RELATIONSHIPS

7 Key Relationship Insights I've Learned As A Couples Counselor.

RELATIONSHIPS • May 01, 2016

When people learn I’m a couples counselor, I’m often asked for any juicy tidbits or words of wisdom I might have to support them in their relationship.

Juicy and wise, they may or may not be but there are a few things I’ve learned for sure about relationships in my work as a couples counselor that I’m always happy to share with folks.

Today, I want to share these seven key relationship insights with you in the hopes that they may feel helpful and supportive to you and your relationships. 

1) Relationships are often hard work.

Disney, Rom-coms, TV and hyper-edited social media have led many of us to believe something along the lines of “when you’re with The One it’s easy.” And I completely disagree.

Long-term, committed, romantic relationship is often hard. And that’s perfectly normal and natural. After all, you get two people together with all their triggers, wounds, quirks, preferences and neuroses and then you expect them to manage a house and build a life together through sickness, financial stressors, changing bodies, changing libidos, in-laws, kids, commutes and more – how could this possibly always be easy even if you are with “The One” (a belief I also don’t subscribe to.)?!

The bottom line is that, in my professional and personal opinion, relationships are often hard work. And… with that said, some relationships may be harder or easier than others depending on the specific context, compatibility, and willingness of any couple to heal and to grow together.

2) There’s no such thing as a perfect partner and you don’t get a wish list of “101 Must-Haves.”

Quite honestly, I don’t believe in the concept of “The One” and I don’t believe there’s a single perfect partner out there for each of us (see this blog post for more of my thoughts on that). I also don’t think it’s helpful or realistic to create lists of “101 Must Haves” in a partner when you’re looking to find, keep, or heal a relationship.

“101 Must Haves” is a lot and it’s doubtful any one person could fulfill such a list no matter what was on it. Now that said, you absolutely get to have some preferences about who and what you’re looking for in a partner.

Indeed, often what I recommend to clients is to reflect on and create a list of “10 Must Have” character traits of a partner (think of qualities of character, how you want to feel around them, and what’s most important for you in terms of values and life goals) to help them clarify what’s most needed/wanted in a partner.

3) Relationships are where the rubber of personal growth meets the road.

I think insights gained from books, articles, personal growth seminars and more are fabulous. And I think that where those insights and aspirations to growth and healing will always get tested is in the often messy, real-life experiential arena of relationships.

Relationships are our greatest mirror, the catalyst for bringing up and reflecting back to us all of our STUFF. Is this painful and hard sometimes? Sure. But the good news is that relationship – a certain kind of relationship – can also provide us with the very opportunities we need to heal, grow, and transform old childhood wounds, more so than any book or seminar ever will.

What kind of relationship helps facilitate that? Well, a kind of relationship where there is a safe container between the partners. In other words, a firm commitment to each other and a willingness to grow and to not give up when the going gets tough (as it inevitably will sometimes). That’s the kind of relationship that, I think, has the opportunity to be a deeply healing experience for the people in it.

4) Commitment and a willingness to grow are critical. These should be on your list.

Per the above, consider adding an ability to commit and a willingness to grow on your list of desired qualities in a partner. At the end of the day, these two qualities – commitment to you and a willingness to grow in the context of a relationship – count for so much over the long arc of a committed, romantic relationship.

5) 69% of your problems won’t be solved. They can only be managed (sorry).

According to nation’s leading couples researchers, Drs. John and Julie Gottman, 69% of a couples’ perpetual problems won’t actually get solved. They can only be managed.

In other words, those issues that you two tend to gridlock over again and again (e.g.: She’s neat, he’s messy. She’s always early, he’s always late. He’s a saver, she’s a spender.), are likely due to inherent temperament and personality differences.

The issues then, will likely keep reappearing over the course of your relationship and won’t be solved. They can only be managed (hint: couples counseling is an excellent resources for learning how to manage these problems and make space for both of your differences in the relationship.).

6) You can have many different relationships with the same person.

Over the course of a couple’s life together, depending on how you both show up for each other and your personal work, it’s possible for the dynamics and patterns between you to shift and heal and transform in ways that may feel unimaginable.

The person you’re struggling with so much right now could be the person who you re-fall madly in love with again down the road. Or vice versa. We as people are so changeable, so unfixed, so ripe with potential for transformation, and so is your relationship.

I personally and professionally think it’s possible to feel like you’ve had multiple different relationships with the same person over the course of committed, long-term relationship.

7) Each universe between a couple is a world of its own.

I love the visual of those old, Tolkien-esque maps where there are forests, markers, unbeaten paths, mysteries, and blind spots.

I tend to think that the world each couple constellates between themselves in relationship is something like one of these old, highly detailed maps of an alternate world. The universe and land a couple creates between them is wholly unique and totally unlike the proverbial relational topography that any other couple might experience.

What do I mean by this? I mean that no one else is the expert of your experience and can tell you what your relationship should look like. You and your partner get to make up your own rules about how often (or not) you want to have sex, how you split household chores, how you divvy the finances, how you manage your sleeping arrangements, how you sweet talk and geek out together behind closed doors.

This — the texture and landscape of your relationship — is totally yours and will be unlike that of anyone else. Only you can really know and navigate and create this terrain together. (But a good couples counselor can definitely be a guide along the way for you.)

Wrapping this up.

So there you have it. Seven key insights I’ve learned from my work as a couples counselor and as a fellow human in relationship. I hope this list of insights felt helpful to you no matter where you are in your own relationship journey.

Now I’d love to hear from you:

Leave me a message in the comments below and I’ll be sure to respond.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Resources:

Eager to read more of my blog posts on relationships? Check out the following:

• The Myth of the Perfect Partner & The Myth That Love Should Be Easy.
• “What if I never meet The One?”
• A Care Package for Your Relationship.
• Three little-known communication tools to improve your relationships.

Frequently Asked Questions

This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: Attachment Styles: A Complete Guide.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Johnson, S. M. (2004). The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection. Brunner-Routledge.
• Gottman, J. M., & Gottman, J. S. (2015). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books.
• Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1992). Marital Processes Predictive of Later Dissolution: Behavior, Physiology, and Health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press.
• Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
• Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (2000). The Timing of Divorce: Predicting When a Couple Will Divorce Over a 14-Year Period. Journal of Marriage and Family.
• Johnson, S. M. (2008). Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Little, Brown and Company.

What Driven Women Often Miss About Their Relationships

There’s a particular pattern I see with driven, ambitious women in couples counseling: they bring the same executive functioning to their relationships that serves them brilliantly everywhere else. They problem-solve. They research. They make plans. They optimize. And they’re often completely blindsided when none of that works.

Relationships don’t run on efficiency. They run on attunement — that quality of feeling genuinely felt by another person. You can read every communication book ever published, you can have the most productive conflict-resolution conversation imaginable, and still leave the room feeling like you weren’t really there for each other. Because attunement isn’t a skill you execute. It’s a state you enter.

Leila was a partner at a tech startup, managing teams of forty people with what everyone described as exceptional emotional intelligence. She could read a room, defuse conflict, build culture. And at home, with her wife of eight years, she felt like a complete failure. “I know how to do this with other people,” she told me in our first session. “Why can’t I do it here?”

The answer, as it often is, was stakes. At work, attunement was a professional skill deployed from a position of relative safety. At home, real vulnerability was required — the terrifying kind, where what you need is also what you most fear not getting. Leila had never let herself be that exposed. She’d spent decades keeping need at a manageable distance, and she’d married someone who was patient enough to wait for her to learn how.

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of The Developing Mind, describes this kind of work as developing “mindsight” — the capacity to see and shape the workings of your own mind, and to understand the minds of others. In couples work, that means being able to notice your own emotional state, name it accurately, and communicate it before it hijacks the conversation. It’s a skill that can absolutely be learned. But it requires slowing down in ways that high-functioning people typically resist.

The good news is that driven women, once they commit to this kind of work, are often extraordinarily effective at it. The same intelligence that helps you succeed professionally can absolutely be redirected toward your most important relationship. It just requires a different operating system — one that runs on presence, not performance.

Both/And: Love Is Complicated — And That’s Okay

In my work with clients, I find that the most important breakthroughs happen not when someone chooses one truth over another, but when they learn to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

You can be grateful for what you have and grieve what you didn’t get. You can love someone and acknowledge the harm they caused. You can be strong and still need help. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the texture of a fully lived relationship.

The driven, ambitious women I work with often struggle with this because they’ve been trained to solve problems, not sit with paradox. But relationships don’t get solved — they get tended. There’s no optimization strategy for intimacy. There’s only the ongoing, imperfect practice of showing up.

Nadia came to therapy frustrated by what she called “regression.” After two years of genuinely good work with her husband — better communication, more connection — she’d expected a permanent upgrade. Instead, she was back in the same fight, the same shutdown, the same exhausted silence. She wanted to know what had gone wrong.

What I offered her was a both/and: the progress she’d made was real and the hard moments would keep happening. Growth in relationships isn’t a straight line. It spirals. You pass through the same tender spots again and again — but you do it differently. With more tools, more self-awareness, more capacity for repair. The both/and frame saved her from treating temporary difficulty as permanent failure.

Both/and thinking is also what allows couples to navigate radically different attachment styles — one partner who leans anxious, one who leans avoidant — without one person being wrong. Both developed their style in response to early experiences. Both carry pain. Both deserve to be understood. That dual understanding is, in my experience, where real change becomes possible.

The Systemic Lens: Why Your Relationship Didn’t Happen in a Vacuum

When we locate relationship struggles exclusively in the individual — “What’s wrong with me?” or “What’s wrong with us?” — we miss the larger forces at work. Culture, family systems, economic structures, and intergenerational patterns all shape the terrain on which couples navigate their lives.

This matters because the driven women I work with almost universally blame themselves for relational pain that was never theirs alone to carry. The hypervigilance in conflict. The difficulty trusting. The profound loneliness even inside a committed relationship. These aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive responses to early environments that didn’t reliably provide safety, attunement, or repair.

Consider the cultural context: driven, ambitious women often inhabit professional environments that implicitly demand they suppress emotional needs, project invulnerability, and equate interdependence with weakness. Then they come home and try to create intimacy — which requires the exact opposite. The exhaustion of that switch isn’t personal failure. It’s structural stress.

Resmaa Menakem, MSW, trauma therapist and author of My Grandmother’s Hands, writes about how unresolved trauma — including relational trauma — moves through bodies, families, and cultures across generations. The ways your parents fought, or didn’t, or couldn’t — were shaped by how their parents fought, or didn’t, or couldn’t. You didn’t create these patterns. You inherited them. And in your relationship today, you have the first real chance to change them.

That reframe — from “What’s wrong with us?” to “What were we each handed, and can we decide together to put it down?” — is, in my experience, often where the most profound couples work begins.

What Healing Looks Like In Real Relationships

Camille came to couples counseling convinced that her husband simply didn’t understand her. A physician running her own practice, she’d spent years managing everything at home and at work with the same clinical precision she brought to complex patient cases. She was competent, organized, driven — and completely exhausted by the emotional labor of a relationship where she felt perpetually unseen.

What emerged over months of work wasn’t that her husband was indifferent. It was that Camille had learned, early in life, that her needs were a burden. She’d gotten so good at hiding them that her husband — who genuinely wanted to meet her — couldn’t locate them. She wasn’t being neglected. She was being invisible on purpose.

This is what John M. Gottman, PhD, relationship researcher and co-founder of The Gottman Institute, calls the “hidden conversation” — the emotional dialogue happening beneath the words, the requests, the arguments. Most couples fight about dishes and schedules when the real conversation is about longing, fear, and worth.

Healing in relationships doesn’t require perfection. It requires what Gottman calls “repair” — the capacity to acknowledge ruptures and return to each other. Couples who stay together aren’t the ones who fight less. They’re the ones who recover faster.

In my work with clients, I’ve seen that the capacity for repair is itself shaped by early attachment experiences. Partners who grew up in homes where ruptures went unacknowledged often freeze when conflict arises — either shutting down completely or escalating in panic. Therapy isn’t just about communication skills. It’s about helping two people tolerate the discomfort of being imperfect with each other while staying in the room.

The Neuroscience of Couplehood

There’s a reason being in a troubled relationship feels like a full-body emergency. Sue Johnson, PhD, clinical psychologist and creator of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT), argues that adult romantic attachment activates the same neural systems as the infant-caregiver bond. When your partner withdraws, your nervous system doesn’t register “inconvenience.” It registers abandonment.

This is why couples therapy can feel so intense. You’re not just negotiating disagreements. You’re working at the level of the attachment system — the neurobiological circuitry that governs your sense of safety, belonging, and survival. A cold response from a partner doesn’t just hurt feelings. It can trigger the same cortisol response as a physical threat.

Priya had been to three couples therapists before she and her partner came to see me. Each experience had felt like an exercise in sophisticated negotiation — who said what, who did what, who was more wrong. What they hadn’t done was say the scared thing out loud. The real thing. “I’m terrified that you don’t find me interesting anymore.” “I’m afraid that if I need too much, you’ll leave.”

When Priya finally said it — sitting in my office, voice barely above a whisper — something shifted in the room. Her partner’s defenses dropped. Not because she’d used the right communication technique, but because she’d told the truth. That’s what couples work, at its best, opens the door to.

When the Work Is Worth Doing

Not every relationship is worth saving. That’s a truth that doesn’t get said enough in couples therapy circles. Sometimes, after honest exploration, a couple discovers that the relationship has run its course — that both people have genuinely grown in incompatible directions, or that patterns of harm are too entrenched to change.

But far more often, I see couples who arrive convinced they’ve already answered that question — only to discover that what felt like incompatibility was actually unexpressed need. They weren’t wrong for each other. They were lonely with each other, and had stopped trying to say so.

Elena had been planning her exit for two years when her partner finally agreed to therapy. She’d composed the speech. She’d even found an apartment. But something in her wanted to be wrong. She wanted there to be something salvageable.

What we discovered in therapy was that Elena’s husband had been suffering from depression for most of their marriage — quietly, without telling anyone, including himself. He hadn’t become cold and distant because he’d stopped loving her. He’d become unreachable because he was unreachable to himself. Treating that depression changed the marriage more than any communication exercise could have.

This is why I always tell couples: come to therapy before you’ve already decided. Come when there’s still enough oxygen in the room to breathe together. The work is possible. The connection is real. What’s needed, most of the time, is someone willing to stop managing the relationship and start actually feeling it again.

Medical Disclaimer