Think about how your relationship started. Or your last one. Or the one before that. Chances are it didn’t begin with a long conversation about values, expectations, needs, boundaries, communication, sex, conflict, or what kind of life you wanted to build together. It started because you met someone you liked. There was attraction. Chemistry. Timing. Curiosity. You enjoyed being around each other. You kept spending time together and eventually that time turned into a relationship.

There is nothing wrong with that.

The beginning of relationships is supposed to be spontaneous. Nobody wants to feel like they were selected through an application process. The problem is not that relationships begin organically. The problem is that many people continue them that way.

They never stop to ask what they’re actually creating.

Instead, the relationship becomes a series of defaults. You text because you’ve always texted. You spend weekends together because that’s what you’ve always done. You move in together because it seems like the next step. You get engaged because enough time has passed. You stop having sex and never really talk about it. You start fighting about the same things over and over without ever asking what those fights are actually about.

The relationship keeps moving forward, but nobody is steering it.

Then years later people sit across from me in therapy and tell me they feel disconnected, resentful, lonely, bored, misunderstood, or unsure if they’re even compatible anymore.

Most of the time, they are treating the symptoms of a problem that started years earlier.

They never intentionally defined the relationship they were trying to build.

Relationships Don’t Naturally Become Great

One of the biggest myths we have about relationships is that good ones should happen naturally.

People believe that if love is real, communication should be easy. Boundaries should be obvious. Sex should take care of itself. Needs should be intuitively understood. Conflict should somehow resolve itself.

None of that is true.

Relationships don’t naturally become healthy any more than a business naturally becomes successful or a friendship naturally stays close. Every meaningful relationship requires attention. It requires conversations. It requires decisions.

The couples who seem effortless from the outside are usually the ones who have spent years having uncomfortable conversations that nobody else sees.

The problem is that many people mistake intentionality for a lack of romance.

They think talking openly about expectations will somehow ruin the magic.

In reality, the opposite is true.

Unspoken expectations ruin relationships every day.

The Agreements Nobody Talks About

Every relationship operates according to a set of rules.

The issue is that most of those rules are never discussed.

One person believes being in a relationship means checking in throughout the day. The other believes it means maintaining independence.

One person believes conflict should be addressed immediately. The other believes people should cool off first.

One person thinks sex is an essential part of feeling connected. The other thinks emotional closeness should come first.

One person wants a highly intertwined life. The other wants more space.

Neither person is necessarily wrong.

But when nobody talks about these differences, people start interpreting them personally.

Instead of saying, “We have different expectations,” they say, “You don’t care about me.”

Instead of saying, “We have different ideas about partnership,” they say, “We’re incompatible.”

What often looks like incompatibility is really just two people operating from completely different assumptions.

Intentions Are Not Rules

When I encourage people to set intentions for their relationship, I’m not talking about creating rules or writing a mission statement.

I’m talking about getting clear.

What matters to you?

What kind of partner do you want to be?

What kind of relationship are you trying to create?

How do you want to handle conflict?

What helps you feel loved?

What makes you feel disconnected?

What role do sex, friendship, affection, independence, family, and growth play in your vision of a relationship?

Most people have answers to these questions.

They just keep them inside their heads and assume their partner sees things the same way.

Then they become frustrated when reality doesn’t match the expectations they never communicated.

Intentionality isn’t about controlling the relationship.

It’s about helping the relationship become something both people are actively choosing instead of something they are passively experiencing.

Relationships Need Updating

Another mistake people make is believing that once these conversations happen, they’re done. They aren’t. People change. Needs change. Circumstances change. The relationship you wanted at twenty-five may not be the relationship you want at forty. The way you handled conflict before children may not work after children. The amount of independence that felt good early on may feel completely different ten years later.

A healthy relationship isn’t one where two people figure everything out once. It’s one where they keep checking in and updating the agreement as they grow.

Choose It On Purpose

The strongest relationships I’ve seen are not necessarily the most compatible. They are not the couples with the best communication skills or the least conflict.

They’re the couples who continue to approach the relationship with intention.

They ask questions.

They stay curious.

They talk about difficult things before resentment builds.

They revisit conversations.

They make choices instead of assumptions.

Most importantly, they recognize that love by itself is not enough.

Love might bring two people together.

But intention is what helps them build something worth staying in.

The goal isn’t to find the perfect relationship.

The goal is to stop living in one that was created entirely by default.

Because at some point every relationship asks the same question:

Is this the relationship you accidentally ended up with, or the one you’re intentionally creating?

Want More Support With Your Relationships?

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This push to analyze our way into clarity is a fantasy. It’s rooted not in love, but in fear. It's the part of us that says, “If I know this will work, then I can finally relax.” If I know this is my person, I can stop scanning for threats. If I have a guarantee, I don’t have to be vulnerable. But here’s the truth: if you’re waiting for something permanent and fixed, you’re not looking for love. You’re looking for control.

And control will not make you feel safe. Ever.

Here is the thing. You don’t need certainty. You need capacity. You need presence.

You don’t need to be healed to be in a relationship. You need to be healing. You need to be self-aware enough to notice your triggers and take ownership of them. You need to stay in the room when it would be easier to shut down. You need to be able to say: “This is my wound. I’m working on it.”

That’s the work. That’s the unsexy, powerful, transformative work. The more you search for certainty, answers, the right conversation to solve all conflict the more you’re driven by a wound. By fear. And this is a recipe for disaster. This is how the pattern gets recreated.

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They become consumed with what their partner is doing wrong. Their partner doesn’t communicate enough. Their partner isn’t affectionate enough. Their partner doesn’t listen. Their partner avoids conflict. Their partner is too needy. Too distant. Too emotional. Not emotional enough. They spend hours analyzing texts, replaying conversations, talking to friends, talking to therapists, reading relationship content online, all in an attempt to understand what their partner needs to change in order for the relationship to finally work.

When people talk about their relationships, they’re often talking about someone else. What they rarely talk about is themselves.

This is one of the reasons people often find themselves stuck in the same patterns over and over again. Different partner. Different relationship. Different circumstances. Yet somehow the same feelings keep showing up. The same fears. The same disappointments. The same arguments. The same insecurities. They keep arriving at the same emotional destination and convincing themselves that they just haven’t found the right person yet. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes a relationship genuinely isn’t healthy or compatible. But many people never stop long enough to ask a much harder question: What if the relationship isn’t the only thing contributing to my pain?

Why We Focus On Our Partners Instead Of Ourselves

The truth is that focusing on someone else’s behavior is much easier than examining our own.

If the problem is your partner, then the solution feels relatively straightforward. They need to communicate better. They need to become more emotionally available. They need to stop avoiding conflict. They need to be more affectionate. They need to finally understand what you’re asking for. It creates a clear narrative where the source of the problem exists outside of you. It also allows you to maintain the comforting belief that once they change, everything will finally feel better.

The problem is that relationships are rarely that simple.

Most of us enter relationships carrying histories, wounds, fears, insecurities, expectations, and beliefs that existed long before we met our partner. We don’t enter relationships as blank slates. We enter them with years of experiences that shape how we interpret situations, what we fear, what we need, and how we respond when we feel threatened. Yet when conflict arises, we often focus exclusively on what is happening in front of us instead of asking what might also be happening inside of us.

I see this all the time. Someone tells me their partner hasn’t responded to a text for several hours. Objectively, very little has happened. But internally, an entire story has unfolded. Maybe they begin worrying that their partner is losing interest. Maybe they feel rejected. Maybe they become convinced they’re about to be abandoned. Maybe they feel a surge of anxiety that seems completely disproportionate to the situation itself. The delayed text is real. The anxiety is real. But the meaning attached to the delayed text often has far more to do with the person’s history than with the actual event.

That doesn’t mean their feelings aren’t valid. It means their feelings deserve curiosity.

Different Partner, Same Relationship

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That’s because great sex is not primarily about looks.

Looks matter. Physical attraction matters. Bodies matter. But attraction and desire are not the same thing, and many people spend their entire lives confusing the two.

Attraction gets your attention.

Desire keeps it.

The Difference Between Attraction and Desire

Physical attraction is relatively straightforward. You see someone and your brain says yes. You like their face. Their body. Their style. Their energy. There is an immediate pull.

Desire is more complicated.

Desire lives in the realm of imagination, anticipation, fantasy, meaning, vulnerability, and emotion. It is deeply psychological. It is shaped by your history, your attachment patterns, your insecurities, your confidence, your fantasies, and the stories you tell yourself about intimacy.

This is why people can find someone attractive and feel absolutely no sexual chemistry. It’s also why people can become wildly turned on by someone who doesn’t fit their typical type at all.

Sex is never just about what is in front of you. It is also about what is happening inside of you.

The Mind Is the Most Powerful Sex Organ

People often assume pleasure is a physical experience. It’s not. Or at least it’s not only that.

Pleasure is filtered through your emotional state, your stress levels, your self-esteem, your relationship to your body, your sense of safety, your ability to be present, your fantasies, your fears, and your capacity to tolerate vulnerability.

You can have an incredibly attractive partner and struggle to enjoy sex because you’re anxious, distracted, self-conscious, resentful, exhausted, or emotionally disconnected. You can also have an experience that looks relatively ordinary from the outside and find it intensely erotic because of what it means to you psychologically.

The body matters. The mind determines what the body is able to experience.

This is why so many people become frustrated when they approach sex as a technical problem. They keep looking for the right position, the right technique, the right toy, the right body, the right partner, the right trick. Meanwhile, the thing that is actually limiting pleasure is happening entirely inside their own head.

What Actually Creates Sexual Charge

When people talk about incredible sex, they are rarely describing physical mechanics.

They’re describing an experience. They’re describing feeling desired. They’re describing anticipation. They’re describing tension. They’re describing excitement. They’re describing curiosity. They’re describing feeling free enough to stop performing and actually enjoy themselves.

The psychological ingredients of great sex are often surprisingly similar regardless of who you are attracted to.

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Because while breakups are brutally painful, maybe one of the most painful things we go through, they’re also a place where we can learn, grow, and literally become a different person, and often a better one. But we rarely see that story. The breakup narrative is usually extreme pain, pints of ice cream, tears, a yoga retreat or a solo trip to “get back to me,” and then somehow they move on. But it’s not really that. It’s a mess. It’s chaos. It’s irrational. It’s grief. It’s obsession. It’s bargaining. It’s your nervous system trying to survive.

And honestly, the only way to “get back to me” is to do the work of understanding how you weren’t fully you in the first place. Not in a shaming way. In a real way. Nowhere do we really see the intensive version of that. We don’t see people doing deep therapy after a breakup. We don’t see people actually studying themselves. We might see a crying video on Instagram and everyone says “so brave,” but that’s still the same surface-level story. And at this point it’s kind of boring. Not because crying isn’t real, but because it’s not the whole process.

The reality is: a breakup isn’t just the loss of a partner. It’s the loss of yourself, the version of you that existed with them. It’s the loss of a life, the routines, the inside jokes, the shared world. It’s the loss of the future you were building. And it’s the loss of the present, because when you’re with someone for a while, the present is wired to the past. That’s how memory works. If everything in your day-to-day points back to the person you’re no longer with, then for a period of time you lose access to the present too. You’re physically here, but you’re not actually here. That is a FUCK TON of loss. And I’m sure we could name ten more, but I’ll stop there.

And in loss, what happens? New beginnings. Newness. You literally build a new life. A new self. A new reality. And that takes time. Some people will do it by simply looking forward, keeping busy, forcing the next chapter. But if you move forward without looking at how you got there in the first place, you will find yourself back there. You’re not moving on, you’re running from yourself.

To me, if you’re going to go through that much pain, which everyone does, and if you don’t you’re lying or repressed, you might as well use the fuck out of it. Learn the fuck out of that pain. Because otherwise you’re not only wasting it, you’re setting yourself up to relive it. Not because you’re bad or broken, but because unexamined patterns repeat.

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But lately I have found myself becoming increasingly concerned about something I am seeing both inside and outside of therapy. I think many people are processing too much. Not because processing is bad. Not because self-awareness is bad. Not because understanding ourselves is bad. But because at some point processing stops being processing and starts becoming avoidance.

What’s interesting to me is that I think we have arrived here through the exact same mechanism that created the opposite problem generations ago. Historically, people did not talk about anything. Trauma was private. Family dysfunction was private. Mental health struggles were private. You didn’t discuss your childhood, your attachment issues, your nervous system, your grief, or your anxiety. We collectively repressed. We denied. We minimized. We looked away. And we did it largely because we were afraid.

Today we have swung dramatically in the other direction. We talk about trauma constantly. We talk about our wounds. We talk about our attachment styles. We talk about our triggers. We talk about our nervous systems. We talk about healing. We talk about growth. We talk about our feelings. And to be clear, I think this is progress. It is objectively better than pretending none of this exists. But I also think we have created a new problem. We now process for many of the same reasons people used to repress.

Fear.

Years ago people avoided vulnerability by refusing to look inward. Now many people avoid vulnerability by endlessly looking inward. We think we are doing the work because we are talking about the work. We think we are healing because we are thinking about healing. We think we are growing because we are understanding ourselves. But understanding yourself and changing yourself are not the same thing.

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Every relationship is missing something.

Not some relationships. Not unhealthy relationships. Not relationships with the wrong person. Every single relationship.

Every relationship contains a limitation, a mismatch, an incompatibility, an unmet longing, a difference in needs, desires, values, communication styles, priorities, emotional capacities, sexual preferences, lifestyles, or expectations. There is no relationship in which two people fit together perfectly. There is no relationship where every need is met, every desire is fulfilled, and every difference magically disappears because you finally found “your person.”

That person does not exist.

And if you think they do, you’re probably still in love with an idea rather than an actual human being.

The Fairy Tale Nobody Outgrows

Most of us grow up with some version of the same fantasy. We imagine that healthy relationships are the ones where major problems don’t exist. We imagine that compatibility means effortless understanding. We imagine that the right person will naturally know what we need, want what we want, prioritize what we prioritize, and communicate the way we communicate.

Then we get into an actual relationship.

Suddenly we discover that the person we love is different from us. They have different fears, different sensitivities, different coping mechanisms, different histories, different desires, and different ways of making sense of the world. Sometimes those differences are charming. Sometimes they’re interesting. Sometimes they’re deeply attractive.

And sometimes they drive us absolutely fucking insane.

The problem is that most people interpret these moments as evidence that something is wrong. Wrong with the relationship. Wrong with their partner. Wrong with compatibility. Wrong with the future. Wrong with everything.

But differences are not evidence that a relationship is failing. Differences are evidence that two separate human beings are involved.

What Actually Determines Relationship Success

The question is not whether something is missing.

The question is whether you can live with what’s missing.

That’s it.

Not whether you can tolerate it for three months. Not whether you can convince your partner to become someone else. Not whether you can complain about it to your friends and get unanimous agreement that you’re right. Not whether your therapist can help you explain for the hundredth time why your partner should change.

Can you live with it?

Can you live with the fact that your partner is less emotionally expressive than you would like? Can you live with the fact that they need more space than you do? Can you live with the fact that they aren’t ambitious enough, organized enough, adventurous enough, affectionate enough, spontaneous enough, sexual enough, verbal enough, social enough, or whatever enough?

Because every long-term relationship eventually becomes a confrontation with limitation.

Not just your partner’s limitations.

Reality’s limitations.

Why We Get Stuck

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I’ve said it a million times: sex is a skill. Sex is also full of meaning. And everyone has sexual issues—even if you think you don’t. (Honestly, especially if you think you don’t, because that confidence is sometimes just denial wearing a cute outfit.)

Everyone has sexual shame in one way or another. Maybe it’s obvious. Maybe it’s subtle. Maybe it’s “I’m totally fine” but your body says otherwise. And even if it’s only one-eighth of a thing—like a dash—sexual shame has a way of leaking into sex. It makes it inconsistent. Hit or miss. Technically fine but not really satisfying. Or it creates a dynamic where you’re “doing sex” instead of having sex.

And before I even get into the skill piece, we have to name the most annoying truth about sex: it involves another person. Duh. Which means it’s not just about what you bring to the table. It’s also about who you choose, what the dynamic is, and whether the context helps or hurts.

If you’re in a relationship, that can go either way. It can make good sex easier because you have a safe partner to explore with, someone you trust, someone who’s invested. Or it can make good sex harder because your partner has their own sexual stuff, or the relationship has emotional issues that bleed into the bedroom, or you two have built a pattern that’s hard to interrupt.

If you’re single, it can be hard for a different reason: casual sex can be a bit of roulette. You really don’t know what you’re going to get. Sure, you might have a fuck buddy or a few regulars, but even then… chemistry, communication, comfort, timing—none of it is guaranteed.

And accessibility matters too. For example, it’s a lot easier for a gay guy to open Grindr and find someone to have sex with than it is for a straight woman. That’s not a moral statement. It’s logistics. And logistics shape sexual experience more than people want to admit.

So yes: good sex is about your own relationship to your body, desire, shame, communication, and skill. But it’s also about the people you choose, the dynamics you co-create, and the structure around it all.

Which brings me back to the point: sex is a skill. And skills can be learned.

So if you want more consistently good sex—not perfect, not porn, not “every time is mind-blowing,” but sex that actually feels connected, embodied, and satisfying—there are things you can work on. Things you can get better at. Things you can practice. And even if you can’t control every variable (because, again, other people), you can cultivate a level of knowledge and self-trust that makes good sex way more likely.

Ok so let’s get into it. How to be good dat sex? This is one of the reasons why I like focussing on sex because unlike PTSD or Major Depression or anxiety disorders that take years to have an impact - sex is actually something extremely changeable with the right approach.

1. Good sex starts with you.

It starts with the relationship you have to your body, your desire, your eroticism, your curiosity, your turn-ons. Before we even talk about partnered sex, we have to talk about your sex life—with yourself.

Let’s start with the basics (and yes, I’m serious):

Do you know what feels good in your body? Do you masturbate? Do you know how to turn yourself on?Do you know how to get yourself off? Can you touch yourself without rushing, dissociating, or feeling weird about it? All of this matters. A lot.

If you don’t know how to get yourself off—if you don’t enjoy sex with yourself—you’re going to have a limited partnered sex life. Something’s constrained. So if we know that, then honestly… there’s no good reason not to masturbate more.

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Not because the nervous system isn’t real. It is. Not because trauma isn’t real. It is. Not because our bodies matter. They absolutely do.

But because we’ve started using the phrase “nervous system” the way previous generations used words like brain chemistry or DNA. It has become a catch-all explanation for nearly every uncomfortable human experience.

We are anxious? Nervous system.

We are overwhelmed? Nervous system.

We don’t like someone? Nervous system.

We have a bad feeling? Nervous system.

We don’t want to answer a text? Nervous system.

We don’t want to go on a second date? Nervous system.

At some point, “my nervous system is dysregulated” became the modern version of “it’s just how my brain works.” The phrase sounds scientific. It sounds intelligent. It sounds grounded in biology. The problem is that it often explains everything and therefore explains nothing.

And I think it is preventing people from understanding themselves.

The Nervous System Is Real

Let’s start with the obvious.

The nervous system is not some made-up wellness concept.

Your nervous system is an extraordinarily complex network that coordinates sensation, movement, physiological responses, attention, emotion, and survival.

When you perceive a threat, your body changes. Your heart rate changes. Your breathing changes. Your muscles tense. Stress hormones are released. Attention narrows. Your body prepares to respond. This is real.

The autonomic nervous system plays a major role in regulating arousal, stress responses, recovery, and countless physiological processes.

Trauma affects it. Chronic stress affects it. Relationships affect it. Sleep affects it. Exercise affects it. Nutrition affects it. Social isolation affects it.

No serious psychologist, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, or physician would disagree with any of this.

The problem isn’t that people are talking about the nervous system. The problem is how they’re talking about it.

We Have Turned It Into An Identity

Somewhere along the way, nervous system language escaped the lab and entered social media.

As often happens on social media, something nuanced became simplified. Then oversimplified. Then monetized. Now every uncomfortable experience is discussed through the language of regulation and dysregulation.

People talk as though the nervous system is the central explanation for every emotional experience. But emotions are not just nervous system events. Relationships are not just nervous system events. Identity is not just a nervous system event. Meaning is not just a nervous system event. Human beings are more complicated than that.

The irony is that many people who constantly reference the nervous system rarely seem interested in understanding what is actually creating the response.

They stop at the label.

“I’m dysregulated.”

Okay.

Why?

What is your body responding to? What meaning are you assigning to the situation? What fear is being activated? What memory does it connect to? What grief haven’t you processed? What relationship dynamic is being triggered? What belief about yourself is being threatened? What need is not being acknowledged?

These questions are infinitely more interesting than simply declaring yourself dysregulated.

The Check Engine Light Problem

Imagine driving a car. A warning light appears on the dashboard. You point to the light and say, “My car has a warning light.” Okay. But that’s not the actual issue. The warning light isn’t the problem. It’s information about the problem. The same thing is true with nervous system activation.

Your racing heart is information. Your anxiety is information. Your overwhelm is information. Your emotional reactivity is information.

They are signals.

But somewhere along the way we started treating the signal as the entire story. We’ve become obsessed with the warning light while ignoring the engine.

Not Every Uncomfortable Feeling Is Dysregulation

This is where things get particularly messy. Social media has convinced people that discomfort is inherently pathological.

If you’re anxious before a difficult conversation, you’re dysregulated. If you’re nervous before a date, you’re dysregulated. If you’re uncertain about a decision, you’re dysregulated. If you’re grieving a breakup, you’re dysregulated. If you’re confronting a difficult truth about yourself, you’re dysregulated.

Maybe.

Or maybe you’re having a normal human experience. Sometimes anxiety is not a malfunction. It’s anxiety. Sometimes sadness is not dysregulation. It’s sadness.

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People dating are looking for a relationship and fantasizing that it will make the loneliness of single life disappear. Which it does in some ways. But still. Then there are people in relationships thinking they shouldn’t have problems. Thinking they shouldn’t have to change. Thinking their problems are because of their partner. That the relationship is wrong. That they picked the wrong person. That if they just found the right match, all of this discomfort would disappear. As if relationships are supposed to feel easy and if they don’t, something has gone terribly wrong.

I do Q&As a lot on Instagram and almost all the questions revolve around some fear. A fear related to relationships. Honestly, I think it sits at the heart of almost everything we do. Some of it is explicitly conscious. I’m afraid this person is going to leave me. I’m afraid they don’t love me. I’m afraid I’m settling. Other fears are packaged differently. I need to make a certain amount of money so I have value. I need to look a certain way so I feel desirable. I need to achieve enough so I don’t feel worthless. I need to become healed enough, evolved enough, self-aware enough so that I can finally feel secure when I date or when I’m in a relationship. Different stories. Same fear.

Relationships are incredibly difficult. Most relationships are fundamentally hard because they are full of paradoxes. You want emotional intimacy, but sometimes once you have deeper emotional intimacy sexual intimacy changes. You want certainty, but certainty often kills mystery. You want freedom, but too much freedom can feel like abandonment. You want closeness, but too much closeness can feel suffocating. You want honesty until the honesty hurts your feelings. You want reassurance until the reassurance stops working.

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Which is a strange thing to feel when you’re moving into a home you’ve spent the better part of a 5-years searching for, buying, renovating, and obsessing over. If anything, I should be excited. Relieved. Proud. Instead, I feel sad.

This past year was a rough one. My last relationship ended and literally the next day I moved into this apartment. If I’m being honest, I knew things were ending long before they actually ended. I had already started looking for somewhere to land. Somewhere to disappear for a while. Somewhere that could hold me while I figured out what the hell had just happened to my life.

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And yet. Being close to them feels destabilizing.

This is one of the most psychologically confusing dynamics a child can grow up inside. Because there is no clean villain. No obvious cruelty. No single story you can point to and say, that’s what happened.

Instead, it’s love mixed with fear. Care mixed with chaos. Warmth followed by rupture. You never quite know which version of them you’re going to get.

And when the person who is supposed to be your source of safety is also your source of stress, your nervous system doesn’t know what to do with that.

This is where anxiety and ambivalence is born.

Love You Have to Manage

When a parent is both loving and destabilizing, you don’t get to relax into love. You learn to manage it. You become hyper-attuned.

You monitor moods before words. You notice tone shifts. You sense when something is about to go wrong. You anticipate. You placate. You adjust yourself preemptively to keep things steady.

You become who you need to be to maintain connection. Instead of forming a solid sense of self, you form an adaptive one. Your needs become negotiable. Your reactions become suspect. Your anger feels dangerous. Your sadness feels like too much.

You learn that love requires vigilance.

The Gaslighting of “They’re Doing Their Best”

This dynamic becomes even more disorienting when no one names it.

If the adults around you don’t acknowledge how unwell your parent is, you’re left alone with your body’s experience of the dysfunction. The tight chest. The stomach issues. The insomnia. The looping thoughts. The constant scanning for danger.

But without an explanation, children do what children always do. They assume it’s their fault. They take on the unexpressed feelings of the parent.

You internalize the inconsistency. You internalize the shame they should be feeling. You conclude that you’re too sensitive. Too demanding. Too dramatic. You learn to doubt your own perception because the person hurting you is also the person literally responsible for survival.

Not Malicious, Still Harmful

Here’s the part that’s hard to hold.

A parent who “means well” is not necessarily malicious. They may not be trying to hurt you. They may genuinely love you deeply. But intent does not cancel impact. They can love you and still lack the capacity to love you safely. They can care and still be emotionally immature. They can be wounded and still wound you.

In a healthy relationship, harm happens but it’s the exception. It’s a rupture inside a fundamentally stable system. There’s repair. There’s accountability. There’s change. In this dynamic, harm is part of the baseline. The chaos isn’t rare. It’s the atmosphere.

That’s the difference.

The Backstory That Explains But Doesn’t Excuse

Often, this parent had a miserable life. Trauma. Neglect. Abuse. A parent who was even more unwell. They might even be “better” than what they came from. Warmer. More affectionate. Less overtly chaotic. And that context matters. It explains the pattern. But it does not make the impact smaller.

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This is mostly true.

It is also a slightly aggressive way of bypassing the fact that you actually wanted the other person to acknowledge what they did to you. Which you did want. Even if you have stopped admitting it.

I want to make space for both things here. On one side, you have people romanticizing closure as if it is something another person owes you and you should keep waiting around for. On the other side, you have people acting like wanting closure means you are emotionally immature, dependent, or unable to let go. Both positions miss something important about what actually happens when relationships end without resolution.

There is a specific kind of grief that lives in unfinished endings.

You can intellectually understand that someone is not coming back. You can know they lacked the capacity to communicate. You can even accept that the relationship needed to end. And still, some part of you remains caught in the fact that it never actually got acknowledged. That there was no real ending. No moment where both people sat inside reality together and said: yes, this mattered, and yes, it is over.

That absence leaves a psychological imprint.

Why Your Brain Keeps Looping

When something ends badly, especially without explanation, your mind naturally starts looping. You replay conversations. You revisit timelines. You look for the moment things shifted. You wonder what you missed. You imagine alternate outcomes. You build theories about what they were thinking and why they pulled away, disappeared, cheated, stonewalled, ghosted, or emotionally vanished while technically still being there.

People often pathologize this process as obsession. Sometimes it becomes obsessive, yes. But at its core, this is not irrational. The human mind does not tolerate unfinished narratives very well, especially when the narrative involved attachment, intimacy, and emotional investment.

Your brain is trying to complete a story that never got completed.

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What you do when nobody is watching is, in a real sense, your relationship with yourself coming to life. Not the curated version. Not the version you let your partner see. The actual one. What you reach for when there is no audience. What you can let yourself want when there is no one to disappoint or impress. What you fantasize about when you do not have to explain or justify it. The way you turn yourself on. The way you touch yourself. The position you get into in order to orgasm. All of it is hardcore data about who you are and what your inner world looks like.

How You Touch Yourself Is How You Treat Yourself

There is a tendency to treat masturbation as functional. A release. Something to get done quickly so you can move on. Most people I work with admit, when pushed, that their solo sex is rushed, goal-oriented, and entirely focused on getting to orgasm as efficiently as possible. Some people do it in uncomfortable places they refer to as “private.” They often struggle to be present in their body and aren’t exploring anything but a routinized orgasm. They are not paying attention to what feels good. They are running a script, hitting the buttons that work, and finishing. Then they get up and go on with their day. This is not pleasure. This is task completion.

If you are doing this, I want you to consider what it says about how you treat yourself in general. Because the way you have sex with yourself is usually how you treat yourself in the rest of your life. If you are rushing through your own pleasure, you are probably rushing through other things you do for yourself too. If you cannot let yourself slow down and enjoy your own body, you probably struggle to let yourself enjoy other parts of your life. If you treat your own sexual experience as something to manage, complete or avoid - rather than something to inhabit, that pattern is showing up elsewhere.

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I see people completely avoiding the reality of their lives while insisting they’re “doing the work.” I hear people say they’re over things that have clearly shaped them deeply. Someone cuts their parents out of their life and declares themselves healed, as though grief, attachment, rage, longing, and identity can simply be deleted with a boundary and a block button. I see people talk endlessly about “processing patterns” while actively recreating the very dynamics they claim to be integrating. I see people performing wellness while being profoundly disconnected from themselves, their bodies, their relationships, and the actual way they live.

These are all ways we run from ourselves. Some would call it self-abandonment. In many ways, I think it’s the origin of neurosis.

When we avoid ourselves, when we refuse to honestly look at the life we are living, we create a split. A divided self. One part performing consciousness, growth, wellness, healing, insight. Another part unconsciously organizing the entire system around avoidance, fear, control, and protection.

Some people are aware of the split. Others are not. Either way, it affects everything.

That’s the first lie most of us live with: I already know myself.

But try telling that to a culture obsessed with psychological language. We live in a time where people can identify attachment styles, diagnose narcissists, discuss trauma responses, post therapy memes, and quote nervous system jargon all day long while remaining profoundly disconnected from themselves. We are fluent in the language of psychology while being deeply resistant to what real self-awareness actually demands.

Because real awareness is destabilizing.

It costs something.

It often requires grieving the fantasy of who we thought we were. Or grieving the fantasy of who we thought other people were. Or grieving the life we imagined we would have.

Most people do not want truth. They want clarity. They want certainty. They want a narrative that helps them sleep at night.

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When it’s your relationship, conflict doesn’t feel intellectual. It doesn’t feel like “communication.” It feels existential. It feels like panic. Like abandonment. Like injustice. Like your entire body has been hijacked by urgency and dread. You can go from loving someone deeply to genuinely hating them in the span of twenty minutes. Especially when the conflict goes nowhere. Especially when you keep having the same conversation over and over and nothing changes.

And most of the time, conflict goes nowhere productive not because couples don’t love each other, and not even because they lack insight, but because most people are trying to have conflict at a time when they literally do not have the capacity to think clearly.

Most people are attempting to resolve emotionally loaded relational issues while they are physiologically overwhelmed, dysregulated, flooded, exhausted, hungry, overstimulated, sleep deprived, triggered, defensive, dissociated, or emotionally cornered. In other words, they are trying to solve relational problems from a nervous system state that is biologically incompatible with empathy, curiosity, flexibility, patience, and perspective.

Then they wonder why the conversation explodes.

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This is the dynamic I see everywhere: in my clients, in my friends, in myself. You want something; your partner doesn’t give it. You push; they resist. You feel rejected; you withdraw. You tell yourself not to want it anymore. You stop bringing it up.

And before you realize it, the relationship has been reorganized around that wall — their wall, and your withdrawal. Their refusal becomes the architecture of the relationship — and our accommodation becomes the scaffolding that holds it up.

The Co-Creation of a Stale Dynamic

The mistake many of us make is thinking that our partner’s “no” is the defining move. That once the wall is there, the only reasonable response is to stop trying. To retreat. To give up.

But this isn’t true.

The stagnation isn’t just created by their resistance. It’s co-created by our withdrawal. By our choice to stop bringing it up, to stop pushing, to stop standing in the truth of what we want.

When we let their “no” dictate our silence, we hand over our authority. We allow their limits to define us.

That’s why I tell people: their “no” isn’t the end. It isn’t always a red light. Sometimes it’s just a flare from their fear, their anxiety, their history. And your response to that “no” — whether you collapse or hold your ground — shapes the entire future of your connection.

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Yes, there’s truth in it. Yes, there’s a recognizable pattern of pursue-and-retreat that makes couples feel like they’re stuck in a hellish tango. But the way people talk about it now? As if it’s some fixed identity, a character role you’re cast into at birth and condemned to play out forever? That’s not psychology.

Here’s the caricature version you’ll find online:

• Anxious: clingy, needy, desperate for closeness, texting 47 times in a row, forever yearning.

• Avoidant: cold, detached, terrified of intimacy, endlessly pulling away, ghosting, allergic to feelings.

It’s neat, it’s digestible, and it gives everyone a villain to blame. You get to say, “See, it’s not me, I’m just anxious, it’s them — they’re avoidant.” Cue the chorus of friends nodding in recognition because they’ve read the same Instagram carousels.

But that’s not the real story. People aren’t archetypes, and relationships aren’t two-person plays with assigned roles. What actually happens is a dynamic — a push and pull that emerges between two nervous systems. It’s not that you’re “an anxious” or “an avoidant” by nature. It’s that what regulates one partner dysregulates the other.

Blueprints, Not Roles

Let’s get one thing straight: as an infant, you developed an attachment style. As an adult, your romantic relationships don’t repeat your childhood exactly—but they often activate the same roles and reflexes, because intimate relationships pull on the same attachment circuitry.

That doesn’t mean you’re “attached to your partner like they’re your parent.” It means your nervous system is using early learning as a template for what closeness means and what it costs.

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And I don’t just mean relationship in the romantic sense. I mean the dynamic that exists between two people in real time. Sex is not a static act. It is not a fixed set of moves. It is not something you master once and then apply universally to every person. Sex is a living interaction between two nervous systems, two psychologies, two bodies, two histories, and two people attempting to meet each other. Even if you’re strangers.

Which means that good sex requires far more than attraction or chemistry. It requires relational skill.

Sex is a conversation. And like any meaningful conversation, it requires presence, listening, responsiveness, awareness, and the ability to stay connected to yourself while also being attuned to someone else. Most people understand this concept intellectually when it comes to emotional intimacy, but for some reason we stop applying it the moment sex enters the room. Suddenly people think connection should become instinctive, effortless, or magically intuitive without communication. But that isn’t how sex works.

A lot of people are not actually having sex. They are managing anxiety during sex. They are monitoring themselves, performing desirability, trying to look sexy instead of becoming immersed in the experience itself. They are hyperaware of how they sound, how they look, whether they’re pleasing the other person, whether they’re being judged, whether they’re “enough.” And because of this, many people are physically present while psychologically absent.

This is part of why so much sex feels empty even when technically everything appears to be there. The attraction is there. The body is there. The fantasy is there. But the actual person is not fully there. You cannot have deeply connected sex while emotionally dissociating from yourself. Good sex requires the ability to inhabit your body rather than simply display it.

And this is where people get confused. They think sex is primarily about mechanics when in reality sex is fundamentally relational. It’s not just about what someone does to your body. It’s about how they relate to you while they’re doing it. People underestimate how much emotional energy exists inside physical interaction. The way someone touches you, looks at you, pays attention to you, adjusts to you, responds to your reactions, handles awkwardness, expresses desire, tolerates vulnerability, or stays emotionally connected after intimacy all become part of the sexual experience.

You can feel when someone is truly with you. And you can feel when someone is using you to manage themselves.

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Any relationship can work—two artists, an artist and an accountant, mirrors or opposites, even anxious with avoidant—if both people are willing to do the work. But the moment one person stops growing, refuses feedback, or hides behind defensiveness, the system collapses.

We’re trained to look for fit. The real question is: do you have the capacity to adapt?

Compatibility Is Overrated

Compatibility matters, but not in the way we’ve been told. It’s not a checklist of hobbies, personality types, or astrological alignments. It’s not even about having the same values on paper.

Compatibility is about how two people negotiate difference.
How you repair after rupture.
How you hold tension without immediately needing to resolve it.
How you can say, “This hurts,” or “This scares me,” and the other person can stay in the room instead of collapsing or attacking.

Every relationship eventually major conflict. The couples that survive aren’t “perfect matches.” They’re people who learned how to meet each other in the mess.

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