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Couples today, especially ones who've been together for many years, are vulnerable to a silent, almost invisible and slow-growing "relationship disease." I call this condition coexistence without contact. Couples living with this "disease" share a home, a bed and a schedule while living in almost entirely separate daily realities.
In her book "Reclaiming Conversation," for example, MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle describes the modern experience of "being together, but also being elsewhere," and argues that it undermines our capacity to have the conversations that count. Real conversations require both people to be present.
As a psychologist who specializes in relationships, I see couples having fewer of those real conversations and being less present with each other. They build systems for running a shared life. They work out who handles the mornings, who books the appointments, which chores belong to whom and how the week gets planned. These systems are a genuine achievement, and they're indicative of good management.
But a relationship isn't a company you're trying to run. A company improves when you divide responsibilities clearly and let each person own one area. A relationship is more complicated than that. In my experience, what holds two people together is overlap, along with conversation and genuine connection.
It builds through small habits that each look harmless, but get out of hand because you repeat them for a decade. In my experience, three of them do most of the damage:
In my experience, this issue shows up in five fairly predictable ways.
You confirm the plumber is coming Tuesday, agree on who's collecting your daughter from band practice and decide what to do about your mother's birthday.
But while you settle things and close loops, you never get to the strange thing a colleague said in a meeting, the article you read on the train or the fact that you've been contemplating leaving your job. These tangents you're missing are how you keep learning about a person you already know well.
Looking at your phone can feel easier than starting a conversation. So you head to bed at different times, scroll for 20 minutes and turn the lights off without saying anything.
That window when you unwind together and talk before falling asleep matters because being tired can lower your filter. People say things at 11 p.m. that they might not have shared at 8 p.m.
You both know about the dentist on Thursday and the school thing on Friday because the calendar told you. Mornings become a matter of getting everyone out of the house on time, and you leave knowing your partner's schedule without knowing what they're dreading in it. A calendar can tell you where your partner will be but not how they feel about being there.
You catch up on errands, admin, repairs and the people you owe a visit. Against a backlog like that, splitting up is simply the better strategy, since two people working separately cover far more ground than two people doing the same job together.
But you've already spent five days mostly apart, and the weekend is sometimes the only real opportunity to close that gap. An idle Saturday might look like waste, but an "unproductive" weekend is sometimes exactly what a relationship needs.
It's easy enough to go your separate ways whenever you do have downtime. You have your shows, your partner has theirs and the one you watch together is a compromise neither of you is enthusiastic about.
Couples tend to read this as a sign they've grown incompatible, when it's usually the result of spending years avoiding accommodating each other's taste. That negotiation keeps each of you current on what the other actually enjoys now, which changes more over a decade than people expect.
It also gives you regular practice at setting your own preference aside for someone else's, a skill that goes rusty without use. Couples who stop exercising it on something as low-stakes as a Friday evening often find it much harder to manage when the stakes are real.
The good news is that each bit of contact you get back makes the next one easier to reach. Here are a few places to start:
Mark Travers, Ph.D., is a psychologist who specializes in relationships. He holds degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the lead psychologist at Awake Therapy, a telehealth company that provides online psychotherapy, counseling and coaching. He is also the curator of the popular mental health and wellness website Therapytips.org.
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