks, but indirectly.

Close relationships have unusual psychological force because they touch older questions about dependence, safety and worth. Research on attachment, emotion regulation and well-being in couples suggests that emotional and attachment dynamics shape how distress is managed within intimate relationships (Brandão et al., 2020). This does not mean that every reaction belongs to childhood or that partners are merely symbols of earlier figures. It means that love makes us receptive to meanings we might dismiss elsewhere.

A criticism from a colleague may be irritating. The same criticism from a partner can feel strangely conclusive, as though it has exposed something fundamental about one’s place in the relationship. A delayed reply from a friend may pass with little consequence. A delayed reply from someone whose affection matters deeply can become proof of distance. Intimacy magnifies interpretation because the person matters enough for their behaviour to become evidence.

This is especially clear after an affair. The injured person may seek details, timelines and explanations, and these facts can matter. Yet factual knowledge rarely settles the deeper disturbance. The injury often concerns reality itself. The person is trying to understand what kind of relationship they were in, whether their judgement can be trusted, and whether the bond they believed in still exists. The conversation may sound like an inquiry into events, while the emotional centre concerns the collapse of certainty.

Sex and intimacy reveal the same problem in another form.

People are often encouraged to communicate more openly about desire, frequency and preference, and sometimes that helps. Yet many sexual difficulties carry meanings that are difficult to discuss without shame. Desire can become entangled with attractiveness. Avoidance can feel like rejection. Pressure can turn pleasure into obligation. The words available to describe the practical problem often feel inadequate because the practical problem has become attached to questions of worth.

Consensually non-monogamous and polyamorous relationships make the limits of the communication ideal particularly visible. These relationship structures often involve explicit agreements, careful negotiation and a high value placed on honesty. Even so, clear communication does not remove the ordinary vulnerabilities of attachment. Jealousy, comparison, uncertainty about priority and fear of replacement can emerge precisely because honesty has brought difficult meanings into view. The issue is not always that something has been left unsaid. Sometimes what has been said now has to be emotionally survived.

One of the painful moments in any relationship is when people stop encountering one another freshly. The other person becomes the familiar figure from previous conflicts.

The one who withdraws. The one who pursues. The one who disappoints.

Research on the demand-withdraw pattern shows how easily one person’s pursuit and another’s retreat can reinforce one another, leaving both people feeling justified and alone (Christensen & Heavey, 1990). Each person experiences their own behaviour as protection and the other’s behaviour as threat.

At this point, communication can become oddly anti-communicative. The conversation continues, but curiosity has left it. Each person listens for confirmation of what they already believe. Fonagy and Allison’s work on mentalising is useful here because it describes “the capacity to imagine another person’s inner world through the behaviour we observe (Fonagy & Allison, 2014). Under strain, this capacity narrows and certainty can replace inquiry. At this point, the other person becomes easier to accuse than to understand.

To sum it up…

Perhaps the phrase “communication problems” persists because it is safer than the alternatives. It allows people to speak about relational pain without naming the more exposing material underneath. It is easier to say that someone doesn’t listen than to say that one feels unchosen, or to argue over facts than to admit that a particular moment produced shame. The language of communication protects people from the vulnerability that communication is supposed to reveal.

There is no need to discard the language entirely. People do need to speak, listen, clarify and repair. But the phrase becomes misleading when it persuades us that the difficulty lives mainly in technique.

A great deal of relational conflict is an attempt to get something recognised: a hurt that has been minimised, a fear that has become overwhelming, a need that feels too exposing, or a disappointment that has hardened into criticism.

The argument keeps returning because something in it remains untranslated.

So perhaps communication problems do not really exist as standalone problems.

They are the visible form taken by deeper struggles with meaning, safety, shame, longing and recognition. When people in relationships say they’re struggling to communicate, they may be closer to the truth than they realise.

The words are often available.

What remains difficult is bearing what the words are trying to say.

References

• Brandão, T., Matias, M., Ferreira, T., Vieira, J., Schulz, M. S., & Matos, P. M. (2020). Attachment, emotion regulation, and well-being in couples: Intrapersonal and interpersonal associations. Journal of Personality, 88(4), 748–761. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12523

• Christensen, A., & Heavey, C. L. (1990). Gender and social structure in the demand-withdraw pattern of marital conflict. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(1), 73–81. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.1.73

• Fonagy, P., & Allison, E. (2014). The role of mentalizing and epistemic trust in the therapeutic relationship. Psychotherapy, 51(3), 372–380. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036505

• Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(2), 221–233. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.2.221

The moment when romantic love becomes real

At the beginning of romantic relationships, something remarkable often happens. Potential lovers encounter each other and feel unusually understood. Conversation flows easily. Similarities appear obvious. Differences seem small or even charming. Many people remember this early stage of love with a sense of nostalgia. It is commonly described as the honeymoon phase.

During this period, partners often experience each other in unusually positive ways. Research in relationship psychology has shown that people in satisfying relationships frequently perceive their partners as closer to their ideals than they objectively are (Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996). Psychologists sometimes refer to these perceptions as positive illusions.

These illusions are not necessarily problematic. In fact, they can help relationships form by encouraging emotional investment and optimism. Yet no relationship remains permanently inside this stage. Over time, something changes.

When the illusion fades

As relationships develop, partners gradually encounter each other more fully. Everyday life introduces practical concerns, emotional vulnerabilities and personal differences that were less visible during the early stages of attraction. The partner who once seemed perfectly aligned with us begins to reveal their own rhythms, habits, and sensitivities.

At some point, many people experience a subtle but unmistakable shift. The relationship no longer feels effortless. The emotional atmosphere of the relationship has changed.

Psychologically, this shift can be understood as disillusionment.

What disillusionment really means

The word disillusionment can sound dramatic, even negative. It often carries the suggestion that something has gone wrong. But the meaning is much simpler.

Disillusionment literally means the loss of an illusion.

In relationships, the illusion that fades is usually the belief that the partner we love is perfectly suited to our needs, expectations or emotional style of expression.

This illusion is rarely deliberate. It emerges naturally during the early stages of attraction. When it fades, the partner appears more human. They become recognisable as a person with their own preferences, frustrations and limitations. For many people in relationships, this moment feels disappointing. Yet disappointment is not necessarily the opposite of love. Often, it is the beginning of a more realistic form of it.

Domestic disillusionment

The type of disillusionment that occurs within relationships can often be quiet and gradual.

It rarely arrives through dramatic events. Instead, it emerges through ordinary moments that accumulate over time. A habit that once seemed charming becomes irritating. A difference in emotional style becomes more noticeable. A small disappointment carries more weight than it once did.

I call this domestic disillusionment.

Domestic disillusionment is not an unusual or pathological experience. It is simply the moment when romantic fantasy encounters the everyday reality of living with another person. In many ways, it is unavoidable. To love someone realistically, we must eventually see them clearly.

Why disillusionment feels so unsettling

The difficulty of disillusionment lies partly in the contrast it creates. The honeymoon phase is often characterised by enthusiasm and emotional harmony. Partners feel aligned with each other in ways that seem almost effortless.

When that harmony begins to fade, the relationship can feel unexpectedly fragile. People in relationships sometimes assume that the presence of conflict means the relationship has deteriorated. Yet conflict is often the natural consequence of recognising difference.

People who once experienced each other through idealisation are now encountering each other as distinct individuals. The relationship has become more accurate. And accuracy can feel uncomfortable.

The possibility inside disillusionment

Disillusionment is often experienced as a loss. The relationship no longer feels as magical as it once did. The sense of effortless understanding has been replaced by something more complicated. Yet disillusionment also creates a new possibility.

Once the illusion fades, partners have the opportunity to encounter each other more honestly. Instead of relating to the imagined partner they hoped for, they begin relating to the real person in front of them. Psychodynamic thinkers have long suggested that mature intimacy requires precisely this capacity: the ability to hold both affection and frustration toward the same person (Kernberg, 1976). In other words, love deepens not when disappointment disappears, but when it becomes tolerable.

Why disillusionment matters

Understanding disillusionment changes how people interpret their relationships. Instead of seeing disappointment as evidence that something has failed, it can be understood as part of the natural development of intimacy.

The honeymoon phase allowed the relationship to begin. Disillusionment allows it to become real.

This blog will explore that stage of relational life in detail — how disappointment emerges, why communication becomes more complicated, and how people in relationships can sometimes become stuck in patterns they do not fully understand.

Domestic disillusionment is not the end of love. Often, it is the beginning of a more honest form of it.

References

• Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality.

• Kernberg, O. F. (1976). Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis.

• Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Griffin, D. W. (1996). The benefits of positive illusions in romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Why I started this blog

Throughout my therapy practice, a striking pattern has emerged in my work with relationships that I believe could do with being addressed. So many people in relationships who seek help begin with the same explanation. They believe the problem is communication.

They say they keep having the same arguments. Conversations escalate quickly. Attempts to explain themselves seem to make things worse rather than better. To them, the conclusion appears obvious: if they could simply communicate more effectively, the relationship might improve.

Yet when people begin to describe their experiences in more detail, something else becomes apparent. Communication problems rarely appear suddenly. They tend to emerge gradually, often after a relationship has passed through a particular stage.

It is the stage most people recognise as the honeymoon phase.

At the beginning of romantic relationships, partners tend to experience each other in an unusually positive way. Differences appear small or easily resolved. Conversation flows naturally. Emotional understanding feels intuitive. Psychologists sometimes describe this period as one of romantic idealisation, a process through which partners see each other through a hopeful lens (Murray et al., 1996).

For a time, this idealisation helps sustain intimacy. It encourages emotional investment and allows a relationship to begin. But the honeymoon phase does not last forever.

Over time, differences become more visible. Expectations collide with reality. Habits that once seemed charming become irritating. Conversations that once felt effortless begin to feel more complicated. Many people assume that when this shift occurs, something must have gone wrong. In truth, something far more ordinary is happening. They have moved beyond the honeymoon. And this is precisely where the real work of relationships begins. After the honeymoon.

What happens after the honeymoon

The stage after the honeymoon is often misunderstood. In popular culture, long-term relationships are frequently portrayed in simple terms. Either the relationship continues to feel exciting and harmonious, or it has somehow failed. The reality is rarely so clear-cut.

Most enduring relationships move through a period when idealisation fades and a more realistic understanding of the partner emerges. What once seemed effortless begins to require negotiation.

Psychodynamic thinkers have long suggested that intimate relationships involve a gradual process of recognising the other person as separate from the fantasies we initially project onto them (Kernberg, 1976). This process can feel unsettling. The person who once seemed perfectly compatible begins to appear more complicated. Differences that once felt intriguing may begin to generate frustration.

In many relationships, this stage produces disappointment, resentment and confusion. Yet it also creates the possibility of something deeper. A relationship that survives beyond idealisation must eventually learn how to accommodate difference.

This blog exists to explore what happens during that stage.

The themes this blog will explore

The essays here (mostly!) revolve around three recurring themes that shape many relationships once the honeymoon phase fades.

Together, they form the intellectual backbone of After the Honeymoon.

Domestic Disillusionment

One of the most common experiences in long-term relationships is the moment when romantic fantasy begins to erode. The partner who once seemed extraordinary becomes recognisably human. Their habits, moods and limitations become more visible. Small disappointments accumulate.

Psychologically, this transition can be understood as disillusionment, and it’s what I call: domestic disillusionment.

It refers to the ordinary but profound moment when romantic idealisation gives way to the lived experience of sharing life with another person. It does not necessarily signal the failure of a relationship. It simply means the relationship has begun to encounter reality.

Understanding this transition is central to understanding long-term intimacy.

The “Communication Problem” Myth

Many people in relationships believe communication is the central issue when their relationship struggles. Relationship advice can frequently focus on techniques to solve this: how to listen better, how to speak more carefully, how to avoid escalation during conflict. While these suggestions can sometimes be useful, they often overlook something more fundamental.

Communication problems are frequently symptoms rather than causes.

Partners may hear each other’s words perfectly well while misunderstanding the emotional meaning behind them. A remark intended as practical advice may feel like criticism. Silence may be experienced as rejection. These reactions are shaped not simply by the conversation itself but by the expectations, vulnerabilities and relational histories that each partner brings into the relationship.

Exploring these deeper dynamics requires looking beyond communication alone.

Stuck, Together

When relationships struggle, partners often search for someone to blame. One person may feel the other is emotionally distant. The other may feel criticised or controlled. Each explanation may contain elements of truth, yet both risk missing something important. Relationship difficulties rarely belong to one person alone.

More often, they emerge through patterns that develop between partners. One partner withdraws, the other pursues. One criticises, the other becomes defensive. Over time, these interactions become familiar cycles that both partners experience as frustrating yet difficult to change.

Understanding relationships as shared patterns rather than individual faults opens a different kind of conversation. Instead of asking who is the problem, couples begin to ask a more useful question: What is happening between us?

Who this blog is for

This blog is written for people who want to understand their relationships more deeply.

Some readers may currently be experiencing conflict or dissatisfaction in their relationship. Others may simply recognise that relationships are more psychologically complex than are often portrayed.

The ideas explored here apply to many different kinds of relationships: marriages, long-term partnerships, newer relationships beginning to encounter difficulty and multi-partner structures.

What these relationships share is the experience of moving beyond the early stage of romantic idealisation. Beyond the honeymoon phase.

Who this blog is NOT for

If you’re looking for quick fixes, ‘5 steps to save your relationship,’ or prescriptive formulas, you won’t find them here. This blog is not for people who want to be told exactly what to do without thinking deeply about what’s happening.

There are many places online offering quick tips about improving relationships. Those approaches can sometimes be helpful, but they often overlook the deeper emotional dynamics shaping relational life.

What you can expect to find here

This blog aims to explore the psychology of intimate relationships with curiosity and care. Each essay will examine a particular relational experience - disappointment, resentment, misunderstanding, expectations, recurring conflict - and consider what these experiences might reveal about the deeper dynamics between partners.

Understanding these patterns does not instantly solve relational difficulties, but it can change how people in relationships see each other. And sometimes that shift in understanding is where meaningful change begins.

If this resonates

Every relationship eventually moves beyond the honeymoon phase. When that happens, love often becomes more complicated. Differences become more visible. Disappointment appears alongside affection. Yet these experiences do not necessarily mean the relationship has failed. Often, they simply mean that intimacy has become real.

If these questions interest you - why relationships change, why conflict appears, why love sometimes feels harder over time - you may find something here worth reading.

New essays will appear regularly. If you would like to receive them when they are published, you can subscribe below.

Understanding relationships rarely happens all at once. It unfolds gradually, through reflection, curiosity and the willingness to look beneath the surface of familiar problems.

That is what After the Honeymoon is for.