You cannot understand modern couples without starting out with this:

What we call ‘chemistry’, ‘connection’ or ‘a spark’ is really something else.

It’s two people’s nervous systems locking in on a compatible wound.

As therapists like to say: we marry our unfinished business.

For example:

He was mum’s little tightly managed project, now he will become her tightly managed project.

She was emotionally undernourished and neglected by two financially well off parents, he sees a chance to mask his insecurities by bending over backwards to support her emotionally and financially.

Eventually resentment will grow, because the pain of childhood has been taken into a different system. Not parents – child, but one partner with unrecognized, misunderstood emotional wounds versus one other partner with unrecognized, misunderstood emotional wounds.

The result?

At first there is a lot of performative sex where a hormonal cocktail is unleashed to strengthen the bond neurochemically.

After a few years, can be two, maximum 5 routine creeps in, resentment, the hoped for cure all that the partner seemed to promise, non-verbally, is slipping away.

The modern couple become a team in managing the challenges of the modern day hustle life style.

You know the bingo card that modern life comes with.

Job, place to live, pet, kids, family visits, the right holidays in the sun, maybe some gym goals, some superficial friendships to dress up the void, all sorts of escapism to compensate for the stress of keeping up with the Joneses.

The couple starts to become a limit to each other’s growth.

Allowed:

getting more pay, escapism in front of screens, binge eating, binge drinking if done non-violently, purchasing, perpetually enhancing the house (cocooning)

Not allowed:

A lot of freedom to spend time away with friends or potential threats to the couple, time spent away for work is tolerated.

Outgrowing the partnership.

Healing from the original wound that brought one of the partners to the partnership. If one of the partners outgrows his or her original wounds then the partnership will end.

In the rarest of cases both partners are dedicated to the others full emotional growth, even risking that this might end the partnership.

Most couples are dedicated to just keeping the status quo.

There is no evolution. Limits have been tacitly decided on early on. They rarely go beyond those limits later.

The woman might have had a profile picture of both of them together. This become a profile picture of just her or her and the kids or maybe them as a family, with the dad pretending to have it all together, but quietly suffering.

The man, if the couple is functional enough, becomes a provider.

Eros dies.

Resentment grows.

Emotional cheating creeps in.

At least one of the two partners starts sharing things with colleagues, friends, a therapist, even strangers online or a brief connection at a work event, things they will never share with their partner.

The couple can have truth or can have pretend peace at home.

Most couples choose pretend peace at home.

There is no aliveness.

When you meet these couples they will talk about the management of their unit while meeting friends.

They talk about practical chores they have to do, which are completely irrelevant, but they will talk about them in front of others. Perhaps to signal they are a unit. Perhaps because they can’t switch of the constant managing of being a couple.

Screen time starts taking over eye contact.

Eye contact starts dissapearing.

The woman is on the phone, while the guy is driving.

At home eyes are on screens or on visitors or on chores.

Sexual vibrancy collapses almost entirely.

Sexuality may become a scheduled act.

A way to decompress, to blow off steam, but without presence, without fully seeing the other. A form of mutual masturbation, or worse: one of the partners allowing the other one to masturbate with the help of his or her body, to keep the peace.

A tiny fraction of couples is fully aware of their wounds at the outset or discover them along the way, and recognize the dynamic that brought them together. With enough presence and radical honesty they can opt to choose each other consciously again and again, every day anew.

These couples keep eros alive.

Keeping eros alive is not the same as having regular sex.

Couples can have no fire left and yet have sex three times a week.

Couples can have eros alive and kicking and have sex once a month.

It’s not about the frequency, it’s about sexuality as a sacred act for transformation, not for pacification or sedation.

In the end modern couples become a mix of economic management and cocooning and a anti-dote to the fear of being alone, like really existentially alone.

Eventually the system of the couple becomes a way of existing without having to see one’s true self.

There’s a tacit agreement to focus on the material well-being of the couple, the time management of the schedule, organizing holidays, attending weddings and funerals together, and to allow the other to be mostly blind to what the other really craves. Because a large chunk of the partners deeper emotional needs and desires become a threat to the survival of the couple.

So the couple becomes a veil to not confront one’s self and to have the idea one is not alone.

Ironically, inside loneliness and being unseen and unmet and unmirrored creep in, resentment grows – sometimes this resentment breaks out when the couple gets very drunk and there are some other triggers at play – and this shadow side of the couple is nurtured with escapism.

Buy more furniture.

Repaint the walls.

Upgrade the car.

Move house.

Go on holiday (where they often discover they have nothing to talk about once they don’t have their jobs and daily life as a couple to manage)

Try out new restaurants or new types of food.

She trying to win praise with a new outfit, he trying to win praise with some success at work.

And in the worst cases, both partners carry some drive for vengeance for something in their childhood and they will exact that vengeance on their partner, BUT in such a way that they have plausible deniability.

Example: she comes home happy about a work promotion and wants his praise.

He consciously ignores her joy and her need, but puts a painstakingly cooked dinner in front of her nose and complains that she is late.

He cannot be attacked for ignoring her needs, she is barely conscious of what her real need is, but look how he took care of her: he cooked her dinner, and how does she treat him? She is late yapping about work stuff.

Later she retaliates by having sex, but lying there like a wooden doll.

And afterwards they go over the details of how to get to a barbecue organized by friends and which present to buy for them. And maybe one of the partners already instructs the other one on how to behave at the party. So nothing happens ‘like last time’.

Important to note is that this death of eros, this death of truly lifting each other up, can take many forms.

He might bend over backwards to go grocery shopping for her, while she non-stop uses pscychobabble to supposedly work on his issues and push him to grow, but what is really going on is that she was deeply dissapointed by a weak father figure and is now on a crusade to make her partner feel all his weaknesses, but masked as helping him.

Most people live quiet lives of desperation and only in the back of their mind are they able to akcnowledge that their relationship is stopping them from fully living. Fully living is about embracing fear, transforming pain into something better, and being open to real vulnerability. Even the reflex to fix the other partner, no matter how well-intentioned, is already wrong. One can give the other space to transform, but that’s not the same as lambasting them with healing techniques, practices, routes, strategies.

It would take hundreds of pages to explain why modern couples, even the ones who seem happy and close at social events, are only maintained on the basis that partners do not become fully alive, but here you have it at least as a short intro.

Note also that some partners who are up to their neck into an eros killing relationship will fight you tooth and nail to claim that they are in the happiest, most wonderful of relationships.