When your partner has to be everything
It's 8 p.m. You both get home exhausted. One of you needs to talk about a hard day, about wanting to change careers, about a mother who isn't doing well. The other just wants some peace and quiet, but also to feel admired and desired, and for everyone to be in a good mood for dinner with friends on Saturday. Each of you expects a lot from the other. And each of you feels like you're falling a little short.
If that rings a bell, it may not mean your relationship is in trouble. It may mean you're asking an enormous amount of it. More than any generation before you.
Maybe you're a young couple who moved to a new city for one person's job, and the other doesn't know anyone there yet. Maybe you've been together twenty years, the kids have left home, and suddenly it's just the two of you, with everything you used to pour into parenting now landing on each other.
That isn't a criticism. It's actually rather beautiful: we expect love to help us grow. But it comes at a price, and knowing what that price is helps explain why so many couples who love each other still feel out of breath.
What couples expected then, and what we expect now
In 2014, American psychologist Eli Finkel and his colleagues traced the history of marriage in the United States. They describe three broad eras.
- Until around 1850: a couple to get by. People married mainly to produce, eat, stay safe and pass on a farm or a trade. Love was a bonus.
- From 1850 to the 1960s: a couple to love each other. As work moved to factories and offices, home became the place for affection. People expected tenderness, companionship and family life from a spouse.
- Since the 1960s: a couple to grow. On top of all that, we now want our partner to help us become ourselves, grow, and achieve our dreams.
The old expectations didn't disappear. They stacked up. Today we want a partner who is at once a lover, a friend, a confidant, a career supporter, a fulfilling sexual partner and a co-parent. That isn't more of the same thing: it's something much harder to reach.
Aiming for the summit with little oxygen
Finkel compares a relationship to a mountain. At the bottom are the basic needs: being safe, not being alone. At the top are the most demanding ones: feeling understood, growing, becoming who you want to be. The higher you climb, the thinner the air. To help someone flourish, you have to know them well, understand what matters to them, and stand by them over time. That takes time and energy: that's the oxygen.
And that's exactly what's in short supply. Time-use studies in the United States, including work by sociologist Jeffrey Dew, show that couples spend noticeably less time alone together than they did a few decades ago, especially when they have children. Between work, commutes, kids, screens and fatigue, what's left is often just crumbs.
Hence the feeling of suffocating: aiming higher with less air. And that gap between what you expect and what you give breeds disappointment, even in couples who, objectively, are doing fine.
Finkel calls this the "all-or-nothing" marriage: couples who manage to bring those conditions together can have a richer relationship than ever, while others are more easily disappointed. It's a way of thinking, not a law of nature: it's based on American data, and other researchers have questioned parts of it.
One confidant for everything is a heavy load
Another change concerns the people around us. Many of us have fewer confidants than before, and our partner takes up more and more room: they're the one we turn to for everything. Work worries, anxieties, good news, family arguments, the big questions at midnight.
A 2015 study by Elaine Cheung, Wendi Gardner and Jason Anderson sheds light on this. The researchers asked people who they turned to depending on the emotion: to cheer up when sad, to calm down when anxious, to share good news. The result: with the same number of close people, those who spread these needs across several people were more satisfied with their lives than those who relied on one or two people for everything.
That doesn't mean your partner should matter less. It means your relationship breathes better when it isn't your only resource. A friend to talk work with, a brother to laugh with, a group for a hobby, a coworker to vent to: each one lightens what your partner has to carry. For couples who've moved far from family and friends, or who live apart, building that circle can take a bit more effort. It's worth it.
Duoly, the couples appThe evening date that puts the conversation back at the center.Three ways to give your relationship some air
Finkel and his colleagues suggest three levers. You can combine them.
1. Make better use of the time you have. Tiny things can count. In a 2013 study, Finkel and his team followed 120 married couples for two years. In the second year, half of them spent seven minutes, three times over the year, writing about their latest argument as a neutral, kind outsider would see it. For those couples, relationship quality stopped declining. For the others, it kept dropping. That's twenty-one minutes in a year.
2. Give it a bit more. Time together isn't a luxury, it's the oxygen. And the kind of time matters. Researchers including Arthur Aron have shown that doing new and slightly exciting things together (exploring a place, trying an activity, breaking the routine) brings couples closer than repeating the same pleasant evenings.
3. Ask a bit less of the relationship. This is the least obvious lever. It isn't about giving up on love, but about deciding together that some needs can be met elsewhere: by friends, family, something that's just yours. No couple has to be at the summit on every front at once.
What you can do this week
- Each make a list. Take ten minutes to write down what you expect from your relationship right now. Then compare. A lot of tension comes from expectations that were never said out loud, which your partner couldn't have guessed.
- Pick your priorities for now. Of all that, what really matters to both of you at the moment? A couple with a newborn doesn't have the same priorities as a couple who just moved in together. Priorities can change, and that's normal.
- Share the load where you can. If one of you needs to talk about work at length and the other is worn out by it, a friend or coworker can take part of that on. It isn't betrayal; it's relief.
- Protect one small fixed moment. Twenty minutes every Tuesday that actually happen beat a big night out that keeps getting postponed.
- Say it simply. "I feel like I'm asking a lot of you lately. What would you need?" That sentence often opens a conversation that does you both good.
- Ease off the pressure. A couple that doesn't fill every role isn't a failed couple. Often it's a couple that understood it couldn't, on its own, replace a whole circle of people.
Asking a lot of your relationship isn't a flaw. It's what lets the best relationships go far. The trap is expecting the summit without leaving it any air. A bit of time, a few more people around you, a little gentleness: often, that's enough for the air to come back.
