Falling in love with the same flavour of person again and again. Staying too long, or leaving before we can be left. Finding someone steady and feeling, inexplicably, bored. Finding someone unavailable and feeling, inexplicably, alive. Pushing people away at the exact moment they get close enough to matter. Giving too much, too fast, and calling it love when it's closer to panic. Giving nothing and calling it self-sufficiency when it's closer to grief. Choosing the chaotic relationship over the peaceful one, because peace feels like waiting for something to go wrong. Being chosen by someone wonderful and spending the entirety of the relationship waiting to be abandoned by them.

Surely none of it is random. My average reader will have spent long enough on the internet by now to have come across ‘attachment.’ You'll have seen the quizzes, the infographics, the TikToks telling you you're anxiously attached in twelve seconds flat. Some of it is useful. Most of it is the map without the territory. What I want to offer here is something closer to the territory itself.

Origins

Let’s start at the beginning, which is always, in this field, John Bowlby.

In 1969, Bowlby published Attachment, the first of three landmark volumes that would permanently alter how we understand human development1. He was asking what is, in retrospect, a deceptively simple question: why do early relationships with caregivers have such a profound and lasting effect on everything that follows?

What made Bowlby radical for his time, and a bit lonely in his own field for a while, was his insistence on looking at this question from multiple directions at once (psychological, biological, evolutionary). He drew on ethology (the study of animal behaviour), psychoanalysis, and systems theory, arguing that none of these alone was sufficient. Bowlby was attempting something that both Darwin and Freud had gestured towards but never fully achieved: a genuine dialogue between the biological and the psychological. He wanted to show how the inner life of a child, their feelings, their sense of self, their expectations of others, is shaped by the actual, physical, relational world they are born into.

Bowlby’s core insight was that the infant is not a passive recipient of care. The baby is an active participant in a system, a reciprocal, dynamic, biological relationship with a caregiver. And that system, in its earliest form, literally shapes the brain.

What Is Attachment, Actually?

It's worth pausing on the word itself, because "attachment" gets used to mean almost anything these days. People talk about being attached to their phone, to a TV series, to a city they used to live in, to almost anything emotionally involving. That's not what Bowlby meant.

In the technical sense, an attachment relationship is one that serves specific functions. Attachment figures are the people we turn to when we feel threatened or distressed, they are our safe haven. They are also our secure base: the platform from which we feel confident enough to go and explore the world. Not every close relationship is an attachment relationship. Your favourite colleague might matter enormously to you, but you probably don’t find yourself reaching for them when the ground falls away beneath your feet.

What Bowlby identified, and what subsequent researchers have built upon, is that attachment is not merely a psychological preference. It is, as Allan Schore puts it, “the interactive regulation of biological synchronicity between organisms.”2 Dense wording, but it points to something marvellous: when a caregiver and infant are in attunement with each other, when they’re in that face-to-face dance of eye contact, cooing, mirroring, soothing, they are quite literally synchronising their nervous systems. The caregiver is helping to regulate the baby’s internal states: calming arousal, amplifying joy, soothing distress (read Maternal Psychology is Nothing Short of Miraculous for more on this process).

What’s Happening in the Brain

Schore’s contribution to attachment theory is to map what Bowlby described in psychological terms onto the developing brain, and the picture that emerges is pretty extraordinary.

The right hemisphere of the brain is dominant in human infants for the first three years of life. This is the hemisphere that processes emotion, holds the body's internal regulatory states, and carries the implicit, pre-verbal, pre-conscious, sense of who we are in relation to other people. It is through right-brain-to-right-brain communication (the caregiver's face, voice, timing, touch, their gaze) that the earliest attachment experiences are transmitted, received, and encoded.3

At the centre of this is a region called the orbitofrontal cortex, which Schore describes as the ‘senior executive of the emotional brain.’ This is the system that learns to regulate affect, to appraise situations for their emotional significance, to shift flexibly between states. And crucially, it is sculpted by experience during a critical developmental window: roughly ten months to two and a half years. It is built in the fire of early attachment relationships.

So what does all of this actually look like? Think about a mother who is warm, emotionally open, comfortable with her own inner life. When she sits with her baby, she creates a rhythm. The infant cues, she responds. Equilibrium is disturbed, equilibrium is restored. Over and over, a thousand times. She is, in a very real sense, willing to go where the infant leads, emotionally, moment to moment. It is precisely these exchanges, these unremarkable right-brain-to-right-brain exchanges, these daily moments of being met, repeated thousands of times across the first years of life, that wire the infant’s emotional brain for optimal development.

But here is the part I find genuinely astonishing, the part that stops a person in their tracks every time I explain it. The mechanism of soothing is not what most people imagine. We tend to picture a mother swooping in with cheerfulness, distracting the baby, lifting the mood, offering something brighter. That is not what happens in attunement. What actually happens is almost the opposite.

When the infant begins to cry in distress, the attuned mother does not immediately try to pull the baby upward into calm. Instead, she herself descends. Unconsciously, her own nervous system moves to meet the infant’s emotional state, her face softens into something that mirrors the distress, her voice carries the colour of it, her body comes close. She sinks, emotionally, to where the baby is. The infant is met there. Joined. The terrible aloneness of the distress is dissolved, because now there are two people in it. And then, and only then, does she begin to lift. Gradually, her own emotional state begins to move toward regulation, toward ease, toward warmth. And the infant, already attuned to her, follows. Unconsciously, automatically, the baby’s nervous system tracks hers upward, out of the distress and into something more settled.

That is the sequence: descent into meeting, then a shared ascent. It is, I don’t use this word lightly, miraculous. The child is not talked out of their distress. They are accompanied through it. And it is the experience of being accompanied, repeated again and again, that teaches the developing brain that emotional states are not permanent, that distress has an ending, that another person can be a source of regulation rather than threat. The implications are significant. When a caregiver is consistently responsive in this way, not perfectly, but reliably, the orbitofrontal system develops in ways that support emotional flexibility, stress regulation, and what researchers call secure attachment. The child internalises a fundamental assumption: that when things go wrong, they can be set right. That help is available. That connection and repair, after rupture, is possible.

However, when caregiving is inconsistent, frightening, or chronically misattuned, the system develops differently, not defectively, but adaptively, in ways shaped by a more difficult relational environment. This is where the different attachment styles emerge.

The Attachment Styles

Mary Ainsworth, Bowlby’s great collaborator, gave us the empirical frame that transformed his theory into something measurable. Her famous “Strange Situation” (a structured experiment in which a toddler experiences brief separations from and reunions with their caregiver) revealed something important: children's responses are not random expressions of temperament. They are coherent, organised adaptations to the specific relational environment each child has been living in. In other words: attachment styles.4

Secure Attachment

The securely attached child has a caregiver who is generally reliably present and responsive, not perfect (there is no such thing), but available enough that the child has learned that the world is basically safe and relationships are basically trustworthy. When distressed, these children seek comfort, accept it, and return to play. They have what we might call a confident expectation of repair.

Schore frames this elegantly: in the securely attached individual, internal working models “encode an expectation that homeostatic disruptions will be set right.” This is the foundational emotional grammar: things go wrong, and then they get better. I am not alone in my distress.

Anxious (or Ambivalent) Attachment

This style develops when caregiving is inconsistent, sometimes warm and responsive, sometimes distracted, overwhelmed, or emotionally preoccupied. The child cannot predict when the caregiver will be available. So what does an intelligent, adaptive nervous system do with that sort of unpredictability? Turn up the volume. Stay close. Don’t fully self-soothe, because the caregiver’s availability is uncertain and you need to keep the signal running.

Anxiously attached children appear inconsolable during separation and are difficult to soothe on reunion, not because they’re wilful, but because their system has learned that the attachment figure’s reliability is not to be trusted. 'There will not always be repair for my rupture. The strategy is hyperactivation of attachment behaviour. More distress, more proximity-seeking, less independence.

Avoidant Attachment

When caregivers are consistently emotionally unavailable, dismissive of emotional expression, or actively uncomfortable with closeness and need, the child faces a very particular bind. Expressing attachment needs leads to the withdrawal of the very connection being sought. The adaptive strategy here is deactivation: minimise emotional expression, suppress attachment needs, develop an exaggerated self-reliance.

These children look remarkably calm during separation and on reunion. Physiological measures, however, tell a different story. Their stress hormones are just as elevated as other children’s. The distress is there; it has simply been driven underground. The strategy works in one sense (keeps the caregiver from withdrawing further) and fails in another (leaves the child’s internal distress unregulated, unshared).

Disorganised Attachment

This is the most complex and, in therapeutic terms, the most significant pattern to understand. It emerges when the caregiver is simultaneously the source of fear and the source of comfort, as in cases of abuse, severe neglect, or a parent whose own unresolved trauma causes them to behave in frightening or frighteningly helpless ways.

Here the child faces what researchers call ‘fright without solution.’ 5Every instinct says: go to the caregiver. But the caregiver is the threat. The attachment system is activated and simultaneously blocked. There is no coherent strategy available. What you see is behavioural collapse: freezing, contradictory movements, dissociation. The system short-circuits because no response is safe.

Disorganised attachment is consistently associated with the most significant difficulties in adult relationships and mental health and it is more common than the available literature would have you believe.

Internal Working Models

One of Bowlby's most enduring ideas is the internal working model and I think this is worth spending some real time on, because it's where the child development story connects directly to the adult experience of why we do what we do. As the child moves through these early attachment experiences, they are not merely reacting to what happens in the moment, they are building a representational map of how relationships work. How available are others likely to be? Am I the kind of person who deserves care, time, interest, desire, love? Is it safe to show need?

These models, encoded in implicit memory, the kind of memory that lives in the body and the nervous system, not in conscious narrative, become the templates through which we perceive, interpret and navigate all subsequent relationships. They operate beneath awareness. They are not decisions. They are assumptions so deep they feel like reality itself.

Schore makes the point that these models encode not just cognitive expectations but strategies of affect regulation (habitual ways of managing emotional states in relational contexts). The avoidant child who learned to suppress need has an internal working model that says, roughly: “I am on my own with this. Showing it will make things worse.” The anxiously attached child’s model says something like: “I must stay vigilant. I cannot trust that a connection will last.”

And here is what I find myself saying to clients, again and again, because I genuinely believe it: these are not pathologies. They are wisdom. They were brilliantly creative adaptations to, once, intolerable problems. Ingenious ways to navigate specific relational environments those children found themsleves in. The tragedy isn't that the strategies formed. The tragedy is that they don't tend to update themselves automatically once the environment changes.

This is the question. Why now? Why still? Why do I keep doing this? Why, knowing what I know, do I still react this way?

The answer lies in the nature of the unconsicous or, if you prefer, implicit memory. Internal working models are not stored as conscious beliefs they are procedural, embodied, automatic. They are activated not by thinking about the past but by anything in the present that resembles the relational conditions under which they were formed. The smell of a particular anxiety. The sound of silence in a room. A boyfriend’s slight withdrawal. A girlfriend’s raised eyebrow that carries, for a moment, the ghost of a parent’s disapproval.

These models function as guides for future action. The child who learned that need leads to rejection will, as an adult, not consciously decide to be self-sufficient to the point of isolation, they will simply find themselves unable to ask for help, and they may not even know they need it. The person who learned that love is unpredictable will find themselves preoccupied in relationships, reading every small signal for signs of withdrawal, amplifying distress because the system never learned that calm waiting is a viable option.

And here is the rude rub: we are often drawn to relational dynamics that replicate what we know. That is the paradox. In love, we seek to re-find all or some parts of the people to whom we were attached as children. And, simultaneously, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted. Not because we want to suffer, but because familiarity is attractive, it feels like safety, even when it isn’t. The person who grew up walking on eggshells may feel oddly comfortable with a partner who runs hot and cold. It’s familiar. And we will choose a familar hell over an unfamiliar heaven almost every time. The nervous system recognises it. There’s a terrible kind of homecoming in it.

It’s also worth pausing here to bring in a voice that complicates all of this in the most useful ways. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who spent his career making straightforward things productively difficult, would take issue with the very idea that we are seeking a person when we fall in love. For Lacan, what we are seeking is something more fundamental and more elusive: the objet petit a (the object-cause of desire) and his central, rather devastating, insight was that we don’t actually want to find it. Because if we found it, desire itself would end. And so we are drawn, structurally, to people and dynamics that keep desire alive. Meaning, in practice, people who are just out of reach, relationships that are never quite resolved, love that always has a gap at its centre. From this angle, the patterns attachment theory describes are not only the residue of early experience, they are also the expression of something more fundamental in the human condition: the fact that we are beings who are constituted by a lack we cannot name, and who spend our lives reaching for something we cannot quite articulate and would not know what to do with if we found it.

This makes my mind, a religious mind, think immediately of God. Are depictions of God not almost unanimously depictions of the ultimate answer to precisely this human longing? All-loving, all-forgiving, all-knowing, omnipresent: the perfect attachment figure, the perfect secure base? A presence imagined as incapable of abandonment, incapable of misunderstanding, incapable of withdrawal. And yet, at the same time, never fully graspable. God remains pursued, prayed toward, longed for, experienced in flashes, but always somehow beyond complete possession. From this perspective, religion can begin to look less like an escape from desire, than its highest articulation. But I digress. Back to human-human attachment.

Adult Attachment

Mary Main, one of the most important figures in the second generation of attachment research, extended all of this into adulthood through the development of the Adult Attachment Interview (a measure of how adults narrate their own childhood experiences).6 Fascinatingly, it’s not what happened to people that predicts their adult attachment style; it’s the coherence of their account of what happened. People who can speak about their childhood with perspective, nuance, and emotional integration, whether or not that childhood was easy, tend to be securely attached as adults. Those whose narratives are dismissive, confused, or flooded with unprocessed emotion tend to show the adult equivalents of avoidant, anxious, and disorganised attachment. Hence, the utility of undergoing a relational mdoel of psychotherapy.

The adult versions look something like this:

The secure adult can tolerate intimacy and separateness. They can ask for help without it feeling catastrophic. They can be disappointed by a partner without it meaning the relationship is over. They have, as a baseline, the felt sense that they are loveable, that others are basically available, and that repair is possible.

The anxiously attached adult tends to preoccupy with relationships. They may worry excessively about abandonment, seek constant reassurance (‘clinginess’), interpret ambiguity as rejection. They can be exhausting to themselves, and sometimes to their partners. They feel love intensely, often because love has always felt precarious.

The avoidantly attached adult has learned to be independent to a fault. They may intellectualise their inner life, keep emotional distance, feel uncomfortable when partners want more closeness than they can give. They often don’t know they’re lonely. They tend to perform health.

The disorganised adult (often described as unresolved in the literature) may oscillate between desperate closeness and sudden shutdown. They may have experienced relational trauma that makes intimacy simultaneously the thing they most want and the thing they most fear.

And here is the thing no one tells you in the neat typologies: these are not fixed identities. They are patterns, and patterns can shift.

Can They Shift?

The research is now clear, from multiple directions, that the brain retains far more plasticity than we once believed. The orbitofrontal system, Schore is explicit about this, remains capable of experience dependent change well beyond childhood and early development. Attachment patterns can shift, not easily, not quickly, but they can, through new relational experiences that provide something different from what what the internal working model has learned to expect.

This is, at its core, what therapy offers. Not insight alone (though insight matters), but a sustained relational experience in which the implicit system gets to encounter something new: a person who stays present when things get difficult. Who can hold and tolerate your distress, perhaps even share it, without becoming overwhelmed themselves, or withdrawing, or getting defensive. Who notices your pulling away but doesn't punish it. Who repairs ruptures, consistently, with care. Who is, boringly and dependably, there.

The nervous system notices. Slowly, incrementally, and software begins to update.

The language of neuroscience for this is that the right prefrontal cortex learns to modulate limbic activation, that higher-order neural networks develop the capacity to regulate the deeper, faster, older threat responses. My preferred language is simpler: something shifts in the body's felt sense of what is possible in a relationship.

Earned security, the term researchers use for people who develop security in later life despite difficult early attachment histories, is real.7 It is documented and it is not a therapeutic fiction. It requires, almost always, sustained experiences of being genuinely known and held over time. It can happen in a long, committed partnership. In a deep and durable friendship. In a community. And it can happen in therapy.

I’m a fan of re-reading certain authors. I find that in the first encounter, I’m often so overwhelmed with the themes and novel ideas that I miss the smaller, more subtle nuggets of wisdom I pick up on return. Nietzsche is absolutely an author who merits a re-reading or two. And sure enough: “One loves ultimately one’s desires, not the thing desired.” I took this seriously for a moment and found I had some thoughts.

To our detriment, we idealise the people we’re with. We even idealise how they mentally represent us (how we imagine they perceive us). Based on what we know, what we observe, and then, fatally, what we desire, we create imperfect fantastical psychic representations of who they are. And they do the same. Often, when we come into conflict with our ‘person’, we are not really even in direct conflict with their authentic being (with them); we are interpreting and responding to our representations of them, and they, in turn, are responding to their representations of us. We are rarely reacting from an objective perception of the objective reality in front of us. Even in more or less healthy relationships, we begin to confuse our fantasies and representations of the individual’s being with what their actual internal reality is.

When I buy a new outfit, I look forward to showing my husband, and I prematurely relish in his awe at my exquisite taste before I ever consider that he, in fact, has eyes and a mind of his own capable of evaluating aesthetic taste for himself. I don’t consider for a moment the possibility that he may not like my outfit because the fantastic version of him I have mentally developed loves it without question. Therefore, when I wear the outfit and detect a flicker of disapproval in the arching of an eyebrow, I am devastated and betrayed. ‘He is not who I thought he was’ (literally). In reality, he did not betray me; he simply did not precisely conform to my mental representation of him. Disappointment is the cost of faulty expectations.

We cannot encounter another person directly in their interiority. That is the fundamental problem. We encounter them through inference, memory, projection, and hope. What feels even more dangerous is that the representation of the other can become entwined with the representation of the self (this is common in individuals with an anxious attachment style). How we imagine we are seen by them (desired, interesting, attractive, admired) can stabilise our identity and self-perception. The partner functions as a psychic mirror that we have partially designed ourselves. When that mirror reflects back something unflattering or unfamiliar, it is not only the image of them that falters, but something of the sense of self that relied on it does too. The partner’s independent perception is experienced as an act of aggression, even when no harm was intended. Their autonomy feels like abandonment.

There is something so unromantic about it, and yet it is the condition under which love becomes real. Not the elimination of fantasy, but maybe the mourning of it, and at the very least an awareness of it. Loving my husband means to consent, again and again and again, to the rude awakenings that come with his otherness. It’s jarring to allow him his private interior world, his tastes, his moods, his perceptions that do not reliably orbit my needs. But if I manage it, I make room for a stranger who is much more complex, less compliant, and infinitely more alive.

For a marriage to mature in a way that allows for this dual function, the environment must be somewhat guarded (at the very least for the first few years). With each new exposure, with each new vulnerability, the couple tentatively extends its perimeter. Trust is not something we grant all at once, it is tested in increments. Too much exposure too soon collapses what has not yet learned how to successfully bear strain; too much isolation, on the other hand, starves the marriage of air. This process is enlivening but deeply intimate. A marriage cannot pass through the checks and balances to become a true safe haven if external influences, especially those with historical emotional charge, interfere (consciously or unconsciously) with the couple’s ability to establish their own relational ecosystem.

In a lot of relationships, particularly in South and West Asian communities, the very first step a married couple is expected to take is to move in with (typically the wife’s) in-laws. I have seen time and time again how taking this step early on fundamentally disrupts the marital process. Not always, but often enough to merit generalisation. It makes it incredibly hard for a couple to experience both the intimacy that leads to growth and the security that leads to peace.

The Need for Space

A marriage is a sort of relational mirror. It reflects back to us our insecurities, our deficits, our unresolved childhood wounds, and the habitual patterns we unknowingly act out. This is precisely what makes marriage so transformative, it confronts us with the parts of ourselves that we would otherwise never encounter, and it provides a space in which these parts can be investigated and overcome (read From Half to Whole: Why Marriage has to be a Challenge for more on this).

This kind of self-confrontation is a deeply uncomfortable process. It requires an honesty and courage that cannot take place without an uninterrupted back-and-forth engagement between spouses. The problem is observed, then named, then put to the problem bearer, the problem-bearer then must muster the courage to acknowledge and own it, then theorise its origins to understand it and resolve it. It is draining and demands incredible humility. When in-laws are present in the home, in the next room, this process is inherently compromised. Couples will feel the need to either postpone or censor and suppress difficult conversations. Conflict is avoided, or approached in ways that appease the presence of an external audience.

For example, a wife who is trying to express her needs in a marriage may hesitate to do so fully if she feels observed, directly or indirectly, by her husband’s family. A husband who is learning to be emotionally present for his wife may, in moments of difficulty, unconsciously revert to old patterns of withdrawing instead. These are not signs of individual immaturity, rather they are the result of deeply ingrained defences that are difficult to override when a person remains within the psychological sphere of their family of origin. If marriage is to truly function as a space of transformation, a couple must have the space to engage each other directly, without the interference, however subtle or polite, of outside influences (particularly familial). Parents, grand parents, and siblings are the inherited scripts (about love, power, gender, loyalty, and survival) that shaped the very reflexes the couple is now attempting to unlearn and redefine. The couple must be allowed to trigger and be triggered, to hurt and to heal, to rupture and repair, without the weight of parental expectations or familial opinions.

The Need for Emotional Safety

Beyond being a space for growth, marriage is also meant to be a sanctuary. A place of tranquility, emotional safety, and deep rest. The outside world is gruelling. The responsibilities and frustrations of work, finances, and social obligations are fatiguing and a matured marriage offers refuge from those pressures. Living with in-laws, makes it difficult for this sanctuary to fully take shape. The ‘home’ shifts from being an intimate space into a shared one where expectations, obligations, and social dynamics require constant navigation. A simple evening of unwinding after a long day can turn into an experience of being on guard, monitoring behaviour, anticipating comments, and bearing the weight of unspoken expectations. There is an invisible but persistent emotional tension. When a couple faces a challenge, their ability to navigate these moments with genuine vulnerability is hindered.

Conflict within a marriage is natural and necessary, but it requires a contained, private space in which both partners feel safe enough to express their rawest emotions without fear of external judgment or interference. The presence of in-laws can distort this dynamic, leading to avoidance, repression, or the seeking of external validation rather than mutual resolution.

Distorted Loyalties

Something you tend to see in strong marriage is the mutual, unwavering prioritisation of the relationship itself. Each spouse is the other’s primary emotional anchor, the person they immediately seek in times of need. However, this prioritisation is complicated when in-laws are present in the home.

A man who continues to live under the same roof as his parents may struggle, often unconsciously, to fully transition into his role as a partner, friend, and husband first and as a son second. He may find himself caught between the unspoken expectations of his family and the needs of his wife, leading to subtle but persistent relational tensions. A woman who lives with her husband’s parents may feel the weight of expectations regarding how she should behave, how she should contribute to the household, or how she should engage with her in-laws. It is a constant negotiation of roles and introjected expectations rather than an organic and authentic development of her relational identity.

Marriage demands a clear and intentional shift in relational hierarchy. While honouring and respecting parents is undoubtedly important, the marital relationship take precedence. The couple must operate as an attuned unified front, making decisions based primarily on what strengthens their bond rather than what satisfies external expectations. This is exponentially harder to achieve when parents are physically present in the home, as the emotional and psychological pull of historical familial roles can unconsciously override the couple’s ability to establish a new, independent foundation.

Marriage is both a challenge and a refuge, a mirror and a sanctuary. For these dual functions to be fulfilled in an organic manner, the marriage must be allowed a protected space. However, I also recognise the limits of any single perspective. Life is complex and sometimes requires individual and relational sacrifices. This is an undoubtedly a contentious matter in many households.Nevertheless, I have written this as an introductory critical evaluation that will hopefully provoke curiosity in those that are willing to suspend their reflexive judgment.

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Think about that for a moment because belief is transferable. If a child accepts the existence of Santa Claus on parental authority alone, they are equally prepared to accept the quieter, simpler, more damaging stories: that they are lazy, annoying, in the way, too loud, too slow, too much. These judgments, delivered by the same trusted voice, settle just as easily into the architecture of the child’s reality, where they will likely persist long after the magical myths have dissolved. Children do not wake up one day with a new epistemology. They shed fantasies gradually, unevenly, and often without revisiting the premises that made those fantasies possible in the first place.

Even after what might be called the social birth of the individual; when the child leaves the closed epistemic world of the home and enters school, peers, institutions, and other authorities, the architecture doesn’t necessarily reset. It is tested, but not objectively. New information arrives, in droves in fact, but it is not received neutrally. Experience is filtered through what has already been internalised. A glance becomes a judgment, a correction becomes confirmation, exclusion becomes proof. Even ambiguous or unrelated events may be read as evidence in support of an existing self-concept. The child doesn’t ask, Is this true? but rather, How does this fit what I already know about myself? The world appears to agree with them, not because it actually does, but because perception has learned where to look and what to ignore.

This is how harm survives innocence. Harm is not always dramatic, sometimes it is casual; folded into jokes, sighs, eye rolls, labels, tones of impatience. A child is told who they are long before they are capable of arguing otherwise. By the time they acquire the tools for skepticism, the claims have often already hardened into identity. They do not feel like beliefs anymore; they feel like facts.

I think adults like to imagine that children are resilient, that words bounce off them, that love compensates for carelessness. But love doesn’t neutralise authority. If anything, it strengthens it. The more a child depends on you, the more weight your words carry. To speak is to inscribe.

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While there are certainly cases in which those roles are reversed, where the man becomes the leafblower and the woman the leaf, the specific pattern I describe is common enough to merit generalisation. I personally believe that generalisations are not always careless oversimplifications but are actually often useful tools for recognising patterns that hold true more often than they do not. This particular dynamic recurs not because of cultural conditioning alone, but because it reflects differences built deeply into our physiology and emotional architecture. What looks on the surface like a clash of personalities is, in this case, more likely a meeting of two somewhat distinct nervous systems reacting to stress in incompatible ways.

The Male Nervous System

In 85 percent of marriages, the stonewaller (the person who disengages completely to avoid further conflict) is the husband. This is not because of a cultural male deficit; the reason lies more intimately tied to our biological makeup. The male cardiovascular system is much more reactive than that of the female and, importantly, much slower to recover from stress. This particular sex difference appears to have developed from a place of biological benefit.

It’s no secret that our ancestors were restricted to very rigid gender roles, which were necessary to collectively survive a much harsher environment. Females specialised in nurturing children and the relational vulnerabilities within communities, while the males specialised in cooperative hunting, resource finding, and protection. One role requires sustained emotional attunement and the capacity to soothe distress, while the other demands vigilance, endurance, and rapid activation in the face of threat.

Whether you personally regard them as the outcome of evolutionary refinement or the imprint of divine design, these biological differences in stress response persist today. As most mothers will tell you, the amount of milk a mother produces when breastfeeding is largely dependent on how relaxed the mother feels. The calmer and more stable her parasympathetic nervous system, the more the hormone oxytocin is secreted in the brain. Furthermore, during the earliest years of a child’s life, their emotional state is closely attuned to and synchronised with their mother’s, making her capacity for calm a direct regulator of the child’s developing nervous system. So, in more ways than one, it is in a woman’s best interest to be biologically able to quickly soothe herself, quickly activate her parasympathetic nervous system, and quickly calm down after a stressor.

As for men, historically, the opposite response was most advantageous. In an earlier time in human history, a male hunter’s ability to maintain a focused vigilance was a key survival skill. A man whose adrenaline kicked in quicker, whose sympathetic nervous system activated faster, and who did not calm down so quickly was a man more likely to survive. Today, research indicates these differences in stress response and regulation endure and are observable almost everywhere you look.

For instance, when a man and a woman suddenly hear a very loud bang respectively, the man’s heart beats quicker than hers and stays accelerated for longer (Levenson et al., 2005). The same goes for blood pressure. Psychologist Dolf Zillmann found that when male subjects are deliberately treated rudely and abruptly and then told to relax for 20 minutes, their blood pressure initially surges and then remains high long past 20 minutes, seemingly until they are able to retaliate. But when women face the same treatment, they are consistently able to calm down and self-soothe during those 20 minutes. Interestingly, a woman’s blood pressure seems to actually surge again if she is pressured into retaliating.

Marital conflict is a potent and often more emotionally complex stressor than those used in these studies for both men and women. In a relational conflict, a person engages not only the content of the disagreement, but also the tone, the pitch, the expression, the body language, and the implicit threats of rejection, abandonment, or even betrayal. Since stress takes a greater physiological toll on the male, it’s no surprise that men are more likely than women to attempt to avoid it.

This gender difference in stress response also influences what men and women tend to think about when they experience marital conflict. Men have a greater tendency to think negative thoughts that maintain their distress, while women are more likely to think soothing thoughts that help them calm down and be conciliatory. For example, Men often think about how righteous and indignant they feel (”I don’t have to take this”), which tends to lead to contempt or belligerence. Alternatively, they may think about themselves as an innocent victim of their wife’s wrath (”Why is she always blaming me?”), which leads to defensiveness. Because of these differences, most marriages (including healthy ones) follow a pattern of conflict in which the wife, who is inherently better able to handle stress, brings up sensitive issues; to resolve, to repair, to reconnect. The husband, who is not as able to cope with it, will attempt to avoid getting into the subject; to withdraw, to retreat, to isolate.

A Closer Look at The Female Nervous System

The female nervous system, as mentioned, is generally better equipped to recover from emotional arousal and return to a state of relational stability. It is a biological system optimised for connection, cooperation, and care. A woman’s stress response, though certainly intense in the moment, tends to subside more quickly. Her physiology is more adept at re-engaging the parasympathetic nervous system (as opposed to staying activated in a sympathetic nervous system state), allowing her to move from arousal back to communication with relative ease in comparison to her male counterpart.

This faster recovery is often what drives a woman in a relationship to approach and engage with the conflict rather than avoid it. Once the initial emotional wave subsides, her body pushes her back toward resolution. The same oxytocin system that promotes calm during caregiving also motivates repair after rupture. Emotional safety, for her, is achieved not through withdrawal but through re-establishing connection. She cannot fully relax until the social bond feels secure again.

In practice, this often means that after an argument, she is more likely to initiate conversation, to ask, “Can we talk about what just happened?” or to attempt physical closeness as a signal of reconciliation. These efforts are rarely about control, as they are often misunderstood to be; they are about soothing. The problem, of course, is that her partner is often still flooded. While she has already returned to a manageable baseline, his nervous system remains heightened in survival mode. Therefore, when she approaches him in this state, her attempt to connect is misconstrued as provocation. What feels like repair to her, feels like renewed attack to him.

I see this misalignment constantly, in others and in my own marriage. I might send a long text message to my husband after an argument, carefully explaining my feelings and original intentions in an attempt to bring clarity, to foster understanding and empathy. My husband, reading it while still physiologically activated, experiences it as criticism and overload. His further withdrawal or a lack of reply to this message will most likely be understood by me as a lack of the care and empathy my message was intended to produce. I might, as a result, send a second message or a third. I might follow him into his office, wanting to “finish the conversation,” unaware that his body is still in survival mode: his heart rate elevated, his muscles tense, his system still signalling threat. To me, his withdrawal seems cold and punishing; to him, my persistence feels relentless, unmerciful and unsafe. Both of us are acting from genuine motives, guided by biology rather than ill will.

At this point, perhaps you are expecting a cure. I cannot offer one. Every couple’s biological foundation for their specific dynamic is, of course, layered with a set of additional narratives, life scripts, histories, and learned responses. Temperament, attachment history, trauma, culture, and personality all modify how the dance plays out. There is, therefore, no single prescription that fits all. But even without a cure, awareness itself is corrective. To recognise that beneath the conflict are two nervous systems, each striving, in its own way, for safety, is to soften the moral edge of the encounter. Understanding that the other is not an adversary but a body under stress grants the smallest but most essential mercies: empathy, patience, and space. From that recognition, couples can begin to meet each other not in accusation, but in curiosity; less as leaf and leafblower, and more as two people learning the timing of one another’s breath.

References

• Baumeister, R.F. & Leary, M.R., 1995. The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), pp.497–529.

• 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), pp.221–233.

• Gottman, J.M., 1999. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. New York: Crown Publishers.

• Levenson, R.W., Carstensen, L.L. & Gottman, J.M., 1993. Long-term marriage: Age, gender, and satisfaction. Psychology and Aging, 8(2), pp.301–313.

• Levenson, R.W., Carstensen, L.L. & Gottman, J.M., 2005. Physiological bases of emotion: Gender, age, and emotion regulation in long-term marriage. Emotion, 5(1), pp.37–52.

• Taylor, S.E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B.P., Gruenewald, T.L., Gurung, R.A.R. & Updegraff, J.A., 2000. Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107(3), pp.411–429.

• Zillmann, D., 1988. Mood management through communication choices. American Behavioral Scientist, 31(3), pp.327–340.

• Zillmann, D., 1993. Mental control of angry aggression. In Wegner, D.M. & Pennebaker, J.W. (eds.), Handbook of Mental Control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp.370–392.

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I think I agree with this. I don’t think a marriage is built on or defined by its grand photographable moments; I think it is built on whatever rhythm of words is passed back and forth across a couple’s lifetime. Desire dwindles, looks fade, circumstances shift, health waxes and wanes, but conversation stays as the daily ground on which two lives meet.

I also don’t think that what Nietzsche is referring to is simply whether one enjoys talking with the other, but whether one can imagine talking with them endlessly, across the seasons of life. A marriage is a lifelong interaction between two people where every stage requires new words, new listening, and new patience. The partner who sits across from us at breakfast today is not the same person we first kissed. Nor are we. Five years can completely remake an individual; new interests arise, old interests die, historic wounds deepen, identities shift, worldviews expand, passions cool, or unexpected ambitions take root. It is not in the nature of a human being, or anything else for that matter, to remain the same across a lifetime. ‘The only constant is change’, as Heraclitus put it. Therefore, the union of two human beings cannot be a covenant between two fixed selves to preserve an illusion of permanence; it must be a covenant to commit to the continuous process of reintroducing ourselves and learning again who the other has become.

Conversation, as Nietzsche posits, is the bridge across these evolutions. Without good conversation in any relationship, this flux occurs in isolation, and its members grow silently apart, each changing alone, until they no longer recognise one another. But with good conversation, genuine, curious, searching, playful, sometimes difficult, marriage becomes a vessel spacious enough to contain transformation.

This is why I find the question Nietzsche asks so intriguing: can you imagine talking with this person for a lifetime? Can you imagine interest in them lasting a lifetime? Can you imagine rediscovering them again and again? Beauty alters, careers shift, children grow and leave, but the conversation continues.

The phenomenon begins with the birth of an utterly helpless human infant. At birth, we are entirely dependent on our primary caregivers (typically mothers) for every element of our survival and development. Our mothers become immediately responsible for the fulfilment of every single one of our physiological and psychological imminent needs. On the physical side: the provision of food, water, hygiene maintenance, and health maintenance. On the psychological side: company, soothing, touch, affection and praise.

Now this is where it gets complex. Infants have one singular method of communication: to cry/moan. Every single one of their distinct needs is communicated by the infant in exactly the same way to the mother. Mothers, therefore, have to be incredibly intuitive to decipher from body language, facial cues, and perhaps even elements beyond physical awareness, what need their infant requires fulfilment in that particular moment.

What comprises the foundations for this kind of intuition? How does a mother come to possess it? Could a man ever simulate it?

The Maternal Dimension of Female Personality: Agreeableness & Neuroticism

To understand the beauty of the female personality and its maternal dimension, we should first establish how human personality and its sex differences are mapped in the research. It is a fact that, temperamentally, the average man differs from the average woman, and these differences manifest most plainly at the extremes. For example, men are generally more aggressive than women. That is not to say that there are not aggressive women out there who could outmatch and overwhelm a temperamentally average man; however, at the extreme, 100% of the 100 most aggressive people alive are men, and 100% of the 100 least aggressive people alive are women.

A clear expression of these sex differences as it pertains to maternity can be seen with two of the Big Five personality dimensions. Women generally score in the highest percentiles for trait Agreeableness and for trait Neuroticism, while men do not.

Agreeableness

Agreeableness is characterised by elevated levels of compassion and cooperation, making it the core dimension of caregiving in an individual’s personality. It is a willingness to listen, a preference to cooperate, an aversion to conflict, and a curiosity to understand the ‘other’. Agreeableness is a pathway structured for the building and maintenance of deep relational connections. It enables the formation of intimate bonds and the process of emotional attunement in relationships that ultimately become the cornerstones of a healthy functioning society (parent–child, teacher-student, husband-wife, neighbour-neighbour, doctor-patient). Women are, on average, significantly more agreeable than men.

The neurobiological model proposed by Allan Schore offers a fascinating explanation for how this compassion and responsiveness in a woman (the hallmarks of agreeableness) results in profound right‑brain attunement between mother and infant. Schore shows that the infant’s ‘right brain’, the seat of emotional, non‑verbal, and attachment processing, develops through its earliest, finely tuned exchanges: facial expressions, vocal tones, gestures, and touch. These moment‑to‑moment synchronisations (what he calls ‘affective synchrony’) are essential for expanding the infant’s regulatory systems and shaping its emerging self.

When a mother high in agreeableness engages with her baby, delivering warmth, empathy, and gentle responsiveness, these interactions act as a scaffold for the infant’s emotional brain to grow optimally. Her emotional presence helps to create a rhythm of reciprocity: the infant cues, and she intuitively responds, restoring equilibrium. A mother high in agreeableness is willing to go (emotionally)where the infant leads. Over time, these right-brain mediated exchanges form a secure attachment, enabling the infant to self-regulate and feel deeply seen.

Effectively: (1) infant begins to cry in distress, (2) mother observes and unconsciously moves to emotionally sink to the infant’s emotional state and mood to meet it there, (3) infant is met and joined by mother in mutual distress and attunement takes place, (4) mother then begins to lift her own emotional state out of distress, (5) infant, now attuned to mother, unconsciously follows mother into a more positive emotional state.

It is remarkable.

Biologically, this attunement is further facilitated by the distinctive expression of particular hormones in mothers as opposed to fathers. The caregiving roles of mothers and fathers are underpinned by distinct, but complementary, hormonal systems. Mothers, following pregnancy and birth, experience surges in oxytocin and prolactin, hormones that foster nurturing behaviours, affectionate touch, emotional attunement, and verbal and audible affirmations. Oxytocin in the maternal brain produces behaviours like prolonged gazing, soft vocalisations, and soothing contact.

Fathers, meanwhile, also show increases in oxytocin, but their expression is distinct from that of a mother’s. A father’s release of oxytocin is associated with stimulatory contact, cooperative problem solving, and play, enhancing affectionate yet active engagement during interactions. Research even suggests that after childbirth, a father’s oxytocin elevates activity in brain regions tied to reward and empathy, especially when seeing their own child, reflecting a particularly unique neural attunement through affectionate involvement. Additionally, fathers experience a surge in vasopressin, another neuropeptide, which supports more assertive, ambitious, protective behaviour and social communication. Together, these divergent hormonal pathways illustrate how maternal and paternal instincts are naturally shaped, one oriented toward nurturing emotional closeness, the other toward playful bonding and protection.

Neuroticism

Neuroticism is the dimension of personality that refers to an individual’s sensitivity to negative stimuli and emotions. Similarly to trait agreeableness, on average, women score significantly higher in trait neuroticism than their male counterparts. Individuals high in trait neuroticism will pick up on subtle emotional cues that others might miss: a slight shift in tone of voice, a fleeting expression of discomfort, the furrow in a person’s brow, or a sudden change in body posture. The observations will elicit in the individual a heightened emotional state to provoke an emotional response. This neuroticism is also a feature of the maternal dimension of female personality. Women are the sex that birth and immediately care for infants and so a more neurotic temperament proves incredibly useful as a threat detection system.

Aside from infant care, women have a number of good reasons to be more sensitive to negative stimuli than men; for example, women are more physically and sexually vulnerable than men. A woman will identify a change in tone, or a change in body language, or a hazard in the environment, or a hesitation in their significant other, and these will make an emotional impression on her. In a marriage, a woman will bring her partner her concerns (the threats she has detected and her current understanding of them), and the intention and goal of that interaction is to: 1) regulate and resolve the emotional impression left by the trigger, and 2) to gauge the validity of her concern using her husbands assessment.

However, a man’s typical reaction to his partner’s emotive concerns are twofold: (1) to try to contain and minimise her emotional expression of the concern (e.g. stop the crying) but in doing so dismissing and neglecting to address the threat his partner has detected, or (2) immediately problem solve to either negate the threat as valid or remove it entirely from the situation. If a man is able to listen to his partner’s entire description of the issue with curiosity, and let the discussion unfold to the degree that he begins to understand her perspective well enough to offer a solution, then his legitimate assessment of his wife’s concerns will be received by her as genuine comfort.

It is important to note that, like any thorough threat detection system, a woman will produce a number of false positives. She may have picked up on a subtle cue that is does not actually represent a serious concern, or a threat that will not actualise, or perhaps she has interpreted an unusual but harmless gesture as threatening. Women initiate roughly 75% of divorces in the West. The driving factors for this statistic are debated; some choose to conclude that women must simply be troublesome; however, I think it is much more likely the case that, generally, women pick up what’s wrong in a relationship long before men do. Therefore, husbands would do well to listen and facilitate exploration of their wives’ concerns.

To return to how these traits facilitate the maternal dimension of female personality, agreeableness and neuroticism, when nurtured, they result in a functional source of real intuition. Meaning, the majority of the time, an infant communicates a need (by crying monotonously), a mother’s intuition will allow her to correctly identify and fulfil it. However, nobody is infallible. Mothers are simply imperfect human beings living life for the first time. An infant’s desire for physical affection and comfort may easily be mistaken for hunger. No mother is going to be able to accurately identify and immediately fulfil every need communicated correctly every time. Therefore, every child will be left with unmet psychological needs at some point, resulting in what is now referred to as a '‘childhood wound’. The consistency with which a child’s needs are neglected or misinterpreted by their primary caregivers is what creates the blueprint for the development of personality structure and adult attachment styles.

However, I encourage caution against catastrophising the concept of ‘childhood wounding.’ The aim is not to be a ‘perfect mother’ without fault. The British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott famously coined the term ‘Good enough mother’ to describe the kind of caregiving that supports healthy psychological development without requiring perfection. Winnicott observed repeatedly that infants do not benefit from having every need met instantaneously and flawlessly; rather, a mother who is ‘good enough’ initially adapts closely to her infant’s needs, providing reliable comfort, attunement, and care. Over time, however, she allows for small, tolerable frustrations by occasionally misreading a cue or not responding instantly. These minor lapses, far from being harmful, help the infant gradually develop resilience, frustration tolerance, and the ability to self-soothe. In this way, maternal imperfection becomes an essential developmental gift, training the child to exist in a world where others cannot, and will not, always meet their needs on demand. Winnicott’s insight reframes maternal fallibility not as a failing, but as a natural and necessary part of fostering a secure, autonomous, and emotionally capable human being.

Child Narcissism

The catalyst for this hurdle is the inherent narcissistic nature of children. I use narcissism here to describe the failure of children to distinguish the self from external objects, and not in the negative and dysfunctional sense. Children view everything external and environmental through the lens of the self. When mum leaves a cuddle to take a serious phone call, an infant interprets that as a fault of their own: “I did something wrong, mum left me“. When mum and dad burst into an argument in front of an infant, the child interprets that as a fault of their own: “Mum and dad don’t love me or each other anymore, I did something wrong“. Conversely, when mum randomly comes into the toy room smiling to play with their child, the child also interprets that, again, through the lens of the self: “Mum loves me, I’m fun to play with, I’m interesting“.

Our earliest interactions with our primary caregivers, particularly our mothers, sculpt our self-perception, self-esteem, and sense of self-worth. They also inform our blueprint for romantic love. How we operate in adult romantic relationships, particularly during moments of high-stress conflict, is deeply rooted in how conflict, reconciliation, affection, and honesty were approached during childhood. Motherhood is, therefore, not only intuition, it is sacrifice. The momentary satisfaction of escalating a household conflict to get a point across is sacrificed by a mother who wants to model healthy resolution and calm communication. The inherent and existential human yearning for autonomy is sacrificed by mothers to indulge and satisfy the narcissistic temperament of their child. The physical comfort of a mother is sacrificed for nine months prior to and years post childbirth for the physical development of her infant child.

When phrased plainly, it’s a baffling job description. Mothers sacrifice their physical health and personal autonomy to sustain and immediately obey each and every specific command from a self-centred, unempathetic and unforgiving little creature who will offer no gratitude or appreciation. Why do they do it? I can explain it partially as a psychological and physiological phenomenon through hormone changes and instinctual psychological drives. However, the largest part remains intellectually unexplainable to me, suggesting that there is some sort of metaphysical component. Perhaps you now share my fascination with the miracle of motherhood. Pure, unpolluted love. Complete emotional investment. Inexhaustible and unconditional empathy and patience. Magic.

References

• Carter, C.S., 2014. Oxytocin pathways and the evolution of human behaviour. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, pp.17–39.

• Feldman, R., Gordon, I., Schneiderman, I., Weisman, O. and Zagoory-Sharon, O., 2010. Natural variations in maternal and paternal care are associated with systematic changes in oxytocin following parent–infant contact. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 35(8), pp.1133–1141.

• Schore, A.N., 2001. Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22(1-2), pp.7–66.

• Schore, A.N., 2012. The science of the art of psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

• Srivastava, S., John, O.P., Gosling, S.D. and Potter, J., 2003. Development of personality in early and middle adulthood: Set like plaster or persistent change?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(5), pp.1041–1053.

• van Anders, S.M., Goldey, K.L. and Kuo, P.X., 2011. The steroid/peptide theory of social bonds: integrating testosterone and peptide responses for classifying social behavioural contexts. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 36(9), pp.1265–1275.

• Winnicott, D.W., 1965. The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. London: Hogarth Press.

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Unlike friends or romantic partners, we do not choose our siblings. They are assigned to us by fate, biology, or circumstance and yet their impact can be just as defining, if not more so. Whether they preceded us or arrived after us, whether we adore them or ache because of them, siblings often become the most enduring relationships in our lives. They play a peculiar and multifaceted role in shaping our inner worlds and social development. They are both the mirrors and makers of our identity and I believe that, if circumstances and relational dynamics allow it, sibling bonds mature into uniquely gratifying friendships of unparalleled depth. It’s one of life’s rare gifts and I’ve personally had the privilege of living it.

Parallel Foundations

More than just cohabitants of childhood, in developmental psychology siblings are seen as key agents in shaping an individual’s cognitive, emotional, intellectual, and social abilities. Much of this is a result of the unique relational structure that siblings operate within. Unlike the vertical hierarchy of parent-child relationships, sibling relationships are more horizontal. This facilitates a psychologically favourable environment for practising negotiation, competition, empathy, rivalry, and collaboration.

As children, our siblings are the first ‘others’ we bump into repeatedly, sometimes literally. Unlike our parents, who hover above us with authority and structure, siblings occupy a parallel emotional space: equal footing, equal vulnerability, equal competition for the last piece of cake and the first glance of approval. It is with, or in the company of, siblings that we first learn emotional regulation and social role-playing. Through conflict and connection, we learn how to manage frustration, how to share attention, how to joke, how to praise, how to sting, how to apologise (or not). Older siblings may serve as caregivers or mentors, while younger siblings challenge norms and claim attention. These interactions can reinforce or undermine a child's developing self-evaluation. Sibling feedback, whether affirming or critical, often has more lasting emotional resonance than that of peers or sometimes even parents, given the emotional intensity and permanence of the relationship. When my sister told me I was good at something I was more inclined to believe her than anyone else.

It’s impossible to ignore the power of social comparison in this early mix of personality. We naturally begin to measure ourselves in relation to them: who is smarter, funnier, clumsier, more reliable etc. Sometimes these identities get codified early (the "responsible one," the "wild one," the "peacemaker") and they follow us into adulthood, eventually shaping not just how we see ourselves, but how we expect the world to see us too.

Rivals & Mirrors

From a psychoanalytical standpoint, especially within Freudian and post-Freudian traditions, sibling relationships are rich with unconscious conflict and desire. While Freud obsessed in many ways about the Oedipal triangle (child, mother, and father) his later work, which was later refined, acknowledged the ‘sibling complex’ as a formative source of rivalry, jealousy, and identity conflict.

Siblings compete not only for parental love but also for existential recognition. The arrival of a younger sibling, for example, can be experienced as a deep narcissistic injury; displacing the older child from the exclusive maternal gaze and igniting deep feelings of rejection, betrayal or abandonment. Such emotional injuries can often then become buried in the unconscious and resurface in adult relationships, especially in dynamics of envy or chronic competitiveness.

Melanie Klein, building on Freud, viewed siblings as ‘objects’ in the infant’s internal world: figures that become split into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ depending on how they satisfy or frustrate desires. These internalised sibling figures may later influence how we respond to friends, colleagues, and romantic partners, often repeating unresolved sibling dynamics in adult life.

Psychoanalysis also suggests that siblings can serve as ‘mirrored doubles’: external reflections of our own self-image, aspirations, and flaws. This duality of love and rivalry, intimacy and alienation, makes the sibling bond uniquely psychologically loaded. It is a site where narcissism meets recognition, and where identity is forged not in isolation, but in relation.

Psychosocial Anchors

I truly believe that even though sibling relationships are not chosen or come from organic relational interest, they can paradoxically provide the deepest foundation for authentic friendship. They withstand decades of change, family ruptures, geographic separation, diverging life paths, and thus carry a depth of shared history that no later relationship can possibly replicate. Psychosocially, this shared history functions as a narrative anchor, an implicit reminder for each person of where they came from, who they once were, and how far they have come.

As adults, siblings often re-encounter each other anew; outside of the family hierarchy. If early traumas have been processed, or rivalries outgrown, the bond can transform into a friendship of truly profound intimacy. Unlike friends made in adulthood, siblings have watched each other grow through every awkward, painful, or triumphant phase of development. This kind of witnessing cultivates, in my personal opinion, an emotional safety like no other and a sort of unspoken non-verbal understanding that is rare. Where many adult friendships are built on compatibility, sibling friendships are built on the deepest kind of familiarity.

Even when relationships are strained or distant, the phantom presence of a sibling lingers in the background of the psyche. For example, one may still feel the need to outperform, appease, or differentiate from them. Conversely, when relationships are close and mutually supportive, siblings can provide a source of enduring support, a reminder that we are known and accepted across time, mistakes, and reinventions.

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To speak of siblings is to speak of time, memory, identity, and longing. They are witnesses to our formation, rivals for our belonging, and potential best friends in our maturity. Psychologically, they shape our ability to love and to be loved. Psychoanalytically, they haunt and hold unconscious dramas. Psychosocially, they are the original co-constructors of our roles, values, and relational patterns.

When we are lucky, the sibling bond becomes a lifelong sanctuary for the self.

See also:

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References:

• Erikson, E.H., 1950. Childhood and society. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

• Erikson, E.H., 1968. Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

• Festinger, L., 1954. A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), pp.117–140.

• Freud, S., 1923. The ego and the id. Translated from German by J. Strachey, 1961. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

• Freud, S., 1914. On narcissism: An introduction. In: J. Strachey, ed. 1957. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV. London: Hogarth Press, pp.67–102.

• Klein, M., 1952. Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of the infant. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963, 1975. London: Hogarth Press, pp.198–236.

• Klein, M., 1946. Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, pp.99–110.

• Toman, W., 1961. Family constellation: Its effects on personality and social behavior. New York: Springer.

• Dunn, J., 1983. Sibling relationships in early childhood. Child Development, 54(4), pp.787–811.

• Dunn, J., 2002. Sibling relationships. In: P.K. Smith and C.H. Hart, eds. Blackwell handbook of childhood social development. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.223–237.

• Buhrmester, D. and Furman, W., 1990. Perceptions of sibling relationships during middle childhood and adolescence. Child Development, 61(5), pp.1387–1398.

There are few moments as vulnerable as the moment in which we realise we have been seen. To invite it, you must completely relinquish control over how you will be perceived. It is to be laid bare & naked before the judgment of others; it is terrifying. When we invite a person to see us, we are simultaneously also inviting a potential rejection and refusal. Yes, they might meet us with compassion, but they might also turn away in disgust and pity. So much is at risk, and yet we cannot help but reach for it, because to remain forever unseen is to doubt whether we truly exist at all. This is why even in an age of unprecedented digital connection, genuine recognition feels so rare. We’re starved of it. The stakes are so high, and the risk of rejection so great, that we present carefully curated, inauthentic versions of ourselves; digital avatars designed to protect the individual. If these avatars are dismissed or rejected, it isn’t truly us who bears the blow. Our connections have become utterly superficial.

Developmental psychology shows us that this need begins in infancy, when a mother’s attuned response mirrors the child’s, she communicates to them that their felt reality is real. Donald Winnicott revolutionised our understanding of this process through his theories of child development. His work reveals that the way we are seen (or not seen) in infancy and childhood doesn’t merely influence our personality, it determines whether we develop an authentic sense of self or whether we spend our lives performing for the approval of others.

The Mirroring Mother and the Birth of the Self

In the earliest months of life, an infant has no coherent sense of the boundaries of their existence. After nine months of physiological symbiosis with its mother, the psychological symbiosis begins. They do not perceive or believe themselves to be a separate individuals; their psychological world consists entirely of mutual sensations, needs, and fleeting impressions. When the infant looks at their mother’s face, what they see reflected back, her expressions, her responses, becomes their very first understanding of who they are. Winnicott famously wrote, ‘When I look, I am seen, so I exist.’ This mirroring is not passive; it is an active, dynamic exchange in which the mother’s attuned responses (a giggle for the infant’s smirks, a concerned face for their cries) confirm the child’s emotional reality. The infant learns: ‘My feelings exist because they are met.’

However, if the mother is emotionally absent, depressed, or preoccupied, the infant gazes into a void. Instead of seeing their own emotions reflected, they encounter blankness, anxiety, or misattuned responses. A distressed baby whose mother fails to soothe them doesn’t just feel discomfort, they experience a terrifying collapse of meaning. The unmirrored child then internalises a pretty devastating message: ‘What I feel does not matter. I must become what she needs me to be.’ This, according to Winnicott, is the origin of the false self: a defensive adaptation in which the child learns to suppress their spontaneous emotions and desires in exchange for connection.

The ‘Good Enough’ Mother

Winnicott’s famous formulation of the “good enough mother” is often misunderstood as advocating for mediocrity in parenting. In reality, it is an acknowledgment that perfect attunement is neither possible nor desirable. The ‘good enough’ mother provides a shared psychological space in which the infant’s needs are met reliably, but not instantly or flawlessly.

Early on, mothers are in a state of ‘maternal preoccupation.’ They are completely absorbed in her infant’s world, anticipating and fulfilling their needs immediately. But as the child develops, she gradually ‘fails’ in small, manageable ways (she gets momentarily distracted, misinterprets a cue, delays a response etc.) These manageable failures are crucial for development. They teach the infant that frustration is survivable, that the world does not revolve entirely around them, and, most importantly, that relationships can withstand imperfection. A child whose mother is too perfect (never allowing frustration) fails to develop resilience or a sense of separateness and a child whose mother is chronically misattuned or absent learns that their needs are irrelevant or dangerous.

The Fear of Being Seen

The legacy of this early mirroring follows us into adulthood and structures the scaffolding of our relationships. If we were misseen or unseen in infancy, the fear of being seen later in life isn’t simply social anxiety, it becomes existential. To be truly seen by another means risking the exposure of parts of ourselves that have long been hidden, denied, or shaped into palatable versions for survival. We fear being seen not because we’re shy, but because we have learned that exposure can be dangerous. To be visible might mean to be rejected again, not for a performance, but for the very parts we were once told were too much, too needy, too angry, too strange.

This fear explains why many people struggle to tolerate intimacy, even as they crave it. Vulnerability requires a dismantling of the false self, a letting down of the well-rehearsed persona we’ve spent years constructing. It means showing our unguarded inner world to someone else and trusting and hoping that they won’t turn away. For those whose earliest experiences taught them that their authentic self was unwelcome, this can be a truly unbearable process. They may retreat, lash out, dissociate, or default to charm and caretaking as a way to manage the unbearable proximity of being truly perceived.

Social media and digital life only magnify this conflict. The constant performance of identity, the editing and filtering of expression, offers a seductive illusion of being seen. Likes, comments, and followers feel like recognition. But without real presence, real mutuality, and real risk, these interactions often leave us emptier than before. The paradox is that we are never more lonely than when we are being watched but not truly seen.

Perhaps this is the paradox at the core of being human: we are terrified of exposure, yet we wither in invisibility. We want to be known, but only if the knowing is gentle. It is the birthplace of intimacy. And though it may feel perilous, there is no substitute for it. No curated persona, no performance can offer what even a moment of real recognition can.

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References

• Winnicott, D.W., 1960. The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, pp.585-595.

• Winnicott, D.W., 1965. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press.

• Winnicott, D.W., 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.

• Winnicott, D.W., 1975. The False Self. In: D.W. Winnicott, ed. 1975. The Family and Individual Development. London: Tavistock Publications, pp.140-152.

• Winnicott, D.W., 1962. Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In: D.W. Winnicott, ed. 1962. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press, pp.140-152.

• Winnicott, D.W., 1958. The Capacity to Be Alone. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39, pp.416-420.

• Winnicott, D.W., 1964. The Child, the Family, and the Outside World. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

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The function of our unconscious is clear as it is invariably asking the exact same question in every situation: Am I safe? The complications arise when the unconscious attempts to answer that question while having a very hazy awareness of the external world and what’s actually taking place around us. The conscious mind makes logical decisions based on direct information from our environment received through our senses (sight, smell, sound, touch), the unconscious mind does not. As a result, the conscious mind is able to easily and precisely distinguish, for example, our husbands or wives from our parents, or our siblings from our colleagues. The unconscious cannot and instead sorts people into more or less one of six fixed categories: (1) a person to nurture, (2) a person to be nurtured by, (3) a person to mate with, (4) a person to run away from, (5) a person to submit to, or (6) a person to attack. Later on in the cognitive processing the subtitles of ‘neighbour’, ‘cousin’, ‘wife’, ‘mother’ or ‘enemy’ are assigned.

How it all works

To demonstrate the cognitive interplay between both, here is a practical example:

Let’s say someone knocks on your door, you go to answer it and it’s an old friend from work. Your conscious mind will immediately screen this individual using your senses and send the screening to your unconscious mind for scrutiny. The unconscious receives the image and compares it with other stored images, memories, and feelings. Immediately, it produces a conclusion that this human being is not a stranger. A millisecond later there is a second observation—there are no dangerous episodes associated with this image. Another millisecond later—there have been numerous pleasurable episodes associated with this image. A conclusion is reached—this image is of a nurturing safe person. The next thing you know you are already involuntarily moving towards the individual to embrace them because your unconscious has sent a signal to your brainstem and then when operating with your conscious brain you decide to greet her with a “Hi! How are you?”

That entire sequence of events has taken place outside of your awareness in a fraction of a second in your unconscious mind. It’s truly incredible! To make sense of this in the context of marital conflict, let’s take a look at a more marriage-related example.

Let’s say you’re a 35-year-old married woman at home thinking warm loving thoughts about your charming husband and you decide to call him and share your sentiments. You ring his number and his secretary answers to tell you he’s out of office and cannot be reached right now. Your heart sinks. Suddenly the warm loving thoughts disappear entirely and you feel a surge of anxiety and perhaps rage: Where is he? How could he be too busy for me? Your conscious rational mind knows all too well that he’s probably calling a client or eating lunch but another deeper more vulnerable part of you feels abandoned or rejected. You are an intelligent and capable woman and after the simple fact that your husband was not available the first time you rang him, you now feel exactly as vulnerable as perhaps you did when your parents left you alone with an unfamiliar babysitter weekends at a time. Your unconscious mind is frozen in time.

Everything that was, still is

Our unconscious mind has absolutely no sense of linear time. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday do not exist to your unconscious. Everything that was, still is. This can help us to understand why sometimes the feelings we experience within marital conflict seem alarmingly out of proportion to the events that triggered them. The entirety of your emotional history as a human being resides in your unconscious mind including the experiences that hurt us most. We naturally make associations between the details of our negative experiences and the resulting negative emotional responses. Those associations also reside in our unconscious mind. Hence, when a vaguely similar experience occurs in our marriage, the associated emotional response is elicited despite how inappropriate it is in relation to the actual current experience that triggered it.

From my personal and professional experience, this becomes most evident in the way our attachment patterns (formed in early childhood) interact and shape our relationships in adulthood. Psychologist John Bowlby, and later Mary Ainsworth, proposed that our early interactions with caregivers create a relational internal working model—an unconscious blueprint that dictates how we seek, maintain, and respond to intimacy. These theories were investigated in experiments involving observing children react to a temporary separation from their mothers. Three primary attachment styles were observed: Secure attachment, Anxious attachment, and Avoidant attachment. When unresolved attachment wounds are triggered in marriage, our unconscious mind reacts not to the present moment, but to echoes of the past. An anxiously attached individual, shaped by inconsistent caregiving, may experience overwhelming fear at any sign of emotional distance, while an avoidantly attached partner, who learned to equate closeness with intrusion, may instinctively withdraw. Neither response is truly about the current relationship; instead, both are unconscious reenactments of early relational wounds, playing out in ways that feel inevitable but are, in fact, deeply ingrained patterns.

When we enter romantic relationships our unconscious interact with our partner’s unconscious and provoke their attachment patterns. This often creates a dynamic where partners unknowingly trigger each other’s deepest wounds and fears. What we seem to hope for when we attach to someone new is a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, we are seeking in our partner the qualities of who we were attached to as children. On the other hand, we demand that our lover correct the wrongs that this early attachment inflicted upon us. We attempt to return to the past but simultaneously we attempt to undo the past. A particularly gruelling dynamic of this kind is the relationship between an Anxiously attached individual and an Avoidantly attached individual.

Take Sara, an anxiously attached individual whose mother was emotionally inconsistent. At times her mother was loving, present, and affectionate, but at other times she would withdraw and become cold—emotionally distant. Sara felt interchangeably loved and rejected. As a result, Sara developed an unconscious pattern of seeking constant reassurance and closeness in relationships, fearing that any emotional distance meant rejection. When Sara married Adam, she was unconsciously drawn to him, identifying elements of her mother in him and simultaneously seeking in him the stability and emotional presence that her mother didn’t provide.

Adam has an avoidant attachment style. He was raised in a traditional Arab family where emotional expression was stifled, and his father often dismissed his feelings, teaching Adam to contain and suppress his emotions and maintain a sense of independence. For Adam, emotional intimacy feels unfamiliar and suffocating, and closeness is something foreign that may strip him of autonomy. In his marriage to Sara, he finds himself withdrawing when she seeks emotional closeness.

Their dance looks something like this: Sara seeks reassurance that Adam loves her and still wants her (‘Do you love me?’); Adam withdraws feeling a little uncomfortable with emotional intimacy; his distance triggers Sara who reaches closer to Adam to be reassured she is still loved; Adam pulls away further feeling suffocated and controlled; Sara’s deepest fears of rejection are triggered and the cycle continues.

Awareness is their only hope at breaking this feedback loop. The conscious mind’s biggest roles is to moderate the involuntary reactions of the unconscious mind but it cannot do this without awareness. Without a conscious and informed effort to make the contents of your unconscious mind more accessible to you for confrontation and scrutiny, your behavioural and emotional reactions during marital conflict may remain entirely out of your control. It is only when they begin to unpack these unconscious dynamics—through deep introspection, journalling, therapy, and open & honest disclosures—that Sara and Adam can begin to break free from this cycle. With awareness, they can start to understand why they react the way they do and work toward building a relationship that is not driven by the emotional patterns of their childhoods, but by conscious choice and mutual understanding.

References

• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Strange Situation Procedure (SSP). PsycTESTS.

• Bowlby, J. (1978). Attachment theory and its therapeutic implications. Adolescent Psychiatry, 6, 5–33.

• Freud, S. (1915). The Unconscious (Standard Edition, vol. 14, pp. 159-190). London: Hogarth.

On the introspective front (the child’s developing relationship with themselves), it is primarily in the parent-child interactions where we form and modify our self-perception. ‘‘The self comes from the other,’’ maintained Hegel, highlighting that even our most intimate and personal quality, our very own sense of selfhood and identity, does not emerge ‘from within,’ but rather from our dialectic engagement with a social landscape. We draw up the initial drafts of our self-image and all of our assumptions about who we are, what we need, what we’re good at, and what we’re bad at in the context of relationships; namely, the parent-child relationship. How lovable I am, how interesting I am, how funny I am, how intelligent I am, how reliable, how competent etc. That is all information we internalise relationally based on how our parents react to our behaviour.

To demonstrate how the parent-child relationship can inform an aspect of a child’s self-image with a single interaction, here is a scenario:

A child is desperate for a trip to the toy shop and asks their mum repeatedly to take them. The child is unaware that, today, mum had an explosive argument with her sister and that she has 3 assignments overdue at work and that she just found out they are all out of toilet roll at home. Mum snaps in response to the child and yells at the child to ‘Go to your room and leave me alone’. As explained in The Miracle of Motherhood in Developmental Psychology, children are inherently narcissistic and view everything through the lens of the self. It is not in a child’s nature to consider the possibility that what mum just did was not because of me, but because of something else. Thus, what the child concludes in this case is that mum does not want me around, she does not love me, I am unlovable and annoying.

With no follow-up reparative conversation with mum, the child is left alone to affirm and internalise the self-loathing narrative created by the child’s mind. The long-term results of such a self-perception are well documented in research (low self-esteem & sense of self-efficacy, dysfunctional relationships, imposter syndrome etc). Children intrinsically look to parents for the fulfilment of their every need, including their most primitive survival needs. Parents are a primary source of security and safety for children. If you have ever observed a child playing in a public park, you will notice that every 5-15 minutes the child will habitually glance back to wherever their parent is sat. Children are natural explorers and adventurers but even in their most playful state, they require consistent reassurance that, should anything go wrong, their source of safety is nearby. Thus, when a parent shouts, yells, or threatens their own child, what happens in the mind of a child is that their sole source of safety and security has become their immediate source of danger and threat. There is nothing more devastating to a child than that. A child is left alone to doubt their own experience and potentially face the reality that they cannot trust their parent.

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It’s important, at this point, to state that parent-child interactions like the one exemplified above are incredibly common and even the greatest parents are still fallible. What matters most is not always the initial interaction (shouting, yelling etc), but what follows it. The mum in this scenario has an opportunity to not only prevent the internalisation of the child’s negative self-perception, but also to teach her child accountability in the most effective way possible.

The intervention must provide a clear separation between the mother’s behaviour and how she feels about the child:

“I want to apologise to you for how I acted earlier. I shouted at you and that was an overreaction. You do not deserve to be shouted at. I also told you to leave me alone which is hurtful and not how I really feel. I love you so much and I always want you around me. I will learn to express myself in better ways when I am upset.“

The child learns two things here: (1) mum’s outburst was about her and not about me—she still loves me, and (2) It’s good to be accountable for my behaviour and my actions have a direct impact on other people. Children learn accountability from parents who make a point to repair after hurtful or dysfunctional behaviour.

Parents are the most easily accessible models a child has to imitate. Every interaction a child witnesses between adults—whether it’s a conversation with a neighbour, a disagreement with a spouse, or a moment of laughter among friends—becomes a template for how to approach similar situations. However, children are also highly attuned to the inconsistencies they observe between what adults say and do. They look to their parents not just for guidance but also as examples of integrity and consistency. When you consistently model honesty and accountability, it cultivates not only a child’s trust in you, but a deep trust in themselves. Children are really not seeking perfection in their parents; they are seeking authenticity and unconditional love.

First and foremost, let’s expose a hard truth: every relationship, no matter how strong, will experience conflict and rupture. That, in itself, is not a failure; it’s a feature of human connection. We are nobody’s clone and with any difference, conflict is inevitable. The idea that love, parenting, or friendship is about seamless harmony is a fantasy that ignores the reality of our fallible nature. What matters to the success and maintenance of a connection is not whether rupture occurs in the first place—because it always will—but whether there is adequate repair after the fact. That is what separates the surface-level connections from those that transform us forever.

We are a species full to the brim of unconscious contradictions. We shout when we want to make peace. We withdraw when we want to connect. We criticise when we wanted to be supportive. We listen to defend instead of to understand. These missteps pile up until we don’t even know where to begin fixing things, so we do nothing. And “nothing” becomes the default response in too many relationships—pressing on while resentment festers like an undiagnosed infection.

What makes true repair so excruciatingly difficult is that it must involve a moment of complete defencelessness. You cannot apologise and defend yourself simultaneously. You must give the right to self-defence up in that moment. Repair requires you, in a way, to put yourself at the mercy of the person whom you hurt and failed to show mercy unto you. “Im sorry I disrespected your parents, but I only did it because…“ is not an effective apology and it most certainly is not repair. There will always be a place for self-advocacy but it does not belong a conversation dedicated to repairing a rupture caused by your behaviour. “Im sorry I disrespected your parents, I know that hurt you deeply and that you felt disrespected by me personally as a result. I will work on my reactions to make sure I never do that again“ is repair. It is to say to say in one way or another, “I failed you here, and I want to make it right.” But it is not easy to be the villain.

Fundamental attribution error is a cognitive bias the vast majority of us carry into every single relationship. It is the acknowledgement of my complexity and nuance but an inability to offer others the same understanding. I am elaborate and complex but you are simple. If I am in a bad mood and yell at my partner it is a result of a plethora of contextual factors—there was traffic on the way home, I have late assignments due at work etc.— but if my partner is in a bad mood and yells at me it is because they are rude. It is not so much narcissism as it is the default human condition. Repair demands that we breakthrough this cognitive bias in order to truly empathise with the other. This is why relationships are rarely healed at the level needed, and why the majority of couples simply press on in relationships full of repressed resentment and contempt and unresolved issues.

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Relationships—parental, romantic, platonic—are laboratories for growth. They challenge and provoke you and they expose you to your blind spots in ways you could never accomplish on your own (read From Half to Whole: Why Marriage has to be a Challenge for more on this). Relationships challenge you to grow past the flaws you’d otherwise ignore. In any conflict, regardless of who’s in the right or wrong, your partner, friend, or child is showing you something about yourself. You either take the bait and get defensive or simply pause long enough to consider what they see and if it’s worth working on.

This is what makes relationships transformational. They are a delicate but beautiful dance between you and the parts of you that you refuse to acknowledge. They’re not just places where we share love or comfort; they’re crucibles where we refine ourselves. Every rupture is an opportunity to grow, and every repair is an act of returning—not just to each other, but to the best version of ourselves.

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People pleasing

‘People pleaser’ is a cultural term I wrestle with. The psychological origins of the term were initially used to describe the dysfunctional behavioural dynamic of collapsing your boundaries and sacrificing your personal comfort and authenticity due to a fear of rejection or a compulsive need to be liked by others. However, the term has been misunderstood and misrepresented so often in pop-psychology that it is now more often used to berate altruism. I frequently see selfless and generous behaviour dismissed or condemned on social media and individualistic and self-serving behaviour celebrated and encouraged. Is it no longer admirable to put the needs of another over your own the way a mother does to her child? Do we no longer admire the way Prophet Muhammad, Prophet Jesus, and other saints alike would go multiple nights without food so the old and ill could eat? Are we to only contribute to the well-being of others if it comes with no expense to us? Maybe my life is not about me. Maybe the purpose of my life transcends me. Perhaps the potential of what I can achieve is far greater than myself. Altruism has become so distant as if the word itself is not a member of the English language, but part of some other foreign dialect. I would even go so far as to say the concept of altruism and genuine sacrifice is treated with contempt. As if it is ridiculous, naïve, and worthy of mocking to put another person’s needs entirely above your own.

Altruism is admirable, however, that is not to say that self-sacrifice cannot become harmful. The difference between people-pleasing and altruistic selflessness lies in the intention behind the behaviour. Altruism is enacted with the intention of helping another person, for them, with nothing for you to gain from the interaction (other than spiritual or unconscious fulfilment). People-pleasing is a form of unconscious manipulation with the intention of controlling another person’s perception of you. That might sound incredibly malicious but it is often not.

People pleasing is usually (but not always) a coping mechanism with deep and early roots. When facing a threat, our nervous system operates in one of four main states: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Fawn, is when we seek to appease or please the source of the threat. Evolutionarily speaking, fawning would allow us to survive dangerous situations (such as capture or kidnapping) by avoiding conflict and placating the threat. For the average person today, fawning might look like agreeing to go clubbing with friends to avoid loneliness when, in reality, you absolutely despise alcohol and loud music. Unlike altruism, people-pleasing isn’t about the other person at all, it’s about us. We’re not actually trying to please the other person for them. We’re trying to avoid being seen as selfish or boring. We’re trying to avoid a difficult or confrontational conversation. We’re trying to avoid the guilt of saying no. Pleasing behaviours are a form of avoidance and perception control.

Boundaries

Boundaries are the delicate dance that eradicates pleasing behaviour and helps us maintain personal integrity. For example, when a friend shows up unannounced at your home and, while you feel violated and frustrated, you attempt to appear pleased to see them and let them in, you betray yourself. The solution is incredibly liberating, albeit rather uncomfortable. Assert a boundary and maintain integrity.

Often what we think is us asserting a boundary is actually us making a request. A request is what we ask others to do or change, a boundary is what we communicate we will do and change. For example, a request in response to our friend in the example above would sound like this: “Please do not turn up at my home before letting me know of your plans to do so”. A boundary, on the other hand, would sound like this: “If you show up unannounced without letting me know beforehand I’m not going to open the door to let you in.“ Harsh I know, but effective. In the first example, the ball is very much in your friend’s court - they are still in control of how they are able to show up at your home. In the second example, you have communicated what you will (behaviourally and practically) do in response and thus you are in control of their access to your home—a significant difference.

Boundaries are essential for personal integrity and personal integrity is essential not only for fostering healthy self-esteem but also for creating authentic & fulfilling relationships. When we assert our boundaries and act in alignment with our values and beliefs, we affirm our self-worth. Each boundary we assert reinforces a positive self-concept. Boundaries are not about constructing walls to shut others out; they are about being intentional with how you spend your time, energy, body, space, and privacy.

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A lot of modern marriages are initiated on a foundation entirely comprised of infatuation. Strong romantic feelings, while they are a wonderful indicator of compatibility and can nourish a baseline friendship beautifully, are a fragile and tenuous base to build a lifelong commitment over. All marriages, healthy or unhealthy, require a substantial individual investment of time, money, energy, patience, personal leisure etc. There should be a pretty compelling reason for choosing to embark on an investment as substantial as marriage and there should be some serious thought about the investment partner you choose. “What would marriage add to your life in your view?”

2. How does your parents’ marriage impact your view on marriage?

It’s important to be able to gauge what a successful union looks like to each of you. Every relationship is unique and thus we all develop a unique understanding of how they should operate based on the models we were exposed to earlier in our lives. Parent relationship dynamics will tell you how trust is demonstrated to a person, how conflict is approached, how often accountability is taken, how affection is shown etc. Understanding your partner’s blueprint for relationships and understanding your own can help you develop a picture of what your own relationship dynamic may look like and whether there is anything you want to address and alter in that prospective dynamic before it manifests.

3. How do you handle change & the unexpected?

A lot of people don't realise how meticulously they have planned out their life going into marriage. Fantasies, whether realised or not, hold significant influence over how we evaluate our life circumstances and relationships. The reality of life is cruel & painful at worst, and predictable but inconvenient at best. Life is unpredictable & when something happens that interrupts our perfectly curated plan, it can take a toll on the relationship. Death, injury, illness, unemployment - life is relentless in what it will throw at a person. What will ensure the marriage survives the jabs and crosses of life is a tolerance to change. Learn how competent your partner is at operating outside of their comfort zone.

4. Whose career would take precedence, if necessary?

It is not uncommon for career changes to disrupt the relational dynamic of a marriage. One of you may get a job across the country or loss of childcare may require one of you to leave work. Understanding your partner’s priorities, their attachment to their career & their views on breadwinning stops you from being blindsided in the future.

5. Do we have any major secrets we haven't shared yet?

Whether some secrets are to be kept is for both of you to decide, but you risk finding out later. It’s always best to attempt to be entirely truthful and your true authentic self from the genesis of your marriage & to know as it develops that you are fully accepted regardless of your past.

6. Do we agree on the division of labour in our house?

I’ve been old this question is trivial and unnecessary to ask at the start of a marriage. I wholeheartedly disagree. Who does what, and how often, is a perpetual issue for so many couples. The perception of marriage is called into question here. For a lot of people their life satisfaction is evaluated using the 3 weeks in Malaga or The Maldives in the sun with your spouse enjoying a heated pool and a sun bed once a year. In reality, those moments make up—at most—10% of your married life. The rest of the 90% of your life with that person is the greetings at the door when they return from work, the dinner table conversations, the errands you run, the mornings before work getting ready together. If you perfect the small mundane things as you go about chores, you have perfected 90% of your life together. The 10% in the sun is then an earned bonus. The 90% is where the effort and anticipation must be. When chores and mundane responsibilities are an issue it makes a very real and tangible difference on the quality of your life together. It’s important to discuss and perhaps even divide tasks between you (cooking, laundry, finances etc.) as early as possible & develop a forgiving attitude for any slip ups.

7. How will you handle it if we drift apart?

Infatuation fades. Work, kids & life in general can distract you from the ‘couple’ part of being married. The emotional intimacy and the curiosity required to keep a marriage truly romantic requires maintenance. There really is no ‘the one’ with whom infatuation and romantic attraction lasts forever effortlessly the way it does in the Disney films we ingested as children. You choose who the one will be. And when you do, you'll have to make that choice again and again many times throughout your marriage. Love isn't simply a feeling, it's an intentional practice. Maintaining romantic attraction & shared interests becomes hard. Ask ‘how would they approach a reconnect?’ ‘Would you consider couples therapy?’.

Disclaimer:

There are no perfectly correct answers to these questions. However, the answers they provide will allow you to paint a more realistic picture of what a married life with them will look like and what you can practically expect. This is not a complete list and should be used flexibly with further exploration being directed by your and their answers to these questions. The areas of particular interest and the points of tension will become obvious as the conversation develops and evolves.

Marriage aside, suffering is a non-negotiable in life. Therefore, to measure your success or life satisfaction solely in accordance with your level of ‘happiness’ is a foolish mistake. So what is a more honest measure of a life well lived? If you ask Abraham Maslow, it’s self-actualisation. If you ask me, it’s a growth of character in the direction of the divine. Both require self-transcendence. Each of us have a unique set of temperamental obstacles that prevent us from that kind of success. Perhaps for me it’s arrogance, self-doubt, debilitating anxiety, callousness, or a lack of discipline. These are serious problems. Problems capable of determining the limits of a life. Problems you want to resolve. I believe a marriage, interestingly enough, is the most effective place to solve them.

The more relational psychotherapy I practice and the more I reflect on my own marriage, the more I am convinced that what you want in a spouse is someone you can spar with. I don’t mean that in a literal sense but in a psychological sense. You want someone capable of sustained, meaningful opposition. Someone observant. The deluge of problems we bring with us into the interpersonal sphere of a marriage are, more often than not, utterly unknown to us as the problem bearers. We are woefully ignorant to our fears of rejection, our sensitivities to conflict, our avoidance of intimacy, our tendency to withdraw, our insatiable desire for emotional reassurance, our need to be admired, our impatience, stinginess, jealousy etc. Whatever it is we are destined to contend with relationally, is unknown to us until we find ourselves directly in the belly of the beast. Therefore, what we need in a spouse is someone who will: (1) tell us directly and honestly how they experience us and thus what our problems are, and (2) be patient enough to guard us as we solve them.

There’s a well-known Islamic narration by the Prophet Muhammad (s) that states that a person who gets married ‘has completed half of his faith’. Marriage is categorically defined as a way in which an individual can complete their self-development. Fascinating. Why? Because meaningful psychological growth can only occur in the context of relationships. From the genesis of our existence as human beings we are wholly reliant on relationships to develop a sense of self. We are not born as individuals. As Winnicott insisted, an infant cannot be meaningfully understood in isolation; the basic unit is not the baby, but the baby and someone. In early life there is no clear boundary between self and world, no stable ‘I’ that stands apart. What exists instead is a relational field in which continuity, safety, and recognition are provided from the outside. Through being held and mirrored, physically and emotionally, the child slowly acquires a sense of existing, of persisting through time. Only then can a self begin to consolidate.

A self-image then begins to develop. We build and adjust our self-image based on the reactions of our environment (parents, siblings, peers, teachers, colleagues etc) to our behaviour. How lovable I am, how interesting I am, how funny I am, how reliable I am; that is all information that we internalise relationally. Therefore, if we are to change or develop our self-image it only makes sense that the process takes place in the context of a committed relationship.

It is tempting, at this point, to wonder if such development can be accomplished privately, that careful self-reflection, journaling, and introspection might be sufficient substitutes for a committed relationship. And while these practices are often indispensable, they are inherently limited. As Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham demonstrated in their formulation of the Johari Window, self-knowledge is structured across three domains: (1) the things we know, (2) the things we know that we don’t know, and (3) the things we don’t know that we don’t know (blind spots). The contents of this third domain are, by definition, inaccessible to solitary introspection. You cannot reflect on what you are unaware of, these blind spots are revealed only through interpersonal contact, where another person can observe, confront, and name what remains invisible introspectively.

This is precisely where marriage becomes developmentally indispensable. Over time, a spouse becomes an unavoidable witness to how we respond under stress, disappointment, and intimacy. They will observe you closely and then react to any problems they notice. In a simple sense that is how conflicts work: you observe something in someone that brings up a negative response in you, emotional or otherwise, and you attempt to communicate that. When confronted, it’s incredibly easy to miss the gold mine of opportunity for self-development that presents itself in every marital conflict and take the emotional bait. However, if you are smart enough to pause and inquire about what they are seeing that you overlook, you open access to your blind spots. Then, if you are humble & patient enough to consider their reactions to the problem they observed, you can obtain an understanding of a potential solution. Without the participation of your spouse in this process, without their perspective, you are left with half the cognitive power and half the understanding you would otherwise have.

For this reason, the success of a marriage cannot be determined by the absence of conflict (conflict is inevitable), but by how conflict is metabolised. Marital tension is not simply an unfortunate byproduct of intimacy; it is the primary mechanism through which growth becomes possible. Each disagreement carries crucial information about unmet needs, unexamined assumptions, and disowned aspects of the self. When conflict is avoided, defended against, or prematurely resolved, that information is tragically lost. But when it is approached with curiosity rather than contempt, it becomes instructive.

In a successful marriage not only are you are made aware of your many flaws and vices, but you are obligated and motivated to attempt to correct them as a result of your spouse’s refusal to tolerate them. It is the deepest and most intimate form of accountability. But make no mistake, you are not in the boxing ring with your spouse. You are in the ring with the worst possible version of yourself and your spouse is simply in the stands desperately rooting for the best version of you to win.

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References:

• Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari Window: A graphic model of interpersonal awareness. Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development. University of California.

• Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being (2nd ed.). Van Nostrand Reinhold.

• Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. Hogarth Press.

• Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.

Women generally score in the highest percentiles for trait Agreeableness and for trait Neuroticism, while men do not. Agreeableness is characterised by high levels of compassion and cooperation. It is the primary dimension of care for others and is part of the maternal dimension of a woman’s personality development. Agreeableness is what facilitates infant-mother attachment and attunement. Neuroticism is defined as a sensitivity to negative emotion and stimuli, and on average women are significantly more sensitive to negative emotion than their male counterparts. This is also a feature of the maternal dimension - women care for infants and so a more neurotic temperament is incredibly useful and acts as a threat detection system. Aside from infant-care, women have a number of good reasons to be more sensitive to negative stimuli than men; for example, women are more physically and sexually vulnerable than men. A woman will identify a change in tone, or a change in body language, or a hazard in the environment, or a hesitation in their significant other, and these will make an emotional impression on her. In a marriage, a woman will bring a man her concerns (the threats she has detected and her current understanding of them) and the intention and goal of that interaction is to: 1) regulate and resolve the emotional impression left by the trigger, and 2) to gauge the validity of her concern with her husbands assessment.

It is important to note that like any threat detection system, a woman will produce a number of false positives. She may have picked up on a threat that is not actually a concern, or a threat that will not actualise, or perhaps she has interpreted an unusual but harmless gesture as a threat. Women initiate roughly 75% of divorces in the West [1]. The driving factors for this statistic are debated; some conclude women must simply be troublesome, some conclude women are quicker to give up and jump the boat than men. I can neither confirm nor deny either of those claims, however I think it is much more likely the case that, generally, women pick up what’s wrong in a relationship long before men do. A husband would do well to listen and facilitate exploration of his wife’s concerns.

A man’s immediate reaction to his wife’s emotive concerns are twofold: 1) try to contain and minimise her emotional expression of the concern (e.g. stop the crying) but in doing so dismissing and neglecting to address the threat his wife has detected, or 2) immediately problem solve to either negate the threat as valid or remove it entirely from the situation. If a man is able to listen to his wife’s entire description of the issue, with curiosity, and let the discussion unfold to the degree that he begins to understand her perspective well enough to offer a solution, then his legitimate assessment of his wife’s concerns will be received by her as genuine comfort.

It must be realised that this feminine sensitivity to negativity is incredibly useful in a marriage. Wouldn’t you be curious about what she’s seeing that you’re not? If a man is able to engage with his wife in this explorative manner, problems can be clarified before they even manifest themselves. In successful marriages, both husband and wife understand that their most valuable assets are each other’s perspectives.

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1. https://www.asanet.org/wp-content/uploads/savvy/documents/press/pdfs/AM_2015_Rosenfeld_News_Release_FINAL.pdf

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