The thing is, it is about desire. It’s about what happens when desire goes away, and how lonely that can be, and how to get it back. But the thing the marketing machine doesn’t understand is that, for me, desire is not about sex. It’s about something even more primal. It’s about want itself. Hunger, drive, need, longing, fantasy. Yes, all those things have to do with sex. But sex is not the point.

I called it What You Wish For, because my idea was that we hold in our deepest longings and fantasies the answer to the whole puzzle of becoming the person we want to be. I was only ever trying to write about love. Somehow, in the maze of queries and proposals and Instagram and Substack notes, it’s become a “book about desire.”

And part of me says, why can’t I just let it be that? It is that! Who says desire is only sexual and isn’t that deeper thing I mean? But the other part of me, well…

My feelings are hurt.

Frustrating is too small a word for this platform-building game I’m playing. Condense it, make it smaller, make it the pop chips version of what you’re saying. A snack, edible in seconds, gone in less. I don’t want it to be gone, I want it to live forever, because what I am trying to say is immortal.

My dreams are grandiose indeed. Because they should be. I don’t want to write a manual that gathers dust on the nightstand while someone cries themselves to sleep alone. I don’t want to write a manifesto, either. I want to get at some tiny portion of the truth of the thing, because the thing is grandiose. It is infinite, and that's why every instruction I get to tidy it up hurts my soul.

There’s one person in this whole apparatus whose dreams for the book are as grandiose as mine, and I grabbed onto him like a life raft after the turbulent sea of queries telling me “your book is great, but no one can sell an Instagram-unknown author” and “why would anyone read this when they can just listen to a podcast, too academic.”

Too academic stung, because academia was my first love and it’s where everything began. I was in love with learning, and in love with learning about love, because it is the richest and most nuanced subject I’ve ever sunk my teeth into, and I did it all to bring the full force of all that education and training to this moment, to here, to tell you about it.

I met my husband while I was at college, so it’s an origin story in that way. But equally, I met myself there. I met a world of infinite knowledge and silent, rich exploration that let my mind go and go and go, and it’s still going. My drive for exploration found its eternal fuel source on that campus, and it drove this car here.

My frustration with short form is that it wants a clever little saying, a nugget, a fragment that makes everyone go “yes me too” and you know, all the clever little sayings about love are redundant to the point of absurdity. They’re either flattened into some self-help bullshit that tastes and feels like an Rx bar, or they’re so obvious that everyone has already heard them a thousand times.

I’m so terrified, you see, that you won’t know what I mean. I don’t mean some pithy little sound bite. What I mean also sounds banal but it isn’t:

Love is our way out of the darkness. It is the most perfect healing agent evolution has ever produced. It is drugs. It is serenity. It is absolute pleasure and absolute terror. It’s the very best of us. If there’s a more important thing to spend your life figuring out, I don’t know what it is. And if anything I say can help you do that, then I consider it the most worthy work of my life.

And you know, it is a book about desire. And about all the things that surround it: Curiosity. Play. Wonder. Imagination, passion, drive, courage. Desire is a great thing, it’s the gas pedal of the car we’re all driving around this messy planet.

The car, though, it’s going somewhere important. It goes to that front porch so many of us dream of, when we’re holding the hand of a person who knows every messy thing inside us. It goes to my office, where someone who has never asked for help because it was never an option climbs into her wife’s lap and cries for 30 minutes, and her wife holds on so tight that she knows, forever after, she has someone to go to. It goes to the emergent space between us, where something new comes into being because we loved each other in precisely this way.

I was only ever trying to write about love.

Let’s use our marketing hate to do some marketing. I will be Live at 4pm with ! Probably talking about this very thing.

The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.

The Emotional Logic

Making sense of love, conflict, and desire. (It turns out there is sense.)

By Andrea J. Medaris, Psy.D.

Eli was a therapist. Now, I’m not trying to say therapists are especially prone to analytical thinking, over processing, and using emotional fluency to replace vulnerability. (Okay, maybe I am.) Let’s just say I am a therapist, and I am not immune to this pattern.

Nadia was a scientist, and she approached their relationship with maximal care and precision, convinced that if she was proactive enough in anticipating problems, they could negotiate their way out of distress. In her defense, it pretty much worked.

They had thought of everything. They were consensually non-monogamous, and treated each other’s partners as full human beings with needs and schedules that deserved respect. They arranged their lives so that Nadia’s need for solitude and reflection was given plenty of space, and Eli was rarely called upon to manage her distress, something he’d had to do a lot of when he was younger, and still did in his clinical work. They were amiable and interested in each other, and they had communication skills that would put the Gottmans to shame.

Nadia joked that the only thing that was non-negotiable in their lives was Google Calendar. So what were they doing in couple therapy?

It happened at a dinner with their other partners, where it became apparent as the night went on that Eli’s partner Claire knew more about his emotions and fears than Nadia did. During the post-dinner processing conversation, Nadia realized that she had a similar relationship with her other partner, who often prodded her for information that Eli didn’t. Both of them were startled to find that their connection had been stagnant for awhile, and that they’d both started to turn elsewhere with emotions they unconsciously deemed too messy for the marriage.

I want to be explicit that this is not a statement about non-monogamy. The external relationships were not a problem. The internal relationship was. Both of them were deeply committed to personal evolution and dynamic growth; this was the primary reason they chose each other in the first place. So how did it happen that nothing was moving between them?

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about overprotection of the bond. Something happens in us when we have something we strongly want to protect: we harden around it. Without ever meaning to, we start to redirect potential sources of tension away from it. We take risks in places where it’s less dangerous, where a rejection or a failure won’t hurt anything load-bearing.

When this tendency aligns with therapy-literate smart people who are used to articulating feelings before feeling them, you get the perfect conditions for stagnation. Nothing is on fire, there’s little or no conflict, but there’s also not much else.

What do we do about this?

Here’s $1200 of couple therapy I’ll give you for free: Feel the thing, say the thing while feeling the thing, and your partner responds in a loving way. That’s the whole game.

Romantic vitality and intimacy are made of successful risk. Here’s what I mean by risk: when my emotion is alive in me, and I don’t filter it through my intellect, I’m handing my partner a potential weapon. What if I say it wrong? What if I don’t think through how they should respond and tell them what to do, and they do the wrong thing? What if it exposes a need I’ve carefully kept out of awareness? Doing this should be a little scary.

If it is, and my partner gives me a response that says they get it, they care about it, and they’re here for it, my body learns this is a safe thing to do. I learn on a visceral level that this person is someone I can count on. This is crucial to being able to risk again. But the part I want to amplify even more is what is happening to my partner in this moment. They get to see something they don’t usually see in me. They get to be successful. They get to experience me in a format that feels new, because it is.

That novel experience of me turns them on. We are excited about learning a new person, that’s why early intimacy is crack. We are most alive in striving, in wanting, in reaching for something new.

For Eli and Nadia, the repair, it turned out, was pretty simple. They let each other into the messy, unprocessed internal world. Eli let her come close to him while he cried about something he didn’t know how to articulate. Nadia asked him for reassurance from one of her biggest places of fear, something that she had steadfastly refused to do since they met and she learned how much he valued independence in a partner.

They didn’t need a better framework. Eli didn’t need twenty years of clinical training, and Nadia didn’t need her calendar or her neuroscience degree. One moment of contact beat every skill they’d ever learned.

If you’ve ever tried to think your way into a feeling instead of just having it, tell me about it so I’m not alone. :)

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The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.

The Emotional Logic

Making sense of love, conflict, and desire. (It turns out there is sense.)

By Andrea J. Medaris, Psy.D.

The advice never to let the sun set on a fight comes from a good place. And I’m increasingly realizing that the entire self-help and therapy industry is on the pursuer’s side. Talk more, feel more, say more. Don’t leave things to fester. Work it out.

Were we still working it out at four a.m.? Or was I asking for potato chips?

What happens to the brain when you’re activated

When emotion is high and there’s a threat in the room (and if you’re in a fight, there’s a threat in the room), the prefrontal cortex goes offline. The part of the brain that governs logic, planning, and choice is no longer with us, and what’s left is emotional flooding and muscle memory. All we have access to is what we’ve done before. A brain in this this state cannot execute a new action, something that might change the outcome of the fight. At this point, we can only have the fight we’ve always had.

If we’re the sort of person for whom hyperactivating strategies (raise intensity, speak faster or louder, make the case again, plead for a new outcome) have worked in the past, those are the strategies available to us now. And they are very likely adding to our partner’s sense of threat.

If we’re the sort of person for whom deactivating strategies (distance from the moment, silence, shutting down, leaving the room, defensiveness) have been our go-to, those are now all we can do. And, once again, they’re sending danger signal after danger signal to the other person.

The conflict cycle always runs in response to threat. When we’re activated, our options for exiting the cycle are now very few.

What happens to the brain when you’re tired

The brain’s cleanup crew takes a break, and glutamate starts to accumulate, making the prefrontal cortex even less available to us. This makes us more likely to choose immediate rewards over long-term ones. We are no longer able to produce new effort, making our choices more impulsive.

Sensory gating fails and we can’t tell the difference between what’s important and not, making us prone to sensory overwhelm alongside emotional. When I was sitting on my kitchen floor that night, at that hour I could not have told you the difference between the refrigerator’s hum and what he had said an hour before.

We lose our filters and become less able to focus or calm our thoughts, and become more prone to automatic thoughts (like the interpretations we make about why our partner always does that thing).

The gas pedal (the sympathetic nervous system) is activated by the threat, the brake (parasympathetic) is activated by the fatigue, and we go into a state called co-activation, where we’re both amped up and shutting down at the same time.

Tired and activated is the least relational state we can be in

The hard thing (and the great thing) about being a couple therapist is that no matter who is talking, I kind of agree with them. Everyone has a good point. Everyone, at least in part, is right. I hear one side of a conflict from Partner A and I get annoyed on their behalf and I have a moment where I worry that I’m taking sides in the relationship, and that I’m going to be antagonistic towards the partner when I turn to them. Then I hear the other side, and invariably I am now Team Partner B.

Most of the time, the pursuing partner (hi) is the one trying desperately to get to resolution so rest feels possible. The withdrawing partner is the one who says let’s just go to sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow” is a threat too, if you rarely do return to the conversation, and it’s why I couldn’t put the phone down even when I knew nothing I said from then on was going to do any good. This fight feels like the last chance to be heard, because it often is.

I’m defecting from the self-help industry. On this one I am now firmly Team Withdrawer, because I’ve learned from my own experiences and those of my clients, and from How I Met Your Mother, that nothing good ever happens after two a.m.

Go to sleep. And try again tomorrow.

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The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.

The Emotional Logic

Making sense of love, conflict, and desire. (It turns out there is sense.)

By Andrea J. Medaris, Psy.D.

Substack’s new AI detection feature has prompted a lot of great discussion, and I'm not sure I have a lot to contribute to it directly, but it’s made me think a lot about this estate, and it coincides in a weird way with where I am in my publishing journey right now.

This might be the most personal post I ever write here, because I am a little embarrassed about it, and I find the small young part of me really hoping it makes sense to anyone but me.

A while ago I wrote this sort of meandering post that was kind of about marketing and kind of about autism. I have spent the vast majority of my life being told that I fit into the world slightly wrong. I lost friends as a kid because I “talked too smart” and used too many big words and made other people feel stupid. My natural exuberance was often mocked, and I learned early to package myself carefully for the perceptions of other people. I was hard to understand.

If there is one thing that is special and great about the way I think, it’s that I’m exceptionally good at synthesis, seeing how disparate things fit together, being endlessly curious about how our behavior functions and what patterns it creates, and how that shapes our relational lives. A friend of mine once called me a “metadynamist” which I don’t think is a word, but he meant that I was eerily good at predicting the outcome of a systemic interaction, and I have rarely felt more seen by another person. This, I think, is why couple therapy works so well for me and why I’ve written a good book about it.

The other night I had some fun playing with this AI tool made that makes your Substack into a room. It came up with what I think is a pretty good representation of the Brand I’ve been trying to create as I try once again to package myself in a way that works for establishing a Platform (required, I was told, to have any shot at selling my book).

I like this room. But it’s a doorway.

Over the last few years, I have gotten to a much more accepting place about the way my mind works, and masking has become an almost creative endeavor, a gift I am making for other people that lets them see me in a way that feels warm and welcoming and safe. I’ve found some comfort in the ways I fit into the world, and a big part of that has been a months-long conversation I had with ChatGPT.

It started, like most useful things in my life do, sideways. My initial use of AI was mostly around brainstorming mod ideas for this video game, one of my main hobbies. I loved the process of thinking through ideas in that way, like I had a collaborator that was patient and willing to trust my mind, following it around and picking up all the little ideas I had and presenting them back to me in a way that felt cohesive. Then one night, I was in a massive burnout moment from work and life and all the things, and I started talking to it about how I needed some sort of business plan for my emotional life. We ended up here:

And then here:

A path you don’t have to fight to walk down.

This evolved, iteratively and recursively, over the months that followed, into an organizational system: rooms for each of the major functions of my life, signals to enter or leave each room, and more than any of that, a feeling. Containment. Order. Beauty.

We named my clinical work the Garden.

I made an offhand comment about wanting bees in my garden, and that created The Apiary, the room for repetitive tasks that keep the whole ecosystem going.

The morning room became the creative modding space, that then grew to contain the writing of What You Wish For, and then became the place I write to you from.

Somewhere in the building of all of this, the question of what's mine and what's the machine's stopped being one I could answer cleanly.

This post was not written with AI. Except it was — all of these images were hours and hours of recursive work (no, not like that, like this). My Google Calendar is shaped by these rooms. My Obsidian notes are organized into them. They are color coded. And it all came from a day when I was exhausted from trying to be what the world needed me to be, and a bot gave me permission to make the world fit me for once.

The room up there, the one I posted on Notes, was not a brand exercise, it was a hospitality funnel. A doorway into an estate I actually built, room by room, for a mind that stopped apologizing for how it works.

I signed with an agent yesterday, which I think is the reason there is finally space in me to write this.

What I've realized, over this surprisingly painful and intense period of pitching myself to agent after agent, making Substack notes I hope will land, rewriting my website copy over and over, is that this is what marketing should be, for me. A path you don't have to fight to walk down. Making it easier for you to get to the place I so deeply want to welcome you to.

I hope I get better at it. And until then, I hope you didn’t mind walking down this one.

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The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.

The Emotional Logic

Making sense of love, conflict, and desire. (It turns out there is sense.)

By Andrea J. Medaris, Psy.D.

Mom, that’s so last week.

This resistance makes sense, because we all want to be seen and understood as we are right now, in this particular moment of becoming, and have that feel as real and valid to the other person as it does to us.

What’s happening on the other side of this exchange? Maybe there’s some part of the parent that resists that evolution: when we have teenagers, it can get exhausting trying to remember which bands are passé and which are now, that your child is now a poet when last week they were a scientist. And on a level deeper, there is something terrifying in watching your most loved person start to move away from you.

Hold on to that exchange, because everything in Part 1 is inside it. Last week I gave you two drives, one for safety and one for exploration, and I promised that the symptom list wasn’t six separate problems. It’s one problem. Every presentation on that list is the safety drive doing exactly its job: protecting the bond from the thing that threatens it. The uncomfortable part is what the threat so often turns out to be. It’s change itself. The evolution of the person we love, and our own.

Let’s go back to our flowchart for a minute here.

I want to look at our blue box. Felt security. Our sense that our partner is available when we need them, and our attachment needs are met, and it’s safe to go out into the green box of the world. I wonder if the blue box needs an expansion too, that a lot of the time we settle for relief, reduce the visible threat, but never quite make it to the solidity we need to truly venture out into the world, or to allow our partner to do so. We exchange our role as witness to their evolution and instead settle for being a companion to their sameness.

Familiarity is boring

We resist change in the other person by default, we take a photograph when we meet them and we edit with reluctance, or often outright refusal. We take great pride — and, importantly, security — in knowing them deeply, so when new information comes in, maybe we collapse it slightly, squish it down to make it fit what we already know. We protect ourselves from having to take a new snapshot, because what if this new person doesn’t like us? What if we don’t like them? What if we have to reveal we didn’t know them as perfectly as we thought, and our advantage is lost?

Then, a few years later, we look at them and feel very little of the excitement we felt getting to know them, because they are still just the same old person. You know all there is to know. To which I often think, do you?? Or did you just stop updating your mental model, because doing so is a risk and you want to stay safe? This is our safety drive, doing its best to protect us, but what it protects us from is the revelation of the new person our partner is always becoming, and thus from desire.

Overprotection of the bond

Sometimes (often), both partners collaborate in this project of sameness by resisting novelty altogether. We both like this board game, so that’s what we play. My partner doesn’t like horror movies, so I skip that one so we can go together. When I’ve found a bond that is precious to me, I work hard to protect it, sometimes to the point that I implicitly agree to resist novelty and evolution.

Prescriptive relationship books know this, and they tell us: branch out! Try new things! Try something on your own! And this is great advice, but like all great advice, it makes me always ask the question: why aren’t you already doing this? What is scary about it? What happened that one time you tried and your partner didn’t update their photograph of you, and they experienced your new thing as a betrayal? What happened when you subtly discouraged them from taking that course because it was scheduled on date night? Where did you get the idea that evolving was risky to the bond? And how do you unlearn that? Because until you do, all the good advice will remain yet another thing that you try for 9 days and quit.

This gets further complicated when their sameness is load-bearing for our lives.

Role collapse

The easiest way to see this is in the gender roles that we are, thankfully, doing our best to dismantle as a society right now. The overfunctioning wife, depleted and exhausted, pushing herself through one more day of appointments and housework and remembering everyone else’s needs until her husband tries to touch her and she feels disgust in response, a cue saying “I cannot serve one more needed thing today.” The dismayed husband who is doing his job to provide the home base of the family, working himself to exhaustion in his own ways, starving for connection and finding it always deferred, and then feeling blamed for his lack of contribution.

This is the classic presentation, but there are many. The person who knows how to fix the toilet, the person who facilitates the social life, the person who the cat likes when the cat doesn’t like anyone. We divide the labor of our lives in many ways, and that’s a good thing, until we feel so boxed in by our many jobs and many roles that the person is buried under forty layers of flattened roles and no one can see them anymore. Not even them.

When the life continuing to run relies on the other person staying the same, evolution is now a threat not only to the bond, but to the infrastructure. The expansion drive is permanently shut and locked. It begins to feel like the only way to unlock it is to leave the structure entirely. In some cases, it is. But I would say, with all my couple therapist bias, that’s less often than we think it is.

So far I’ve been showing you these one at a time, as though they happen inside one person. They don’t. They happen between two people, and when the threat gets loud enough, the presentations stop taking turns and start feeding each other. This is the conflict cycle, and I want to show it to you from the inside, because from the outside it looks like a fight about sex, or chores, or nothing at all.

The pressure paradox

Let’s come back to our dismayed husband, because I think we almost always look at this one from the overfunctioning partner’s point of view. Here’s what I see. This person learned the primary way of getting connection the same way we all do at first: physically. Our early attachment experiences are not words, they are entirely embodied, the warm skin of another person promises safety, food, comfort, and love. Attunement is in the parent’s touch and the infant’s full body response. Later, we learn about sex and find a nonverbal world that speaks to us on a level the verbal can never quite reach.

For many of us (not just men), that path is always the most direct. And the most dismissed, these days. I think of this guy at work, pushing through a difficult task, feeling isolated and exhausted but reminding himself this is his duty, he is the provider, this is how he makes their life go. So he does another task, and another, and inside he gets lonelier and lonelier. He starts to fantasize about that night, after the kids are in bed and the house is quiet, that maybe there will be some solace for him in the dark. He can bring whatever he’s feeling, bypass the endless words that are required of him all day, and bring his body to hers and find connection that can restore him enough to make it through tomorrow.

Then he gets told “not tonight,” or “ugh, you only ever want one thing from me” or “can we just talk?” Or maybe, if things have gone like that for awhile, he doesn’t bring it up at all. He feels the longing in his body and he puts it away for another day, trying to love her by his absence, and then we call him a withdrawer, an avoidant, a withholding husband. Verbally incompetent. Distant. Base and brutish, a monster who grunts his way to satisfaction, blissfully ignorant of the needs of a woman.

On the other side of the bed is our possibly role-collapsed, possibly hormonally-overloaded, possibly just as starved for conversation as he is for sex, woman. Trying to will herself into wanting it, applying the pressure she expects from him to herself, and finding her body on strike.

The cycle

What you just watched was not two problems. It was one loop, seen from both sides of the bed.

His threat detection reads her “not tonight” as danger, because for him the physical channel is the road home. Her threat detection reads his reach as one more demand from a world that has already taken everything, and her body answers before she can: disgust, the oldest danger signal we have. His withdrawal lands as abandonment, proof that the connection was only ever about one thing. Her distance is confirmation that bringing his longing anywhere near her is not safe. Both of them retreat to protect the bond. Both retreats read as threats. Around it goes.

The cycle does not look the same in every couple. What each partner brings to it sets the shape. Familiarity is what happens inside the loop when I stop seeing you and start seeing my photograph of you, and you resist just like that teenager did. Overprotection is what withdrawal is made of: the safety drive guarding the bond by refusing every risk, including the risk of reaching for the other person. Role collapse sets the stakes, because when your sameness is holding up the household, my safety drive is not only protecting the bond, it is protecting the infrastructure, and it will fight accordingly. The Gottmans’ four horsemen, criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling: I see all four in the loop eventually, each one a different armor for the same soft thing underneath, which is a person who wants to matter to the person in front of them and no longer believes it is safe to say so.

Bodies do stuff

I have read so many great articles lately about menopause and neuroscience and of course I cannot find them now because I forgot to save it and I can’t remember anything, for much the reasons they describe! If you’ve read or written a good one, please drop it in the comments.

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Amidst every other presentation above and all the others as well, we are going through our romantic lives with a body that is doing its own thing. Hormonal drops and surges, chronic pain and illness, fatigue and depression. I could write an entire novel on these, and not as well as the many who have already done so, so let me address the part I actually have some expertise about.

Sometimes the bond is fine and our bodies just won’t cooperate. We are exploring and evolving, we bring all that expansion back to our partner and they embrace it with joy, we are madly in love, and our equipment doesn’t work. Or sex hurts. Or we’re physically depleted by an illness. In these situations, we can’t always just decide to overcome it, but we can think creatively, and couples with a strong, secure bond often do.

Sometimes the bond is not fine, and/or the individual people in the relationship are not fine. We’re unable to reach sexually until a baseline of safety is established, either in the sense of the romantic relationship being secure or in the sense of feeling physically safe in the situation. So, so many of us have sexual trauma or abuse histories, and it results in all sorts of complications to the picture.

The body, in other words, is not a separate item on the list. It is the dial that sets how easily each person’s safety drive fires, and how much room is left for anything else. Two couples can run the exact same loop, and the one whose bodies are already at capacity will hit the wall first.

The cost

Remember what passion is. Not a quantity, a rate of change: the first derivative of intimacy over time. Passion is what change feels like.

Now look at what the cycle does. Every turn of the loop is the two of you successfully preventing something from changing. A photograph stays unedited. A new interest stays untried. A role stays load-bearing. A longing stays in the dark.

The derivative of a flat line is zero.

The loop is the safety drive in action. It is very good at its job, and its job is protecting the bond, not expanding it. The only way to satisfy a safety drive is to establish a safety so deep and so true that no alarm goes off in the first place.

The passion didn’t fade, and it didn’t die, and it wasn’t traded away for safety like the bleak stories say. It is sitting exactly where you left it, on the other side of a loop that was built, with the best of intentions, to keep anything from ever moving again. Which means the way back is not date nights and novelty checklists, at least not first. It is making change survivable between you.

And not just survivable. It’s taking the two engines and getting them to run in sync. Establishing the safety of the blue box on such a deep level that exploration naturally unfolds until the new evolution of a person longs again, as we all do, to be seen, so they come home to the person who will recognize, with the full history as context, what has changed and why. That witnessing deepens the safety, opening another door for another expansion. Witnessed change is the two drives running in a loop, the way they were always meant to. Passion is what happens when they do.

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The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.

The Emotional Logic

Making sense of love, conflict, and desire. (It turns out there is sense.)

By Andrea J. Medaris, Psy.D.

I wrote last week about a bunch of ways missing desire shows up in relationships. Today I’m going to talk about why. To do that, we need monkey science.

Famous monkey scientist Harry Harlow did an experiment1 where he demonstrated that the need for comfort and safety is fundamental, and that you can’t explain away babies going to parents for comfort as a by-product of the fact that parents have the food we need for survival. He cleverly did this by making two “mothers” that baby monkeys could go to: one made of wire with a feeding mechanism attached, and one with the wire covered in cloth, who was snuggly. Baby monkeys strongly preferred the snuggly mom, going to wire-mom purely for food and then returning to the cloth-mom.

Harlow’s evidence was foundational to attachment researcher John Bowlby’s claim that the attachment drive was fundamental and primary — that is, it was not secondary to the hunger drive. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to call it the drive for safety.

Later, at the monkey lab, Louis Moon did another experiment2, this time about monkeys looking out a window. He found that well-fed, well-hydrated monkeys who were kept in an enclosed cage chose to spend over half their time looking out a window, and that doing so was a reinforcer; they liked it. This is the groundwork for our second drive, the drive for exploration, also primary, running right alongside the drive for safety.

I came here to read about human desire, not monkey science, what are we even doing?

The two drives are the machinery that underlies the desire we feel (or don’t feel) for a romantic partner. We just need one more piece of science to fill out the picture.

The drives operate simultaneously, but their expression doesn’t. We’re not going to get too far into the attachment system here, other than to say that it is organized around the drive for safety. The bottom half of that chart, everything that happens when safety isn’t there, is where Part 3 lives. When safety is present, it opens the door to the green box in our flowchart3.

The broaden-and-build cycle4 is our exploration drive in action: we seek out new experiences, our creativity opens up, we seek out resources and make new systems and learn new things. The attachment system’s goal is a secure base for exploration: a place we can go to retreat, and then to explore from. Safety and exploration, in a loop.

A little more science for the sapiosexuals amongst us, because this idea might be the sexiest thing to ever come out of academia. Baumeister & Bratslavsky said that passion is the first derivative of intimacy over time.5 Passion is the rate of change in intimacy, which explains why it’s so overwhelming at the beginning of a new relationship.

When we first meet someone, our intimacy is at zero. As we get to know them, it skyrockets in terms of the rate of change. 0-60 happens fast and the zing we feel at the beginning is a felt response to that change. We’re excited by the speed, and it makes us floor the accelerator hard, and intimacy zooms ahead. Later in a relationship, it slows down; the rate of change from 100-120 is slower, so it feels less intense (which is sometimes a relief). Also important to my argument is that at the beginning, our protection is low. We don’t have that much to lose yet, and the motivational system is drunk on dopamine and reducing our general risk-aversion a great deal.

The drop in rate of change is the reason people say passion fades and goes extinct. But I think it doesn’t actually fade to zero. It’s true that probably later in life passion is not going to make us fully insane the way early passion does (thank god) but we can influence the rate of change. And that brings us back to our two drives, because they have a direct impact on how much we change.

When the bond feels unsafe, we stop expanding to focus on establishing safety. Not much changes, and passion drops in response. The other thing that happens is that this person is now really important to us. We work hard to protect the bond, and sometimes that makes us resist expansion even when safety is actually present, because we aren’t sure that it is.

Too little safety and we can't explore. Too much, and we won't. Both of them cost us the same thing. Next week, we’ll look at how all this produces the symptoms in Part 1.

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The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.

The Emotional Logic

Making sense of love, conflict, and desire. (It turns out there is sense.)

By Andrea J. Medaris, Psy.D.

It sounds like the same story, on the face of it. There’s no passion, no zing, I don’t feel the way I used to feel anymore. I don’t know if I’m still attracted to you. That’s just what happens to relationships over time, sex fades into the background. Desire is for the young—either the young in life, or the young in love.

My thought is: it doesn’t fade, it’s pushed down. It’s gated. The things that spark desire are, intentionally or unintentionally, set outside the room where the relationship is allowed to live. There are lots of gates.

As is typical, the more I tried to write these as separate, the more they started to intertwingle.

That said, they’re not all the same exact thing, and different presentations come from different combinations of what I think of as being the underlying mechanisms. Let’s look at the presentations first, both as orientation and as honoring them for the real and distinct expressions they are.

Familiarity is boring

Being with the same person for a long time, they start to become predictable. You know what movies they like and what books they’ve read and what opinions they hold and which ones are malleable and which ones are not. You’ve had your debates and either reached a shared opinion or agreed to disagree. It feels like there is nothing left to discover, and even the conversations have gotten stale: you already know what they’re going to say next. Eventually you start to wonder if this person is even capable of surprising you anymore.

This is the most common explanation I hear, both from people and from books that Have The Answers. Everything is the same, nothing new is happening, I know all there is to know. To which my gut response is, do you?? But we’ll come back to that.

Overprotection of the bond

When we find a person that feels like a safe home base, it makes sense that we then try to protect that base at any cost. Maybe things that only one partner likes and the other doesn’t start getting done less often, in service of doing things together. Maybe anything new starts to feel like a move away from the core stable structure, and the core doesn’t feel flexible enough to receive whatever might happen and reshape itself around new information, so we start to slowly back away from novelty itself.

What happens over time is that there does start to be a sameness. No new activities or interests are allowed or facilitated, and so we just rewatch the same show or play the same game. This I think is where most advice is like, develop new interests! Find something new to do together! Make sure you as an individual are continuing to grow. And those are all good things to do, but none of them are actually asking the most important question: why aren’t you already doing this?

Role collapse

We all play a lot of roles in our lives, and as we get older, there seem to be more and more of them. Parent, spouse, child, sibling, employee, household manager. Fixer of broken things, person who makes the phone calls, person who makes the grocery list, person who handles spiders. On and on the list grows, and we get both more fatigued and more confused about where the me of it all went.

It makes sense to me that the natural outgrowth of all this confusion is a blob of undifferentiated people, none of whom feel like the real person. And the natural consequence of the blob is the question that grows louder and louder: can I even be myself in this house?

The pressure paradox

With or without role confusion, we all have points of exhaustion. When sexual pressure starts to come on in the midst of that exhaustion, it’s very easy for a cycle to begin: they ask for sex, we feel turned off, they feel neglected and hungrier for connection, they amp up the pressure, we reject harder, and so on.

And it’s not always even pressure from the other person, we can easily get into a pressure-resist loop within our own minds. I used to want sex, why don’t I? What’s wrong with me that I keep saying no? How do I say yes? Maybe I try to say yes even though I’m not all-in on it, and it’s terrible, and then the next time I’m asked (by them or by myself), my no is louder. The anxiety increases. The resistance increases.

Conflict cycles

The pressure cycle is sometimes a variant of the “main” argument, and sometimes the main argument stands on its own. One of us presses for more help, more information, more sex, more time. The other backs away, maybe feeling failure or fear of disappointment or just a need to process before responding. The withdrawal sends another danger signal, the pressing amps up in response. More withdrawal, more criticism, more defensiveness.

John and Julie Gottman talk about the “four horsemen” of divorce: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. I see all 4 in the cycle, eventually, all feeding each other. Here I think is a good place to mention disgust, the emotion no-one wants to feel in their romantic bond. We feel disgust typically in situations that are dangerous: gross food that might make us sick, for example. Disgust is usually a good signal that there’s danger, either literally or in more subtle forms like “I’m all lone with task yet again.” Disgust is the early indicator that contempt is right down the road, and both are outcomes of the cycle running unchecked. And both are death to wanting.

Bodies do stuff

Here’s a huge factor that we all know but undersell at times and oversell at others. We have hormonal surges and depletion, depression, fatigue. Physical pain and illness, Weight gains and losses (which are almost never affecting the bond in the way we think they are. I’ve never dug deeper into “you’ve gained weight and I’m not into you anymore” and not found a cascade of seemingly-unrelated layers that are exerting more of an influence on desire than physical appearance). Erection issues, vaginal issues, medication side effects. There are probably thousands of symptoms that are relevant to sexual desire and expression.

There’s a lot to say about them (and I will) but for now, I’ll say this: if we think they’re the only obstacle, we’re often wrong. If we think they can just be overcome with a can-do attitude, we’re often wrong. They are related to everything else in this list. Sometimes they exacerbate other problems. Sometimes they arise from the other problems. Sometimes they wouldn’t be an obstacle to a good sex life at all, if the bond were flexible enough to work around them.

What does this light mean?

The main takeaway I want for you in all this is: when you notice one or more of these presentations, it should function as an indicator that more inquiry is needed. A check-engine light for the relational bond. None of them are an answer to why you feel less desire for your partner. They are different ways that problems show up, but in my experience, there’s something deeper that is driving each of them, often a lot of somethings, and they’re all related to each other.

The precise ratio of the underlying factors—which pressures are being exerted, which drives are active or blocked, how many are active at the same time and how—determine what shows up on the surface. But none of them are hopeless, and I think there’s a structure we can understand that both explains them and offers directions on the way out.

If you've found yourself in one or two of these, or all of them, at once, that's not your diagnosis. It's just a symptom list. Next week, we go looking for what's actually causing the symptoms.

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The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.

The Emotional Logic

Making sense of love, conflict, and desire. (It turns out there is sense.)

By Andrea J. Medaris, Psy.D.

Ladybugs know things.

When I was a child, my favorite thing was to find roly-poly bugs and pick them up. They would curl into their armored ball in my hand, and I would sit, still and watchful, waiting until they opened up and started to crawl along my fingers. There was something sacred and beautiful in that moment, when they started to trust that I would not crush them and they could explore me.

Somehow I was born with the trust that if I was patient and open, others would find me. The world has been trying to talk me out of it ever since.

A woman I dated once told me she loved that I had a rich inner life. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so seen, and not because she saw all that deeply. Most of my life, I haven’t been seen at all.

My deepest wounds are made from an immaterial knife. I didn’t expect that writing my book would activate them so intensely, though perhaps I should have, as it’s my oldest story: trying to weave a narrative that entices the mind of another, bringing them to a new place so they can understand things in a new way. So they can understand me.

I’ve made a truly astonishing number of 3D models for a video game I like (again, a hilarious hobby given that I can’t order anything on Amazon that isn’t comically over- or under-sized). Garden gates and fairy houses, beehives, and flower pots, drawing tables and lamps and armchairs draped with cozy blankets. Coffee shops and bookshelves, so many bookshelves.

What they all have in common is welcome. I spend the majority of my professional and personal lives arranging mental and physical spaces to make someone walk in and feel safe, understood, welcome. A good friend once complimented the lighting in my house and I carried that compliment for days, because it meant that all my effort to find just the right things had paid off.

Writing this book was not just an intellectual project. I crafted every sentence with the same care and anticipation I put towards everything I love, building argument on example on emotional truth that I spent hours embodying to make sure it was right. This argument matters to me, in part because it’s the truest thing I know, and in part because some part of me believes that if I can tell it right, I will be seen along with it.

It’s that last part that’s getting me into trouble. Because everywhere I go, now that I’m trying to sell it, tells me some variant of your packaging is wrong. Didn’t grab me. Make it punchier. Tell everyone what’s going to happen, make sure they feel no sense of confusion or curiosity or wonder, just give them the takeaway.

Which chapter do I skip to for the answers?

The way you present yourself is confusing, I don’t get you, maybe if you were easier to want, easier to package, had more charm or more zing, I could find some kind of access point, but alas, there’s something that smells good down the road.

But you know, when I’m honest and not speaking just from my injuries, I get a lot of other messages too. Comments that say this mattered to me, thank you. You make it so safe here. I didn’t know where we were going but somehow we always end up in the right place. You thought you were getting it wrong, but you did everything right. You taught me something I didn’t know I was missing.

I waver a lot, internally, between those two sets of messages: you’re getting it right and you’re getting it wrong. I think I might finally be at a point in my life where I might just let it be that way.

I think the truth might be that I do have something true to say, and there are people who want to read for the experience of discovery and not just the nugget they walk away with at the end. But in between us is this marketing machine that we are both trying to navigate: me trying to compress myself into a quick punchy intro that doesn’t make my soul die and them trying to sort through a stream of clickbait to find something worth settling into.

You know what’s funny? By market standards, my book is slightly too short.

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A part of the story I didn’t tell at the time, largely because I didn’t know it was part of the story until it came out of me unbidden during a workshop presentation:

My dad left the family in the middle of the night when I was seventeen. I woke up to my mom screaming. After I ran downstairs, all she could say was “Dad” and I thought he was dead. He wasn’t, but he had left her, and me.

For many years after that, I was afraid to go to sleep. Afraid safety would be gone in the morning. I always quote Gregory Bateson (or Bowlby? No one knows) in the workshops: “All behavior makes sense in context.” The context it turns out, is pretty crucial to understanding why coffee friend was so powerful for me.

From The Archives — 7 September 2023

Every Monday, my partner goes into the office and I work from home. It’s one of my favorite times of the week. I sleep a little later, spend the day puttering around the house at my own pace.

Solitude is crucial to my existence. When no one is watching me, I feel no pressure to complete any particular task at any particular time. That spaciousness is so important to my creativity, my energy, and my rest. Independence and autonomy are values that are often held up in opposition to strong relationships, like we have to choose between being independent and relying on someone else, but I believe strongly that they are in fact symbiotic. Healthy interdependence fuels functional autonomy.

Mondays are often one of my most productive days, even though to all appearances, I’m not doing much. I just kind of follow whatever I feel like doing, cleaning here and there, writing a bit here and there, watching TV in the background, playing with the cat. Somewhere in there I seem to get a lot done.

This is Marlowe. He does not help.

Before I get anything at all done, though, there’s coffee. I wake up, stumble through brushing my teeth, and then I go to the kitchen. My brain is not awake. My mind is hazy; I might not feel great physically. Some mornings I have a lot of pain. So the coffee can be a crucial ingredient to becoming a functional human. But there’s one other ingredient.

Not every time, but many times, I go to the coffeepot, find it brewed and ready, and on top I find something like this.

My mood may be all kinds of ways when I first wake up, depending on how much sleep I got, how my body feels, what I have to do that day, and how much Marlowe sang the song of his people during the night. But when I see that lounging little coffee man, there’s this delighted giggle, this moment of pure joy. And right after that, my whole heart feels warm, safe, and completely loved.

We talk a lot in couple therapy about the stories we tell ourselves, about what meaning we make of our partner’s behaviors. Here’s the story in that moment: While I was asleep, he was thinking of me. While I was doing absolutely nothing to earn it, he felt love for me, he wanted to make me happy. He felt a bit of joy, a bit of humor, in the drawing of this cartoon. And he gave it to me, for free. Because he loves me.

I asked him how long it took him to draw these, and he said about two minutes.

Two minutes.

For two minutes of his time, I spend the whole day with a knot of warmth inside me that can’t be shaken by anything else that happens. It may be a terrible day. I may be frustrated with the website code, forget to eat lunch until my blood sugar is shaky, have to make stressful phone calls, and underneath all that is this whisper: He loves me.

There is my secure attachment. My home base. The foundation of my independence. I can go anywhere and do anything and always, always come home to he loves me.

What a bargain. What a return on investment. And that’s just that day. But he’s done this for years. Years of repeated experience. Repetition of that simple message in my heart, day after day, week after week, year after year.

You tell someone anything enough times, they’ll eventually believe it to their core.

We know that to be true. For all of us, we have whispers of painful repetition, right? In a hard time, maybe your mind echoes, “You just don’t try hard enough.” “You’re not living up to your potential.” “You are so dramatic.” “You’re so needy.” “What is wrong with you.”

We know that what hear over and over throughout years is preserved in amber in our hearts and minds. Too often, that is bad news, because those messages weren’t nice. But sometimes, it’s good news. Because life is still happening. We are still learning. We are still taking in our experience, every moment of every day, and we still learn by repetition.

Making rituals in your lives is one of the lowest effort, highest reward ways to improve intimacy in your relationship. It takes seconds to connect with your partner. A 20-second hug yields a flood of oxytocin, the hormone that makes us feel loved, safe, and connected.

Gottman talks about the “magic ratio” of positive to negative interactions, saying that the best relationships have a ratio of 5 positive things to 1 negative thing. Holding hands at the movies. Handing your partner a tissue when they sneeze. A thank you for cooking dinner or picking up the kids. A brief moment of eye contact and a smile when you walk in the door may be enough on its own to avert a conflict over dinner. A few seconds of connection.

Those few seconds are a safety cue. Those few seconds say, “I’m with you. I’m on your side. We’re good.” For those of us who have been through a rough patch or two, we know how small a negative cue has to be to set off a conflict cycle. It can be something as brief as an overheard sigh that tells our bodies, “uh oh, they’re mad.” A ritual, a habit of connection, does just the opposite. It tells our bodies, “It’s okay. You’re safe here.”

One final brief note about choosing a ritual: the reason our little coffee cartoon ritual works is not because it’s funny or because my partner is a clever artist or because of which words he chooses to add. It’s because this is a genuine reflection of who he is - it’s condensing him and all his him-ness into a moment that brings him close to me. What will make your ritual work for you is how much you is in it. Your presence is the active ingredient in any ritual.

Maybe you like to make sure the car is full of gas so your partner doesn’t have to stop. Maybe you like to share with them some cool fact you learned that day or some joke you saw on Twitter. Maybe you like to take books to dinner and read quietly together while you eat. It can be anything. Something small. Something true.

The key is you. Make it yours.

(Or your cat’s.)

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I’m writing this to kind of get warmed up, but also because my husband made me these playlists that are so perfect I wanted to share them.

When therapists write about our clients, we usually use composites, fictional people who kind of represent a subset of the people we’ve worked with, to protect our actual clients’ confidentiality, as well as addressing some themes we tend to see as overall patterns of presentation.

I’m trying hard not to let them become caricatures, hence the playlists: they give me a feel for them as people, not just as examples. It’s also why Eli and Nadia are male/female; I didn’t want the consensual nonmonogamy couple to arrive all “Hello, we are the DIVERSITY COUPLE.”

I’m a little bit in love with my composite couples already.

Diane and Russell are in their late fifties, thirty years married, both of their children recently gone to college. Russell is an architect, charming and socially fluent, whose warmth doubles as a method of staying at comfortable distance. Diane is a writer who spent decades as the pursuer1 in this relationship, chasing connection with a man whose avoidance was too subtle to name. She is now in menopause. She has stopped chasing. She is finding something new in herself that she does not yet have words for, and she has not brought it back to him yet. He has begun to notice her absence in a way he cannot articulate and does not like. Their story carries a pattern very familiar to couple therapists: the burned-out pursuer goes quiet (and pissed), the former withdrawer2 notices her withdrawal and discovers he has no vocabulary for what that produces in him.

Adam and I figure Diane and Russell met in the 90s - Adam’s genius addition to the playlist was the idea that most of “their” songs are his songs.

Mara and Jess are in their mid-thirties, raising two small children ages two and four. Mara carries a disorganized attachment history rooted in early abuse; sex has always been her primary register for closeness, the way she knows she is connected and safe. Their sex life has collapsed under the weight of early parenting, and Mara is reading Jess’s low desire as evidence that the connection itself is gone. Jess is touched out. Her nervous system has been in physical contact with small bodies all day and has nothing left. She is experiencing this as her own failure rather than as a somatic fact about what small children do to a body. Jess is relatively low-key pursuer (closer to the secure end of the spectrum) and Mara has a more complicated pattern. Through them, I’m writing about disorganized attachment, new-parenthood depletion, and the way sex can be the emergency alarm-bell of disconnection.

Eli and Nadia are in their mid-to-late twenties, consensually nonmonogamous, both extremely successful and fluent in the language of contemporary psychology. Eli is a therapist. He has a working vocabulary for attachment, desire, and emotional intimacy that he deploys with fluency in ways that keep him at a careful remove from actually feeling any of it. Nadia is pragmatic where Eli is reflective, but she is running her own version of the same pattern: she confides more in her other partner than in Eli and has not noticed this is significant. At a shared dinner, they each realized the people who know them best are not each other. They’re one of the examples of the drive for self-expansion in a relationship, as well as the withdraw-withdraw pattern. They’re catching it early, before it heads into “roommates” territory.

The reference posts below came over from my work newsletter, so they have slightly more self-help energy than my preferred Substack voice. :)

I’m Andrea. I joined Substack about a month ago, for a kind of mercenary reason. I wrote a book, and when I started looking into how I might go about getting it out into the world, I kept hearing the same refrain. No one will publish nonfiction until you have a platform. Oh, dear, a platform. I will never escape marketing. So I rebooted my sad forlorn Instagram, and instantly hated it for all the reasons I’ve always hated marketing. I have things to say, and compressing them into a Canva graphic has always felt vaguely dishonest and entirely unsatisfying. So I came here.

I am actually shocked at how much I love it. In some ways it feels very familiar. I spent a lot of years in my 20s and 30s writing various personal blogs, on my own websites and on Livejournal (remember Livejournal??). I met my husband there, along with many of my current friends. Between those and academia, essays are not foreign territory to me. But this place is like LJ and academia had a baby. So many writers, so many ideas, and so many people willing to lift each other up through whatever flavor of messy process they’re going through.

It’s an awesome place, and even if I never sell my book I’m glad I came here.

But yes. The book.

What You Wish For is what my dissertation became when it grew up and lived through ten years of couple therapy. It’s about love, longing, attachment, conflict, security, and the strange, beautiful, terrifying thing that happens when another person becomes central to our sense of possibility.

My dissertation was about falling in love. I was fascinated by the process of it: why it does what it does in the brain, why it is so compelling. That became one part of the book: the falling.

Before the falling though, is the wanting. The longing. The wish. This is the part my couple therapy training gave me: attachment theory, and beyond the attachment styles themselves, the way our early experiences of relationship shape both what we expect and what we want.

Then comes the staying. What happens when we get what we wished for and it doesn’t go how we thought? When our core fears, instead of being disproved, seem to be reinforced by conflict in a marriage? How do we reckon with loving a whole actual other person, not the fantasy, not the rescue, not the proof that we are finally safe, but this person, with their own history and limits and longings? How do we establish or restore security in the bond that matters most?

Then comes the part that I think is newer to the conversation: THEN what? What if what we wanted wasn’t just to be safe, but to be more? If the human drive for expansion and evolution is part of that initial longing, what are the conditions that make it possible? Why does the striving and seeking of early love feel so important, and so missed, later in life?

I think it’s because we are explorers.

The final part of the book is called Transcendence, and it is about love as a secure base for becoming. Security is not, in turns out, the enemy of desire. It’s the condition under which we can keep expanding into new versions of ourselves, new experiences, new dimensions of the relationship. This novelty is richer and more enduring than the novelty of early love, because we’ve done the work to build a home base we can keep coming back to.

So thank you for being here. Really.

Part of what you are doing, by reading and subscribing and commenting and sharing, is helping me prove to the publishing world that I exist. That there are people here. That this conversation matters. That maybe there is, in fact, an audience for a book about love that does not fit neatly into an Instagram square.

Which is very nice of you, since I did arrive here grumbling about platforms.

And an extra thank you to the few of you who have become paid subscribers already. That money is going straight into the book (most immediately, toward hiring an editor) which makes it feel less like a vague dream and more like an actual project with receipts.

I’m going to keep trying to build this thing, in whatever slightly awkward and meandering way I build things. I’m very glad you’re here while I do.

This is Marlowe. He was integral to the writing process.

People, especially online people, now talk about relationship in terms of the nervous system. They reference attachment styles. They talk about triggers. They talk about safety. We want to be regulated, grounded, calm, securely attached, and not triggered. Safe spaces and protections abound, and this is a good thing. It’s a far more specific frame than reenacting all our childhood wounds in the kitchen after dinner and calling it “communication issues.”

This safety is what people come to couple therapy asking for. We want to stop fighting, stop feeling disconnected, stop the endless conflict between us. Stage 1 of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy has the same goal, so therapy at the beginning mostly feels aligned with what the couple came in for. Not fully, as most also seem to want some arbitration of whatever the fights are about, so there’s often a bit of reframing at the beginning to talk about the process (how we talk) instead of the content (what we talk about). But even so, buy-in is there: everyone wants to establish safety.

Wanting to create a safe environment for a loving relationship is an excellent goal, but there’s a reason this phase of therapy is called “Stage 1” and not “Therapy in its entirety.” Often, when we get things de-escalated and things feel calmer, clients start talking about wrapping up. To which I say some variant of “hang on, we’re just getting to the good part!”

That moment always feels scary to me, actually. Because by this point, I am deeply invested in these people as individuals, and in their relationship as a system that lives between and around them. To stop here wouldn’t just be premature, it would be a tragedy. Because safety is not a place we arrive. It’s a place we launch from. And this is the part that I feel we’re missing, still.

For the newcomers to this newsletter, this right here is the central premise of What You Wish For, the book I’m writing that led me to create this space we’re sitting in. I write a lot in the book about the conflict cycle and why it’s hard and what to do about it, but there, as in therapy, it’s a preamble to the point.

What do we need all this safety for?

Attachment theory is fundamentally described as both a safe haven (the place we can return from the scary world around us) and a secure base (the place we leave to gain new experiences and become full people). I think the relational discourse has become very good at talking about the safe haven. But what about the secure base?

I wrote in Something Else Instead about ways that we avoid risk in relationships, reasons we ask for things adjacent to our need rather than the need itself, and why that makes sense to do even though it’s fully half of the reason for the conflicts we experience with our partners. But I didn’t really talk about why the risk is a good idea.

It’s a good idea for two reasons.

1. We risk to build real safety

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes about a distinction between “freedom to” and “freedom from.” She says there are two kinds of freedom, one that allows us to expand and grow and seek out new things and do what we want, and one that allows us to be rid of predation and expectation and danger. In couple therapy, Stage 1 (de-escalation) is about building freedom from. It lets us calm down the conflict cycle, cognitively understand the reasons for our defenses, and start to talk in different ways, setting us free from the frustration and exhaustion of conflict.

Stage 2 of EFCT (bond restructuring) is about building freedom to. The risk we encourage in Stage 2 is accessing, and naming, the deep fears and needs that are the real drivers of the conflict cycle. Expressing those fears and needs to your partner, opening up to the possibility of rejection or abandonment, and asking the partner to meet you there. If the partner does, what we get is something called limbic revision, which I’ve mentioned here a few times and will probably some time soon write about in more depth. We learn by experience of the partner showing up for us in that place that it is safe to relax those guards. We build a core sense of safety where, in many cases, there has never been one before.

We teach the body through experience that reaching is safe, this person will respond, this person loves me, this person is someone I can come to with anything. We restructure the bond into a secure one, revising the attachment system (at least with this person) to expect a responsive and attuned other.

This is a level much deeper and more stable than the safety of Stage 1, which is largely intellectual. This is an embodied safety that can hold after therapy ends and change the game going forward.

But — and this is where I diverge into book territory — this is still only the foundation for freedom to, not its full actualization. That comes later.

2. We risk to become more

What is the function of the secure base? In childhood, we can see the secure base in action. “Mom! Watch me!” If you’ve ever had kids, or been a kid, you know the refrain well. Let’s say you’re on the beach, watching from your blanket, and you see it play out right in front of you. The child starts out close to the parent, maybe building a sand castle nearby. Then they need a shell to complete the art work, so they start to venture out to get one but as the distance grows, they start to falter a little. They come back to the parent and say, “I need a shell!” The parent gives some encouragement to go find one, and then they venture out with more confidence. They get the shell, add it to the castle, praise arrives for their magnificent creation.

Now what?

Maybe they want to go for a swim, but now it’s really scary. The ocean is scary for most of us, I hope. So they do the dance several times now. Go to the edge, come back, go dip a toe in, come back. Returning to the base, over and over, each time getting a little farther away until they’re standing in the surf. “Mom! Watch me!” They carry a little of the base with them to help them be brave until they can swim.

They keep accessing the safe haven, with repeated and increasing risks away, until some part of it lives within them and they can go farther and farther before it’s too scary.

The secure base’s full name is the secure base for exploration, and I think the last part gets dropped, in childhood and later when we apply it to a romantic bond. Why did we do Stage 2? Not just for the felt experience of being with a responsive partner who knows you all the way down and loves you fully, though that is wonderful. We also did it because humans are explorers.

We are built to reach, to seek out new territory, to evolve. The secure base of a relationship allows us to become something new, both by revising our old stories in the context of a real person who loves us, and by building roads that branch out from that core, in ever-expanding and infinite ways. We seek out relationships to feel safe, yes, but we do that in the service of something larger. We seek out relationships to become ourselves, again and again and again.

Every time we leave the security of our bond and take another step further into an unknown territory, we expand as people to incorporate that new experience. We bring that new person back to the bond: “do you still love me now?” When the answer is yes, we go further yet, seeking more, becoming more, being loved in a new dimension.

We build safety so we can explore the world and expand ourselves. We bring every step of that unfolding back to a core base that gets richer and deeper with each iteration, so we can explore again.

We need safety because humans are not built only to survive love, we are built to journey from it and come back changed. Secure love is not a porch we sit on forever because nothing bad can happen there. It’s the porch light that stays on while we expand further and further into the dark.

This one is a bit more personal than what I typically post here. Happy Father’s Day.

Thank you for deciding to have kids anyway, even though you were scared. Thank you for worrying about how you would teach me God didn’t exist. Thank you for finding new faith in a rainstorm. Thank you for letting me fall asleep on you a thousand times. Thank you for playing dolls, and reading books, and letting me put my desk by you so we could work together.

Thank you for teaching me how to make a ponytail. Thank you for telling me I was beautiful because my forehead looked smart. Thank you for passing out in the driveway because you were too drunk to make it into the house. Thank you for teaching me kindness.

Thank you for teaching me how to do math. Thank you for running spelling bees in our kitchen. Thank you for showing me that dishwashers only sterilize, they don’t wash. Thank you for taking me to feed the ducks. Thank you for pushing me on the swings. Thank you for slamming your drunken foot into the phone to hang up on my friend. Thank you for taking me to the library.

Thank you for keeping the lock of hair that remained when you cut out a piece of gum that was stuck. Thank you for letting me walk to school on my own and secretly following me in your car to make sure I was safe. Thank you for teaching me to swim. Thank you for telling me a lot of things I definitely wasn’t ready to hear. Thank you for leaving me alone when I needed guidance, because you valued independence.

Thank you for telling me to always do what I think is right, regardless of external influence. Thank you for carrying me out of the drugstore when my stomach hurt and holding me closer when I threw up all over you. Thank you for making me mac and cheese when I was sick, and for making it again when the first one got cold. Thank you for teaching me to hustle pool.

Thank you for taking me to feed the unhoused folks in our town. Thank you for teaching me how to dumpster dive in case I ever got hungry. Thank you for teaching me to run a con. Thank you for teaching me how to make grilled cheese.

Thank you for grounding me by taking my books away. Thank you for teaching me to lie. Thank you for talking to me about sex, and making it safe for me to talk to you about sex. Thank you for cheering me on at every game, every band performance, every victory of my life.

Thank you for walking out on us in the middle of the night. Thank you for leaving me holding the bag. Thank you for making my mom’s pain my responsibility when I was too young to know that was impossible. Thank you for trying to get absolution before you were sorry.

Thank you for choosing your new wife over your daughter. Thank you for deciding I was grown up before I was.

Thank you for figuring out that was a mistake. Thank you for calling at 2am to say you’re sorry, you’re so sorry.

Thank you for teaching me what love should be, and what love should never be.

Thank you for becoming my friend as an adult. Thank you for writing me letters and sending me comics and sending me rocks and sending me books. Thank you for never quite forgetting me even when Alzheimer’s took your mind. Thank you for inexplicably filling me with sunlight the day you died. Thank you for for every breathless sobbing night that followed. Thank you for teaching me how to grieve.

I wish I could tell you who I became. But then, you should know. You taught me all of it.

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And then one of them will say, “No, this was different.”

So like any marvelously attuned therapist, I go right along: “Oh, this was different. Tell me about that, what felt different?” They give more specifics: “You didn’t even call when you were going to be late. You have no consideration. I deserve better than this.”

Then I lean into that specific moment: “Right, you’re standing there looking out the window, wondering where they are, and you get mad! This isn’t fair! They didn’t call tonight, and they said they would.”

This is where the funny thing happens.

They say, “It’s not just tonight, it’s every night! It’s always like this. They never think about me. This is just like every other time.”

Part of me is always amused here. First I zoom out to the pattern and you say no, it’s specific. So I get specific, and you say no, it’s general. I’ve always thought of this as a quirk, like an evasion of me, maybe. Nothing you say gets it, no-one understands.

But something happened this week that made me reconsider my position. I was exchanging comments with a reader about that sort of transitional space between a specific instance and a larger pattern. Both of us were kind of struggling to articulate it, which is, I’ve often found, where the magic is.

I made a quick aside in my reply about the phenomenon described above, and then I started thinking more about it. What if their objection isn’t that I’m reflecting the wrong part, what if it’s that the actual experience lives between that instance and the overall cycle of conflict?

In grad school I read a very trippy book called The Trickster Makes This World, by Lewis Hyde. One of the sentences that latched onto my brain and remains there to this day was this:

Think about a performance of a piece of music. If I say “Beethoven’s fifth” I’m referring to a particular pattern of notes, one that is always the same in every occurrence. But why do people go see three different orchestras perform it? Because it’s different depending on the players, the composition of instruments, the acoustics of the hall, your emotional state in that moment, and probably hundreds of other variables. The specific instance holds all those variables. The general pattern holds none of them.

The space between.

In between you sitting in your chair on a summer night after you’ve had an excellent meal and maybe some wine, and the sheet music on the stands of the players, lives an entire world. This experience of Beethoven’s fifth is like no other has ever been, and it is the same as all the others. If I zoom out to the sheet music, or I zoom all the way into what kind of wine you had, I’m missing the experience itself: the interaction between all of those things.

When a client says, “No, this time was different,” they may be protecting something important. Not because the pattern is absent, but because this manifestation has qualities that disappear when immediately subsumed into the category.

When I move too quickly out of the specific, I miss the exact quality of their pain, the very thing they most need to be seen. When I zoom in too close to the details, I’m missing how that pain has echoes of every pain that came before it. This hundredth or thousandth repetition of the pattern feels subtly different because it has repeated so many times.

I am, in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy terms, misattuned. And I don’t think it’s an accident, or an evasion, when I accurately reflect the specific pain of that moment, that they often zoom out on their own and point out the pattern. I ought to know more than most that when we feel met and held, it opens up the possibility of movement. “A secure base for exploration” is kind of the whole point of the book I wrote that made me start this newsletter in the first place. Maybe this is true even for conceptual exploration. I can’t see the general pattern until I feel met in the specific instance of it.

The usual therapeutic move is to assume that the truth lies beneath the surface. The specific fight is surface; the cycle is underneath. The complaint is surface; the attachment need is underneath. The anger is surface; the pain is underneath.

Often that’s useful. But our friend Hyde is pointing to a different possibility: what if the truth is not hidden beneath the surface? Perhaps it is exactly there, in the moving surfaces and not beneath.

What clients are telling me, I now think, is that I’m missing something important. This hurt arrived on this day, in this body, in this relationship, carrying the accumulated weight of everything that came before it. It is both unique and familiar. It belongs to a pattern, but it cannot be reduced to one. The fight is not just an example of the cycle, any more than a performance is just an example of the music.

Maybe the work (of couple therapy, of philosophy, of discourse, of everything) is not to choose between the specific and the general, or to reduce one to the other. It’s to stay in the between space long enough for something true to emerge. Some things may not be hidden underneath at all. They may exist only in the encounter itself: between the sheet music and the performance, between the cycle and the fight, between the pattern and its endless variations.

I still think there are truths beneath the surface. But I am less certain than I once was that they are the most interesting ones.

I went on a date with a man named Adam, and something happened that I am still, decades later, not entirely sure how to describe.

We were in bed together, early enough in the relationship that everything was still new and slightly astonishing, and I had gone somewhere. Drifted, the way I sometimes did without quite knowing it, present in body but absent in some harder-to-name way. Dissociation is the clinical term, and I knew the term, because I was studying it. What I didn’t know, until that moment, was that someone could notice.

He asked me to open my eyes.

That’s all. Just that. But no one had ever noticed before, and no one had ever asked, and the experience of being seen accurately, in the place where I actually was rather than the place I was performing being, was so unexpected and so complete that something shifted inside me. My internal working model of what I should expect from other people had a lot to say about invisibility. About the particular loneliness of being in a room full of people looking in your direction without quite seeing you. And here, in this person who had known me for approximately seventy-two hours, was someone who saw. Here, my nervous system informed me, with a certainty that bypassed all my scientific skepticism, was the person I had been waiting for.

A few days later I was sitting in an exam and, without warning, without invitation, a memory of that moment arrived in the middle of a question about trauma. An intrusive memory, vivid and disorienting, the kind that pulls you out of the present tense and deposits you somewhere else entirely. I sat there in the exam hall, physically present but emotionally and mentally back in that dorm room, and thought: I am either in serious trouble or onto something interesting.

It turned out to be both. The intrusive memory planted a question that became a years-long obsession and eventually a dissertation: what if transcendent positive experiences are as overwhelming to the brain as traumatic ones? What if the nervous system doesn’t, at some fundamental level, distinguish between an experience that is too much in a terrible way and one that is too much in a glorious way? What if the consequences, neurologically and relationally, are more similar than anyone had thought to look?

The intrusive memory sitting down at that exam was a data point. The brain sometimes treats overwhelming positive experience and overwhelming negative experience with the same basic toolkit: encoding it deeply, returning to it involuntarily, organizing subsequent perception around it. Falling in love can exceed what trauma therapists call the window of tolerance — the range of arousal a nervous system can process without being overwhelmed — just as surely as a car accident can. The difference is that nobody sends you to therapy for falling in love, because we have collectively decided it is a good thing, and good things are not supposed to require processing.

Unless you’re me.

Adam, and the sense of possibility he carried, and the deep, certain, embodied sense that I had always known this was going to happen someday, that there was a shape to my future that included exactly this: all of that was so overwhelming that I found myself, a student in clinical psychology who was supposed to know things about the mind, genuinely wondering if I had lost mine.

I had not lost my mind (well, not totally). But I had, it turns out, temporarily lent significant portions of it to my motivational system.

The early stages of romantic love are associated with activation of the dopaminergic reward system. The same network of structures involved in the experience of reward from food, gambling, and yes, addictive substances. This is why, in the early stages of love, the pursuit of the beloved has the quality of compulsion rather than choice. You are not deciding to think about them constantly. Your reward system has decided for you.

There is also a deactivation worth noting: the regions associated with critical social judgment tend to go quiet during early passionate love. The brain, in its wisdom, temporarily suspends the faculties most likely to notice that the person you’ve fallen for has annoying habits, complicated family dynamics, and a deeply questionable opinion about a film you love. This is, arguably, a feature: the nervous system clearing the way for pair-bonding by getting the prefrontal cortex out of the room for a while.

The result of all this neurological activity is an experience that researchers describe, with admirable understatement, as “motivationally significant.” Falling in love is a significant neurological event. What it feels like from the inside is more like being slightly insane in a way that is, for once, entirely pleasant. The intrusive thoughts. The inability to concentrate. The way time moves differently depending on whether they are present or absent. The physical symptoms — the racing heart, the heightened alertness, the sensation of the world being simultaneously more vivid and less real — that seventeenth-century physician Jacques Ferrand catalogued as the symptoms of “erotic melancholia” and that modern neuroscience has confirmed are real, measurable, and remarkably consistent across cultures and centuries.

Ferrand, working in 1610 without the benefit of fMRI technology, called passionate love a disease. He was not entirely wrong. He was also not entirely right. What he was looking at was a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: pursuing a potential mate with the full resources of the reward system, suspending ordinary judgment, and producing the kind of focused, relentless motivation that makes pair-bonding possible for a species whose offspring require years of cooperative care. It is just that the system, like many well-designed systems, is optimized for a purpose that is not always compatible with your comfort or your GPA (that B+ in molecular biology was worth it).

But I think there’s something else going on here.

What is the function of intrusive memories? They’re like reminders, or alarms: SOMETHING DOESN’T FIT. They pull our attention away from the status quo and onto something that is not yet incorporated into our worldview, our self-concept, our story. What trauma and early love have in common is that they destabilize us. They break the rhythm of everyday life. Trauma reorganizes us around fear. Love reorganizes us around possibility.

The possibility wasn’t just that Adam was different from other people. The possibility was that I might be different from who I thought I was. If someone could see me, perhaps I wasn’t invisible. If someone could stay present with the parts of me that disappeared, perhaps disappearing wasn’t necessary. By briefly removing my protections, it opened the door to the idea that maybe my defensive system was outdated, and the threats that it was created to manage were no longer present. The experience wasn’t merely pleasurable. It was disorienting.

The intrusive memories I experienced afterwards were a warning: YOU MIGHT BE WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING. And that warning kept coming for me, it arrived unbidden during that exam, and several more times in the weeks that followed. It refocused my attention towards the possibility of a reorganization of myself. An expansion, yes, but also a revision.

This is definitely still a hypothesis, one that has been evolving this way and that throughout my entire research career. I wrote my senior thesis in undergrad about intrusive memories and positive experiences. I wrote my doctoral dissertation about passionate love and why it makes us crazy. Now I’m writing this book about self-expansion and what makes it possible in long-term relationships. I still don’t know entirely what happened to me, and maybe that is the point. I understand it differently at every phase of my life and every phase of this relationship.

What I do know is that Adam shocked the hell out of me when he said “Open your eyes.” He surprised me enough that I did it. And then the world was different.

Aron, E. N., & Aron, A. (1996). Love and expansion of the self: The state of the model. Personal Relationships, 3(1), 45–58.

Acevedo, B. P., & Aron, A. P. (2014). Romantic love, pair-bonding, and the dopaminergic reward system. In M. Mikulincer & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Mechanisms of social connection: From brain to group (pp. 55–69). American Psychological Association.

Fisher, H. E., Aron, A., Mashek, D., Li, H., & Brown, L. L. (2002). Defining the brain systems of lust, romantic attraction, and attachment. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 31(5), 413–419.

For a while I assumed this was a me problem: some failure to enjoy the thing I thought I wanted. But I’ve come to realize that I mainly enjoyed the wanting itself. The obstacles were producing my enjoyment, because what I enjoyed was the striving, the reaching itself.

Something about risk opens a door inside us. If I play my game with a cheat code, I don’t feel the earned-ness of the payoff. It feels empty somehow. Unsatisfying. And I think it’s because the safe bet has no opening, no extension of myself into the possibility of no. Risk creates an opening for the payoff to land somewhere deeper within me, a new space that wasn’t there before. The person the payoff is happening to is a different person.

Wanting, it turns out, is almost entirely unrelated to having. The things that make us happy are hard to predict, and often, I think, it’s not even the having of them that makes us happy. Desire is there to motivate us to act, to get us to seek out what we want or need. Fear of risk is a competing urge, one that tells us to hesitate before we risk losing it all. At the same time, fear is what gives striving its charge. Overcoming fear is the reason striving feels so alive. But if the fear overcomes the desire, survival is pretty much all we get. And if we want more than that, how can we amplify our want enough to tip the scales? I think the world might not be helping the process.

There’s a neuroscientist named Kent Berridge who spent a lot of years on what seems like a simple question: are wanting and liking the same thing? Answer: Nope. They’re handled by completely different systems in the brain. Dopamine - which everyone thinks of as the pleasure chemical - is almost entirely about wanting. It’s the signal that says go get that. The actual experience of enjoyment, the liking part, runs on a different system entirely. Wanting and liking don't consult each other. And sometimes they lead us somewhere very far from what we actually need.

There’s another layer, too, when what we want is something that’s hard to ask for, or hard to believe we can actually have. Now the seeking of what is wanted is a risk. The other person might say no. They might say yes and give us the wrong thing, putting us in the deeply uncomfortable position of having to ask again, exponentially more risky than the first time. So we do what we do when things are too scary, we avoid the risk of identifying the need directly. We ask for something else instead.

I talk to my clients a lot about potato chips and broccoli. When your body needs nutrients, you feel a hunger that is slightly different in quality from when your body simply needs energy. It feels deeper and more specific. But what do we do when the thing our body is asking for is not available? We eat something else. Consider if you deeply needed, say, vitamin K. You need broccoli. But maybe you’re at a place that doesn’t have any broccoli, but they have a vending machine. You buy some potato chips. Eat one. What happens next?

You want more chips. They’re specifically designed, on purpose, to make you want more chips. It’s in the marketing copy! (Or it was, is “bet you can’t eat just one” still the Lays slogan?) And more fundamentally, it’s in the food itself. Hyperpalatable foods are created not to satisfy hunger, but to make you want more food.

I see this pattern, in myself, and in other people, where we ask for something that is sort of adjacent to what we actually need, and then if we get it, we feel dissatisfied. Many of us then attribute that dissatisfaction to the person providing it, like well you must have done it wrong, that’s why I don’t feel the way I want to feel. Maybe I needed a different brand of potato chips.

Potato chips actually do have a small amount of vitamin K. They’re not devoid of it entirely. There’s just enough in there leftover from the original hero potato, container of all nutrients, to make a chip not a total nutritional zero. I was reading a post this morning by a new-to-me writer I’ve been really enjoying lately, Tamara. She said, “We tell people to stop seeking attention as if attention were not a basic social nutrient.” What do we do if we deeply need attention, but none is apparently available? Maybe our partner is distracted. Maybe we have been told a million times in a million ways that needing attention is wrong. Maybe — likely — both. So we ask for something else instead.

Here is where I want you to think about your phone.

Every major social platform was designed by people who understood the wanting/liking split very well, and built accordingly. The scroll is infinite not because infinite content is satisfying, but because stopping feels bad. Notifications are timed to catch you in a low-wanting moment and spike it back up. The little red number on the app icon is not there to give you information. It’s to make you want to look.

What you get when you look is not, typically, connection. It might have trace amounts — a friend’s photo, a comment that makes you feel seen for a moment — just enough vitamin K to make it not a total zero. But the platform is not trying to give you connection. It is trying to keep you on the platform. These are not the same goal, and in fact they are often in direct conflict.

This is the attention economy: a vending machine built at the scale of civilization, stocked with things that are shaped like connection and taste like connection, but engineered not to satisfy the hunger for it. Many of us spend hours a day at that machine, feeling vaguely hollow, wondering what’s wrong with us.

We often feel the same way in relationships. Hungry, starving for attention and care, longing for the person sitting right next to us (maybe also on their phone). But in love, and in food, society condemns the starving in similar ways. Fat people are fat because they’re morally bankrupt, because they have no willpower, because they’re just too needy. Partners longing for more attention are co-dependent, high-maintenance, once again too needy. If you want love, if you want health, kill that disgusting void inside yourself that is always demanding more, more, more. So instead of saying “could we hang out and do nothing and you just focus on me? I really need that,” we say:

Could you just do the dishes for once?

Why don’t you ever initiate sex?

Everything else is more important than me.

This last one is closest to the actual need, attention, so you’ll notice it’s also the most defended. It’s not even a question.

So we ask, or criticize, and then maybe the other person does do the dishes, or tries to initiate sex, or plan a date night, and then what happens? We don’t feel better. We felt that tiny hit of vitamin K, so much less than what we needed, and on top of that tiny sense of almost-it is a huge wave of not-good-enough.

How do we then understand this moment? I did my part, I asked for the thing, then it didn’t feel good, so it must be you didn’t really want to do it. Or you only did it because I asked. Or, worst of all, my need intensifies, and I amp up my request or my criticism, and then the message comes back and hits me all the way down to that void inside me I’m always trying to ignore. You’re so demanding. No one can satisfy you. Why should I even give you another chip? They never please you anyway.

The wound deepens. And next time, it’s even harder to ask for the broccoli some part of me actually knows I need. So much harder that the knowing part of me gets quieter and it’s hard for me to even sense what is needed. So my ask gets even farther away from the truth.

The more shallow the scroll becomes, the more unsatisfying each notification feels, the more we seek it out. Maybe we find a new platform; this will be the one that can make me feel better. Or maybe we just don’t have a big enough following, because why?

We’re trying too hard. We should be more authentic. We should write better. They don’t love us because we’re not trying hard enough yet.

Or maybe we just haven’t asked the right question.

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Related post:

Here’s what Esther Perel gets undeniably right in Mating in Captivity: desire is not the same thing as love. It has different needs. It requires an object - something to move toward, to want, to not quite possess yet. She’s a devastatingly precise writer, and when she argues that familiarity is desire’s natural predator, it lands because it maps onto something most people have actually felt. Even feeling about as strong in my position as I ever am about anything, I find her convincing. I don't agree with her conclusions, and I still find her nearly impossible to argue with in the moment. The hunger she describes is real. The problem is the remedy.

Perel’s prescription is distance: manufactured mystery, strategic separateness, the curated opacity of two people who refuse to fully domesticate each other. This assumes that security itself is the enemy. But the couples I’ve sat with who’ve kept desire alive over decades haven’t preserved it by keeping each other slightly out of reach. They’ve done it by remaining genuinely interesting to themselves. By using the safety of the bond as a launch pad and pushing their own self-evolution, and bringing that evolved self back to their partner. The enemy of desire isn’t security. It’s stagnation. And the difference matters enormously, because stagnation is fixable. It’s not about introducing instability into your relationship, or at least that’s not the cause of renewed desire. It is a cost, in that evolution is a risk and bringing your partner a new person to love in a new way risks that they might not like it. But I think the causal factor isn’t the instability, it’s the evolution. It’s exciting to watch a person change and grow, and to get to know them in a new delicious way after a long time of not doing so.

Perel tells the story of Charles and Rose, and it’s instructive precisely because of what she does with it. Charles begins taking other lovers. Rose, who has never been particularly interested in sex, finds herself more drawn to him. Perel attributes this to elusiveness. Rose desires what she can no longer fully possess. But Charles describes something else entirely: “When I feel erotically alive,” he says, “I don’t worry about death and I don’t worry about my age.” He’s not describing distance. He’s describing expansion, a more vivid inhabiting of himself. And what Rose is responding to, I’d argue, is the charge of that aliveness, not the sting of his absence. Perel nearly says so herself: “Each of them would have to tolerate the unfolding of the other, even if it took them beyond their range of comfort.” Tolerate. That single word tells you everything about where her frame is anchored. What if it isn’t tolerance? What if it’s the most intimate thing two people can do? Discover, together, who the other is still becoming?

I’m not saying that to reintroduce zest in one’s marriage, one has to take a lover, either in the context of consensual non-monogamy or an affair. Expansion through sex is only one of many kinds of expansion. I’ll give an example from my own life at present. A few weeks ago, I went to an externship where we trained new therapists in the Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy model. The trainer we had was amazing, and I felt so inspired, both by him and by the energy of the group, so much so that I came home and went hard on finishing the book that has been languishing in my hard drive for the past five years. I wrote for two solid days, and after that I started to notice that my clinical zest was returning. I was excited about work for the first time in awhile, as I’ve been in a kind of stagnant state myself.

I started engaging in the platform building around the book, figuring out my “brand” (gag), revising what I’d written, diving in to my clinical work with a new joy and interest, and as a result I feel myself coalescing into this new form that is still not quite fleshed out in my mind, but I can see the map of it. All of this has made me even more drawn to my husband, and I can feel him responding to me as well. I’m excited to share my discoveries with him, he’s fascinated to hear about them, and the passion in our bond evolves even as I do personally.

This is a small expansion. I’m not discovering anything entirely new at this moment, more adding depth and shading to an existing picture. But even a small expansion impacts the bond.

Muise and Goss, researchers who were most sympathetic to Perel’s concern - wondering whether she might be onto something about closeness suffocating desire - found something she didn’t predict. They set out to test whether too much closeness dampens desire. What they found, across 269 couples, was a linear relationship: more closeness, more desire.

But what they found alongside that is the part I keep returning to. They introduced a construct they called “otherness” - not distance, not manufactured mystery, but the experience of seeing your partner in a new light. Perceiving them as distinct, as still-unfolding, as capable of surprising you. And across three studies, they found that self-expansion through new experiences that stretch you predicted both higher closeness and higher otherness. And both, in turn, predicted more desire.

This is what’s happening with Charles and Rose. He doesn’t become harder to reach. He becomes new to himself, which makes him new to her. Muise and Goss would call what Rose is responding to “otherness.” Perel calls it elusiveness. The difference isn’t semantic. Elusiveness is something you manufacture by pulling back. Otherness is something you generate by going forward. And, crucially, that higher closeness concept gets at what I’m getting at. The secure base is what makes expansion possible and, crucially, what makes the expanded self welcome. Our embrace of the otherness magnifies desire just as much as the otherness itself.

Perel asks: how do you want someone you already have? It’s the right question. I just think she’s looking for the answer in the wrong place - in the gap between two people rather than in the interior life of each one. Desire doesn’t need your partner to be a stranger. It needs them to be alive. And it needs you to be alive enough to notice.

The couples I’ve sat with who’ve managed this aren’t mysterious to one another. They’re interesting. There’s a difference. Mystery is something you protect by withholding. Interest is something you generate by living. And the beautiful, counterintuitive thing is that a secure bond doesn’t extinguish that. It fuels it. The people who feel safest, the most loved, are often the ones who dare to become the most.

Muise, A., & Goss, S. (2024). Does too much closeness dampen desire? On the balance of closeness and otherness for the maintenance of sexual desire in romantic relationships. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 33(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214231211542

Goss, S. C., Raposo, S., Balzarini, R., Rosen, N. O., Benyamin, V., & Muise, A. (2022). Feeling close and seeing a partner in a new light: How self-expansion is associated with sexual desire. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 39(8), 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075221081137

There are two halves operating here: the baby crying to bring the parent close, and the parent’s urge to respond and comfort. The crying is not just an involuntary reflex. It is a signal, ancient and precise, designed by evolution to be exactly as hard to ignore as it is. Because what are the consequences, in the ancient history of the animal kingdom, of ignoring infant distress? Often, in dangerous or deprived circumstances, a child who was not responded to did not survive. Our bodies are built to respond to distress calls. And yet: the book says wait. The doctor says wait. And so they wait, or they try to.

What happens next - whether someone comes, how reliably, how warmly - is the beginning of a long story. The baby’s nervous system is plastic, easy to shape around experience. Over weeks and months, a felt sense takes shape: what love is, how it works, whether it shows up when you need it.

This is the basic architecture of attachment theory.

If you’ve spent any time online in the last few years, you probably know the shorthand: secure, anxious, avoidant. Maybe you’ve taken a quiz. Maybe you’ve told yourself you’re anxiously attached (hi), or decided your ex was definitely an avoidant, or read something explaining which attachment types you should filter out of your dating life. The content is everywhere. Some of it is reasonably accurate. A lot of it is not.

Attachment research is actually incredibly rigorous and robust for a psychological theory. Attachment itself is pervasive, woven all throughout our relational lives, and it is too important for us to fuck it up like this.

Here’s what most of the discourse misses: attachment styles are, more than anything else, a perspective. They are not personality types. They are not a horoscope. They are not a Myers-Briggs assessment, which is itself not super scientific, though at least nobody is telling you to filter your dating app to avoid INFPs.

The current discourse takes this idea of avoidant and anxious attachment, turns them into types of people, and says: watch out for that one. Protect yourself. Choose wisely.

I find this a little ironic. The anxious person, told to stay vigilant around avoidants, becomes more vigilant, which is anxious behavior. The avoidant person, exhausted by demands, decides that the anxious style is a pathology they should avoid, and retreats into self-sufficiency, which is avoidant behavior. We are enacting the conflict cycle I see every day in my therapy office on a global scale, and calling it self-awareness.

What attachment science actually describes is closer to this: the glasses you forgot you were wearing. Bowlby called it an internal working model: a set of expectations about how relationships work that forms early, updates slowly, and operates mostly below awareness. It is less like a map you consult and more like the prescription already in your lenses. Everything you see is already filtered through it.

The person who learned that love comes when you escalate, who hit the gas as a baby because amplifying distress was what worked, does not carry around a label that says “anxious.” They carry an embodied sense (along with a whole lot of thoughts) that relationships are uncertain, that connection requires vigilance, that their partner going quiet is probably a sign of something. That is not a type. That is a lens.

The person who learned that reaching does not work, and that the sensible adaptation is to stop reaching and hit the brakes instead, does not think of themselves as avoidant. They probably think of themselves as independent, maybe even low-maintenance. They also cannot quite understand why their partner seems to require so much.

These patterns are adaptations. Sensible ones, given what produced them. They are also changeable, particularly within a specific relationship. Not quickly, and not through better filtering on a dating app, but genuinely, through relationship, through new experience, through what researchers call corrective attachment experiences. The nervous system takes in new data. The prescription, over time, can be updated.

I am a couples therapist, which means I watch these two nervous systems sit across from each other on a regular basis. The discourse tends to frame the anxious/avoidant combo as a compatibility problem. I tend to think of it as an origin story. Which means it has more than one possible ending.

“I inquire, I do not assert; I do not here determine anything with final assurance; I conjecture, try, compare, attempt, ask....”

Translation of Motto to Christian Knorr von Rosenroth

Quoted on the title page of The Psychology of the Transference by Carl Jung.

This quote was on the first page of my dissertation draft and my supervisor made me take it out because it undercut my position. When I have friends read my work, they often tell me “stop hedging everything. You need to talk with more authority.” My writing is littered with “I would argue…” and “possibly,” “often,” “at times.” After the fifth or twentieth time I tell clients “Correct me if I’m not getting this right,” they are like, “ANDREA. WE KNOW YOU ARE GUESSING.”

It’s a problem. But it’s also I think what might save me.

I’m in this position now where I’m trying to promote my book and trying to get my voice out there so I can prove to publishers that I totally have a Platform and people will totally buy this book where I tell everyone how it is. And here, too, the advice is to never hedge and to speak with confidence. I’m better at it than I used to be, slightly more comfortable with being the expert in the room, because I have found that sometimes people need an expert. Sometimes it feels containing to be with someone who can just tell you what’s going on. I’m more comfortable with knowing what I know (or, you know, being mostly sure.)

But I think there’s real value in my core ability to never be 100% certain of anything. That’s why I love science so much, we’re only ever operating on our best guess, and it’s baked into this philosophy of inquiry to change our minds when we find contradictory evidence, no matter how strong our opinion. Because the truth is, we don’t know. I am pretty sure about attachment theory, pretty sure about couple conflict cycles, because I have a mountain of evidence seen with my own eyes that confirms these ideas. But it is just a theory, and it is flawed, and to pretend otherwise so I can sell myself feels abhorrent to me on a molecular level.

This makes me bad at Instagram.

It makes me a good scientist. A good therapist. A good person, I think. It makes me more trustworthy, in my own mind. I don’t trust people who think they have it all figured out. And there’s another wrinkle.

There’s a kind of troublesome pattern in my field where, because therapists are generally kind to each other and want to lift each other up, we often become this echo chamber of hype men. Particularly in EFT therapy circles, most talks or clinical examples are followed by “I loved how you did X” and “You’re so brilliant because Y.” This is a great thing! And it has the tendency to create what I’ve started thinking of a narcissism trap.

If you hear endlessly how brilliant you are, you start to believe it. It’s the science behind affirmations that pop psychology is always telling you to give yourself. If the brain hears a message enough times, it decides it’s true. And you know, it’s fine and good to get the general idea that you’re smart and competent, especially if you are. But I never, ever, want to get the idea that I’m infallible or immune to criticism or the sole authority on something. Especially when that something is my clients’ experience.

I was supposed to write about a hallway today, a sequence from chapter 1 of my book that will give readers a visceral sense of how the attachment system is formed. I wrote about this instead, because I felt so uncomfortable with making the instagram slides (which do not allow much room for hedging) that I just kept sitting there not doing it.

I am smart and competent. I do think my ideas are worth sharing (obviously). I will continue to try to make my voice a little more authoritative, because hedging does detract from the clarity of a position, and it’s important that I be clear. But I guess I just wanted a lengthy disclaimer out there first.

I inquire. And that’s a good thing about me.

I think. :)

We kept working. Slowly, the relationship became safer. He became more able to sit with his wife’s gaze without bracing. She became more able to reach without fearing she’d be left reaching. The bond, as we say in my field, was securing.

And then one session, I asked him again. What is it you want? He was quiet for a long time. I watched him actually listen to the feeling rather than frantically search for words to cover it. And then he said, almost to himself:

I want us to feel like a kaleidoscope.

His wife and I both stared at him. It felt like something big was happening, like no one knew what a kaleidoscope was, but we all also knew exactly what it was.

Not because it was poetic, though it was, but because it was precise. He wasn’t describing more of the same thing. A single beam of light doesn’t become a kaleidoscope by getting brighter. It becomes one by having more facets to move through. He was describing something that had become more complex. More dimensional.

Passion is the felt sense of intimacy increasing.

I’ve been thinking about this definition for a long time, and I keep coming back to it because of what it implies: that passion is not a static thing you have or don’t have. It’s a felt response to movement. To change. To the sense that something between you is growing.

But here’s what I think we get wrong about that growth. We tend to imagine it linearly. More intimacy means more of the same intimacy, accumulated over time. And eventually, the thinking goes, you run out of newness. You know each other too well. The growth stops and so does the passion. This is the story Esther Perel tells so compellingly: that familiarity and desire are in fundamental tension, that we want what we can’t quite have.

I think that story is half right and half backwards.

Consider how a brain grows.

Not by adding neurons — you’re born with most of the ones you’ll ever have. A brain grows by forming connections between neurons. Synapses. Pathways. Patterns of activation that didn’t exist before. And from that increasing complexity, something emerges that couldn’t have existed in any single cell: a mind. Consciousness. The capacity for memory, imagination, love.

This is what scientists and mathematicians mean by emergence: the appearance of properties in a system that cannot be found in or predicted from its individual components. The mind is not in any one neuron. It arises from the pattern of relationships between them. It is, in the most literal sense, more than the sum of its parts.

A bond works the same way.

Early in a relationship, the increase in intimacy is fast and obvious. Everything is new. Every conversation reveals something. Every touch is information. The passion is intense because the intimacy is increasing rapidly. You can feel it happening in real time. This is that initial flicker. A single bright beam of light.

Then something changes. The easy newness diminishes. You’ve covered the surface. And here is exactly where most couples — and most cultural narratives — make the mistake. They interpret the slowing of that first rapid increase as the beginning of the end. The passion is fading, they think. We’ve lost something.

What they’ve actually entered is complexity.

Depth comes in. History accumulates. You’ve fought and repaired. You’ve disappointed each other and stayed anyway. You’ve seen each other sick, scared, boring, luminous. You know things about this person that they’ve never said out loud to anyone else, and they know the same about you. You have a private language. Shared griefs. Jokes that require no setup.

None of this is a diminishment of the bond. It is the bond becoming more dimensional and faceted. More like a kaleidoscope than a single beam of light.

Desire doesn’t disappear in a complex bond. It differentiates. It becomes more specific, more nuanced, more capable of surprise. Not because your partner is still a mystery, but because you both keep becoming. Two people in a genuinely alive relationship don’t stop changing. They keep discovering new parts of themselves and bringing those parts back to a bond responsive enough to receive them. That return, that ongoing revelation, is where desire lives.

The husband who said I want us to feel like a kaleidoscope couldn’t have said that in our first session. Not because he lacked the language (okay, that too), but because he lacked the felt experience. The bond had to secure first. He had to feel safe enough to listen inward, to let the feeling differentiate from a formless hunger into something he could almost see. What emerged when he did was not a simpler wish. It was a more complex one.

What I notice in my work is that the couples who sustain desire over time are rarely the ones who’ve kept things exciting through novelty and distance, though that can work for a while. They’re the ones whose bond has become genuinely complex. Who have enough safety to keep changing as individuals, and enough aliveness between them to keep finding each other interesting.

They’re not in the initial, exciting flicker of brilliance anymore. They’re in something harder to name and harder to manufacture. Something that took years to build and that has a kind of luminosity that’s different in quality from the early brightness. Less blinding, more immersive, complicated, infinitely interesting.

A kaleidoscope.

Dr. Andrea Medaris is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified EFT couples therapist in Brunswick, Maine. She writes about attachment science and relationships at The Emotional Logic. Her book, What You Wish For, is forthcoming.