The One Thing That Makes Modern Relationships Work

The couples I’ve known who are genuinely happy would be absolutely destroyed in most modern therapeutic frameworks.

Photo by aitac on Unsplash

I was having a conversation recently about what I actually think I know about love.

Not what I’ve read.

Not even what I’ve been trained in through different modalities.

But what I think, after coaching for years, after being personally brave in ways most people aren’t, and probably also sometimes selfish in ways most people aren’t either.

Here is what I came up with.

First, the couples I’ve known who are genuinely happy — not online happiness, but the kind where you can feel it in a room — would be absolutely destroyed in most modern therapeutic frameworks.

Codependent, probably. Too merged. Not individuated enough. One of them, has almost certainly given up a version of themselves that all the insta-therapists would have fought hard to preserve. Usually both of them have.

The person they became inside the relationship is not the person they were going in, and that is not a loss. That is the whole point.

We spend enormous amounts of time trying to hold onto ourselves inside big changes. Relationships. Children. Loss. The advice is always some version of: don’t forget who you are. But I’ve never seen someone build a real life with another person by holding onto who they were. The life — the home, the location, the identity — gets made in the giving up. That’s not romantic. That’s just what I’ve observed.

Next, I have noticed that the timing people agonize over doesn’t really matter.

I interviewed a woman on YouTube a few years ago who had been married eleven years. She and her husband had dated on and off for years, culminating in a screaming roadside fight, stayed apart for five years, then found their way back and got married. They had kids and were from my perspective in a really strong connection. But consider how much cultural advice would say they should have never spoken again.

There are also people who marry in a few months or a few weeks of meeting and stay. There’s not a healthy way or a toxic way, only the way that works for the timing and the two people involved. That’s all they are charged with getting right.

What I haven’t ever seen is a pattern that suggests waiting longer produces better outcomes. I bet if you look around your real life you haven’t either.

What I have seen produce worse outcomes: treating solitude as a credential.

There is an entire industry built around becoming so healed, so whole, so free from the need for another person, that you are finally ready to receive love. I find this mostly untrue. Long stretches of deliberate aloneness don’t seem to prepare you for partnership. They train you away from it.

The desire to need someone isn’t something you resolve. It’s something you either let yourself have or you don’t.

Date someone who compliments the person you really are. The real you, the one that exists when no one is watching, not the “better” version you are trying to grow into.

So, if you are an avoidant person, please stop dating anxious people and hoping the right communication rules will fix it. It’s a trap. Find someone who also needs a lot of space. Find someone who can handle a partner who is constantly unsure of the connection.

Similarly, if you need to raise your voice in arguments, find someone who can live with that, not someone you’ll spend years trying not to scare. Your personality is not the problem to be solved. The mismatch is.

Stop trying to become a person you aren’t through connection.

And finally consider what external connections and habits need to be cleaned up if you want a relationship that becomes a family. I’m not making a moral argument. I am not assigning my version of family to you either. I’m making a structural one. The modern day open, porous, highly networked approach to relationships mostly ends in people being alone. You know it does.

Humans expect particular dynamics with our most intimate long term connections. We haven’t changed as much as think we have. To pretend that modern dating rules where online chatting with multiple connections and leaving every door open will result in a family isn’t reality. The couples I really respect, the ones that still touch each other, end up with something fortress-like around their relationship.

What does all of this add up to?

It’s not self-actualization.

The path, as far as I can tell, is narrower and less interesting-sounding than that.

Maybe it’s just acceptance.

Radical, boring, deeply unflattering self-acceptance. Not of your best self. Of your actual one. The one that opens an essay admitting you are selfish sometimes. It’s admitting to being a person who is at times jealous, attaches quickly, needs more than is convenient, moves at the wrong speed, often makes a mess of things in the process of understanding them. That real person.

If you are judging yourself and everyone you meet through rules and fears about what people think and clocks and external advice it probably won’t happen for you.

If you can find someone who accepts you as is — and you can accept them — I think that’s most of it.

I don’t have a better answer. I’ve looked.

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I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.