How Relationships Actually Work

After six and a half years of looking into it, I've got it all figured out. Mostly.

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I. Who am I to Say?

On March 17th, 2016, I decided to become a relationship therapist. It was an incongruous choice, given that I had previously spent seventeen years in software engineering. Computer nerds are not typically known for their social and emotional skills, and I was an undiagnosed autistic to boot.

The decision snuck up on me. I’d left my promising and lucrative career in Big Tech the previous year, looking for something a little closer to the heart of the human experience. I was discussing my options with my own therapist, a pivotal figure in my life, when I blurted out that I thought her job sounded pretty fascinating, but that I didn’t think I’d qualify.

“Why not?” she asked.

“I think maybe I’m too crazy myself to be a therapist?”

“Oh, Gretta,” she sighed. “Just wait until you meet the other people in therapy grad school. You are more than sane enough.”

And so it was decided. I made a short list of grad programs by lunchtime and enrolled in the necessary prerequisite online courses that afternoon. My top choice of program didn’t accept new students for summer quarter, so I started in the fall, and less than a year after that I was working as an intern and seeing clients of my own. Once I make up my mind, I move pretty fast.

I had a new passion, a new special interest, a new central question to investigate.

“How the fuck do adult intimate relationships actually work?”

I really wanted to know.

—

I wanted to know how relationships actually work because it was glaringly evident that it was a hard and important question, and one I hadn’t fully mastered… yet.

By the time I decided to become a therapist, I was in my late thirties and I had a fairly spotty track record in my own relationships. I’d had a lot of fits and starts. I’d made bad predictions, more than once, about which relationships were going to last a long time. I’d unintentionally contributed to the downfall of those relationships. I’d made big bets hinging on those relationships lasting and then had to restructure my life in very costly ways when the relationships ended after all.

I had also made huge improvements in my own relationship skills. Through couples therapy, doing research, and trying various tactics in my own relationships, I’d leveled up a lot. The gains were real, and I could feel them in my current relationship. But I wondered about the bigger picture. How much more was there to learn? How much was specific to me in this particular relationship? Was there a general law into which I could fit the small pieces I’d learned?

I wanted to become an expert, and you can’t do that with N = 1.

—

Today, six and a half years after reorienting my life around the question of how relationship work, I feel a lot closer to being an expert. There are plenty of people who have studied relationships longer, who have gone deeper on one facet or another, who have done much more hands on research than I have. I do not put myself on par with all of them. In a contest for who’s the Expert-est at How Relationships Work, I don’t win.

But I’ve used my six and a half years pretty well. I’ve read widely, I’ve remained curious, I’ve paid close attention to the experiences of my clients, I’ve co-designed experiments with them to see what would happen as we tweaked one thing or another, and I’ve continued to observe the internal experience of being in relationship.

And I feel okay about saying, now, that I think I have the general shape of it. I think I know what all the major moving parts are and how they tend to fit together and how they tend to get bound up. I think I know, at a high level, how the fuck adult intimate relationships actually work, or perhaps more importantly, the major ways they often don’t.

—

So I said that, recently, in an email to some confidants, and one of them wrote back and said: “And also, if you know how intimate relationships work now, I want the 2h lecture. :P”

I might do the lecture too. But I’m starting with this essay.

II. The Moving Parts

Let me start by telling you what the moving parts in a relationship are NOT.

The big pieces are NOT: parenting, money, household chores, sex, the in-laws, and so on. That’s content. That’s the subject matter that people disagree about, but it doesn’t really matter.

The things that really matter are structure and skills. Structure is how the relationship is put together, and skills are the capabilities of the individuals in the relationship.

In a relationship with a sound structure and solid skills, you’re going to figure out who does what household chores and find peace about it, and you’ll sort out the other content too. In a relationship with poor structure, poor skills, or both, you’ll predictably have strife about chores and every other bit of content. The content doesn’t matter, the structure and skills do.

Let’s start with structure.

A. Structure

Structure is how your relationship is built. You can draw diagrams of relationship structure, and therapists often do exactly that. There’s a whole visual language for it that I’m not going to teach you at the moment.

The major aspects of structure I’m going to cover today are:

• Partner selection: who is participating

• Relationship definition: the various ways the partners interact

• Intimacy vs. autonomy: how close they are

• Flexibility: the degree of tolerance for change

1. Partner Selection

Who you pick as your partner, and who picks you, turns out to matter a lot!

Some people think there is exactly one “right person” for each one of us, and you have to do a perfect job on partner selection and find that one right person. Some people think it doesn’t much matter who you pick, they need to meet some minimum set of criteria and then most of the work in building a successful relationship happens after you’re already committed to one another.

It’s tempting, isn’t it, to say, “it’s somewhere in between!” and then posit that there are 10^2 or 10^5 or 10^8 possible compatible partners, and the game is to draw the line in the right place and then pick someone on the correct side of the line.

My own view is that the question of partner selection is entangled with the other aspects of relationship structure. There are around five billion adults on earth right now. You can probably form some kind of successful relationship with at least a billion of them, depending on how you define that relationship and what you are expecting from it. If you have enough distance and low enough expectations, you can make some kind of ongoing win/win deal with a broad swath of humanity!

“But, Gretta, that doesn’t sound like an Adult Intimate Relationship to me!”

Okay! Fair enough. You are allowed to put as many qualifications and requirements on your relationships as you would like. However, every time you get more specific about what you want, the pool of partners with whom you can create a win/win gets smaller.

None of this is big news. You knew this already. My main point here is that choosing a partner, defining what the relationship is, what you expect of your partner, what you have to offer, and how important it is to you to maintain the relationship even in the face of disappointment, are all interconnected.

People often mess this up by overconstraining it. They pick their partner first based on looks, a shared sense of humor, being great in the sack, or wanting to save on rent. They do not closely investigate the definition of the relationship. They don’t check if they fit together in all of the relevant ways and have the materials to create a win/win with each other. And then they feel a lot of distress later when they realize their level of commitment has outstripped the actual level of compatibility in the relationship.

There is more than one way to solve this, but some of them are only available before a relationship starts or in the earliest stages. Once you’re in deep, you have fewer options.

If you’re thinking ahead, you can do the work to figure out who you are, what you like, what you’re prepared to give, what you’re hoping to get, and how a great relationship for you would actually function. You can bring that information with you as you meet new people and date them. You can choose whether to deepen a relationship, back it off, or end it, based on what you learn while you date.

If you are open to many relationships and many possible relationship shapes, you can be somewhat less picky. You can connect with many people, and choose the shape of the relationship according to your actual compatibility with people as you get to know them.

If you are already deep into a committed relationship, you can continuously look more clearly at your existing partner and show yourself more clearly to them, and then renegotiate the terms of your relationship based on what each of you truly has to offer. The renegotiated relationship may look very different from what you initially expected. And if there is no way to negotiate a win/win after all, you can choose to end that relationship despite the commitment.

2. What Even Is a Relationship

In the first sentence of this essay, I used the word relationship. A few paragraphs later, I used the phrase “adult intimate relationship.”

Did you know exactly what I meant?

You didn’t, of course. I didn’t really even try to define my terms, and this is one of those terms that means something different to everyone. But if you noticed that you didn’t know what I meant, and flagged it for later consideration, then you’re off to a good start.

Most of us build up some kind of model of what a relationship is during childhood and early adulthood. We learn by watching the adults in our household, the adults in our community, and eventually by watching our peers and trying it out ourselves. A lot of what we pour into that model is implicit and many of us never notice what was added or that there were other options.

The definition of “relationship” is cultural, at the micro and macro levels. It’s bound up with religion and race and country of origin and sexual orientation and, perhaps most importantly of all, with year of birth. I’m white and I come from Protestants in the midwestern United States, but my notion of “relationship” has a lot more to do with being born in the 1970s than it does with any of those things. If I had been born in the 1930s, the 1890s, or the 1850s I would have had very different expectations.

The modern progressive American notion of “relationship” as the one-stop shop for companionship, householding, co-caregiving, pooling of financial resources, sexual intimacy, and emotional intimacy is fairly new - and it’s a tall order. The cookie-cutter culturally implicit relationship of centuries past, based more on dividing and conquering responsibilities than all of that intimacy stuff, was easier to implement. It had many other problems, such as raging, rampant sexism and heterosexism, but if you could get past all that, more people could probably execute it well.

It’s bad enough that the current cultural relationship template is too demanding. Worse, it’s confusing and vague. Individuals vary a lot in their expectations of the ideal mix of all of those relationship ingredients. One person is expecting constant companionship; the other is expecting to spend half their evenings out with other friends. One person is expecting a lot of sex, the other person can take it or leave it. One person wants monogamy, which itself needs a surprising amount of definition, and the other wants an open relationship. And so on.

And even worse than that, many people are unaware that others have these subtle and not-so-subtle differences in expectation. They build their model of what a “relationship” is, assume they’ve done a pretty good job and gotten the right answer, the same answer as everyone else, and then they barrel ahead and attempt to start a relationship, not realizing the other person has a different model.

Hijinks ensue.

The solution, as you’ve probably guessed, is to make the implicit explicit, and then figure out what to do with all the disparities you discover along the way. That’s where the skills are going to come in, but we’ll get to that later.

3. Intimacy vs. Autonomy

There’s a balancing act in every relationship between intimacy and autonomy. You can think of two people in a diagram as overlapping circles, like in a Venn diagram. The overlapping part is the intimacy: what you share. The non-overlapping parts are the autonomy: what you keep to yourself. A relationship with too much overlap can feel stifling - everything is a committee decision, there’s no privacy, no room to maneuver. But a relationship with too little overlap is barely a relationship at all - it feels lonely and cold, there’s not enough support or acceptance.

Getting that balance right is tricky. It doesn’t help that you probably disagree about how much overlap you want, and that the amount of overlap each of you wants might shift over time.

There’s no correct answer to point to here. The “right answer” varies. Successful couples are able to be flexible and renegotiate this balance over and over again as circumstances shift. They’re able to risk letting each other in even when they’re otherwise inclined toward more separation. They’re able to tolerate letting go a bit even when they’re otherwise inclined toward more overlap. They can tolerate fluctuations - and they’re clear about their own limits, beyond which flexing no longer works.

4. Flexibility with Change

The only constant in life is change, as we know. Intimate relationships typically have a lot of touchpoints, a complex interface, many interlocking parts. We can’t just negotiate that interface once and expect it to work forever. Circumstances change, our bodies change, our capabilities change, we learn and grow, and as a result we need to renegotiate our relationships over and over. What worked before stops working and we need to find a new way forward. Successful partnerships expect and make space for renegotiation.

It helps, I think, to have a shared notion of commitment. How much value do you place on stability, on longevity, and on keeping the same partnership and maybe family unit intact? The more true value you derive from stability, the more you can afford to flex on everything else, the more you can tolerate dips and downturns in your day to day experience of the relationship. And similarly, the more value your partner places on stability, the more grace there will be for you to falter.

In this as in all other things, a high degree of skill will help you flex successfully when flexing is appropriate, and end the relationship when it’s not.

These four aspects of structure together define the intrinsic stability and compatibility of the relationship. You can trade them off with each other: you can find the closest match in the entire world to you, who wants almost exactly what you want, and then have very little work to do in defining the relationship or managing intimacy or flexing, because you so fundamentally want the same things. Or, you can find someone quite different from you who lights you up but drives you crazy at the same time, and then work very hard to continuously negotiate and define the relationship and its closeness. Any combination can work, but pairing with partners more different from you will require more skill or more tolerance for relationships coming and going. It’s your life: choose your own adventure and enjoy the ride!

B. Skills

Skills are the capabilities of the individuals within the relationship. The more differences you have with your partner - and everyone has some, no two people are actually identical - the more skill you will need to be happy in your relationship together.

The bad news about relationship skills is that most of us didn’t learn them as kids. Depending on what happened to us when we were small, we might have even learned anti-patterns that make relationships worse. The good news is, skills can be learned, and they’re portable. When you learn how to do these things with your partner, they’ll also help you with the rest of your family, your friends, and your co-workers.

There are six broad categories of skills I’m going to highlight today:

• emotion regulation: what happens when someone gets upset

• self definition: knowing who you are

• tolerating difference and disappointment: knowing who your partner is

• making decisions

• repair: how to heal an emotional injury

• co-creation: building something together

I’ve listed these roughly in order. They get harder as they go along, and it doesn’t usually work to invest in one that’s more advanced when you’re still shaky on the earlier ones.

1. How Emotion Regulation is Managed

We’re humans, we occupy human bodies, and we have ancient and poorly-tuned nervous systems. When we feel threatened, our bodies shift physiological states. Unfortunately, our physiology is tuned more to keep us alive in the presence of predators than it is to help us navigate complex human interactions and emotions. What works when evading an angry hippo is catastrophic when dealing with an angry partner.

Dysregulation is a beast.

A lot of us have beliefs or assumptions about what is supposed to happen when we get upset. For example, a lot of people believe that if you’re upset because you’re in an argument with your partner, the best and maybe only way to get less upset is to win the fight, for your partner to admit that you were right and apologize. If the admission and the apology don’t appear on cue, you get even more upset, until your own nervous system gets so wrung out that you collapse.

Other people believe that if you’re upset, the best and maybe only way to get less upset is to close yourself in a dark and quiet room and maybe even go to sleep. If your partner tries to prevent you from leaving, you get even more upset, until your own nervous system gets so wrung out that you lash out at them.

This is the closest I’m going to come to talking about attachment theory in this article. It’s a whole topic, it’s gotten tremendous attention the last couple of decades, and I don’t particularly feel like hashing it all out again right here.

My main point for the moment is that humans get dysregulated, and we need some kind of functional system for getting regulated again. Ideally, we’re aware of our state of regulation, we’re aware of what’s likely to steer us back to a state of calm, and how to navigate smoothly around unnecessary and unproductive triggering experiences. We know how to talk about all of this at a high level with our partners and collaborate on keeping everyone as well taken care of as possible.

2. Self-Definition

A relationship is made up of individuals, and the more well-defined the individuals are, the more potential the relationship has.

By well-defined, I mean: knowing what you think, feel, and desire, having your own individual goals, and being able to express what you think, feel, and desire in a clear and respectful way. It also means being able to keep track of which thoughts, feelings, and desires are yours, even if you are close to someone else who is being loud about their own thoughts, feelings and desires. It means being comfortable being alone and managing your own feelings, at least some of the time.

People who lack self-definition have trouble accessing their own point of view or forming preferences. They may get overwhelmed easily in the presence of someone else with a strong opinion or a lot of big feelings. They may rely on others to help them manage their own feelings, or need others to tell them what to do.

I want to make room here for people to have a relatively smaller set of preferences and goals. It is not a virtue to have a strongly held opinion on every single issue. It is okay not to care or to leave some things up to others. It is even okay, according to me, to choose to hand some piece of your autonomy over to another human and allow their will to supplant yours in that domain.

However, if you take your innate drive for autonomy and repress it, pretend like it’s not there, abdicate on too many decisions and defer at every turn, then there’s no “self” left in you, and you are not bringing anything to the relationship. You’ve hollowed yourself out and let the other person overwrite you. And outside of a few very specific kinky power exchange scenarios, that is probably not what either one of you had in mind.

Figuring out what you want and how much you want it is vital. It’s scary to self-define. Deferring feels easier in the moment. If you stand up for what you want, that might expose an incompatibility between you and your partner, maybe even a relationship-threatening one. But it’s worth it, because if you keep your thoughts, feelings, and desires hidden from yourself and/or your partner, you will end up with a small and bitter life.

3. Tolerating Difference and Disappointment

Self-definition is about knowing yourself; tolerating difference is about knowing and accepting your partner, even though they are different from you.

We have a dazzling array of tactics for blinding ourselves to what our partners think, feel, and desire. We don’t ask, we don’t listen, we make assumptions, we disbelieve, we dismiss, we defend, we argue, we reject. We work very hard to maintain the version of our partner that lives in our heads and is more to our liking, and then we resent our actual partner for behaving differently than we expected.

Tolerating difference means letting go of all of those tactics and seeing our partners clearly, taking them at face value, letting past performance predict future results, and accepting what we see. It means choosing to remain in relationship with them anyway, even once we’ve seen clearly - or maybe it means choosing to acknowledge an incompatibility and letting them go.

Tolerating difference means setting your expectations of your partner accurately, based on who they really are and what they are really capable of.

One reason it’s so hard to tolerate difference is because with difference comes disappointment.

Disappointment is a natural and inevitable part of relationships.

(Side note: can you believe people pay me a lot of money to tell them this stuff? They come in wanting peace, harmony, happiness, joy, and fulfillment, and I send them out with “Life is pain!”)

It’s true, though. No matter how hard we work to communicate clearly, to make accurate predictions, to have accurate expectations, we will still disappoint each other sometimes. And if we’re not great at the communication, prediction, and expectation parts, we disappoint each other quite a lot.

A lot of people believe that disappointment is a huge red flag, that it should not exist, and that any hint of it must be exterminated with extreme prejudice. For them, disappointment is always linked to shame. The logic, such as it is, goes like this: “If I disappoint my partner, it’s because I’m not good enough. Not being good enough is intolerable, therefore I must not have disappointed my partner! And if they imply I have disappointed them, I will make sure they know they are wrong!”

There’s an alternative. If you can decouple disappointment from shame, and make disappointment okay, then you can be a worthwhile human being and disappoint your partner at the same time.

This shows up at every turn, in every facet of relationships, at every scale. Writ small: one wants to watch the latest episode of a show together, but the other is exhausted from a long day of work. Writ large: one wants to have a third child, but the other is already stretched to the limit and isn’t on board. The one who wants is disappointed. Can the couple tolerate the existence of that disappointment? Can it be okay for the wanter to feel sad, without it being a referendum on their partner’s worth as a human and the quality of their love for the wanter?

4. Making Decisions

It’s all well and good for each person in the relationship to know what they want and to understand and tolerate that their partner wants something else. We need to scaffold one more skill on top of all of that understanding: how can these two people make good joint decisions?

Sometimes you can evade a tough decision with greater autonomy. If you can’t agree about what show to watch together, you can each watch a separate show. But if you solve every difference of opinion by solving the problem individually, that limits how much closeness and intimacy the relationship can have.

And so couples who are attempting more togetherness and intimacy despite their differences of opinion have to find other ways through.

There are a lot of common pitfalls here: avoiding the issue, powering over and controlling, resentfully complying, settling for solutions that don’t please anyone.

The skills couples need to make tough decisions together are all the ones from the previous section, plus several more:

• Tolerating the discomfort of not knowing the answer yet while they work through the options

• Finding the crux, or cruxes, of the issue for each one of them, and identify whether there are any unexpected solutions

• Widening the scope of the decision in hopes there’s a trade-off to be found elsewhere

• Compromising without guilt or resentment

• Giving and receiving gifts without guilt or resentment

All of these hinge on the idea that you value both yourself and your partner, you want good things for both of you, and you are working as a team to maximize the greater good in an equitable way. It would be easier to make a decision if you could devalue one or the other of you, but a systematic zeroing out of either partner undermines the viability of the relationship in the long run.

5. Repairing Emotional Injuries

Some disappointments are blameless, differences of opinion or energy level. Other times the disappointment is worse: one of you has violated an agreement, made a mistake, been careless, been dishonest, or truly let down the other one. This too is inevitable. We can work to minimize this kind of disappointment, but we are imperfect humans after all and we let each other down sometimes.

Having a way to understand, acknowledge, and repair these injuries is very important. Without a way to repair, the couple accumulates a trail of past injuries dragging behind them, untended, and the baggage train gets heavier with time. It gets harder to take new mistakes in stride, no matter how small or unintentional. Functional couples have a way to clear out the baggage train and move forward unencumbered, and they need to adjust their understanding of each other to prevent similar injuries in the future.

6. Co-Creation

A long term relationship benefits from an emotional center, something that the couple is creating together that they both care about. This can take many forms: raising children together, renovating a house together, disrupting the patriarchy together, or anything else at all.

Sometimes couples find themselves without an emotional center. There’s no law of the universe that mandates shared projects. They may have finished their previous project - the kids are all grown up! - or they may never have bothered to create one in the first place. Some relationships operate reasonably well without a center - each person supports the other’s individual goals, and there’s no shared project in the middle. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

But if the couple is feeling adrift, without purpose or meaning, wishing for more fulfillment, it can be helpful to look at the history of co-creation, and if the couple sees a gap there they want to fill.

It’s rare to meet a couple who have all the other skills working and simply lack a shared cause. Dropping a joint project into the center of a relationship is not a one-step solution for relational malaise. Instead, what typically happens is that we find out the other skills were not working at all! The reason the couple doesn’t collaborate is that they can’t. They don’t know how to work successfully together, because they haven’t sorted out their emotion regulation or their self definition or their tolerating difference or their decision making. And because they can’t work successfully together, they’ve reduced intimacy and increased autonomy more and more, and now their connection is tenuous and tense.

So the absence of co-creation is usually more of a symptom of a deeper disease than the issue itself - but forcing an attempt at co-creation can be very revealing.

III. Now What?

So that’s it, that’s what I’ve figured out in the last six and a half years. Those are the ingredients, the moving parts. Now I know, and you do too.

So now what?

Now, I’m trying to have better relationships of my own, and support others in having better relationships too. Both of those things are going pretty well.

I like to figure out complicated questions, and once I’ve got a handle on things, I like to teach what I’ve learned. I do that in my private practice as a therapist, but the scale is pretty small. I can only meet with a few dozen couples a year. I’d like to help more people than that.

What part of this felt wrong or incomplete? What part made sense, but you want more detail? What are you left still hungry about, still wanting to know more? Let me know. I’ll write about that next, if I know the answer, or maybe I’ll have to go and figure it out first. Thanks for reading!