26/02/2026
In my office, I see many couples who come for help with their relationship. As we work on building new bridges for better communication, renewing trust in each other, and repairing old relationship injuries, I often encounter unrealistic expectations that couples have of one another.
Esther Perel has done extensive research on this topic—the lack of social structures, of the “village” or community, and how the expectations of what that sense of belonging can provide are redirected toward our partner. Isn’t it a bit too much for one person—any one person—to carry alone?
Expectation is doing more damage to modern love than we like to admit, and I don’t mean unrealistic fairy tale fantasies so much as the ordinary, reasonable hopes we carry without examining them too closely.
We expect one person to be our anchor and our excitement, our safety and our spark, and because that sounds romantic we rarely stop to ask whether it’s actually sustainable. It feels natural to want your partner to be your best friend and your most trusted confidant and the person who understands you better than anyone else, and yet when you lay it out like that it’s obvious we’re asking for a lot. Not just affection, but emotional fluency. Not just commitment, but constant growth. And if they can’t keep up, or if we can’t, the disappointment can feel strangely existential, as if something about love itself has failed.
Esther Perel has built much of her career on this problem. She trained as a psychotherapist after studying literature and cross cultural psychology, and she often traces her interest in relationships back to being the child of Holocaust survivors. She grew up aware that survival and vitality aren’t the same thing, that staying together and feeling alive together are different tasks. In Mating in Captivity she argues that we’ve collapsed the work of a community into the space of a couple. Historically, marriage wasn’t supposed to provide transcendence or self discovery. It was practical. Meaning came from religion, family, shared labour. But as those structures have loosened, especially in the West, the couple has taken centre stage.
And I can feel that shift in my own assumptions. When something good happens, I want one person to understand why it matters. When something goes wrong, I want them to hold the fear with me. I don’t just want companionship, I want recognition. But if one person becomes the main witness to your life, then any distance between you can feel like abandonment. A distracted reply, a week of irritability, a sense that you’re slightly out of sync, and suddenly it’s not just a passing mood. It’s a threat to the whole structure.
Perel talks a lot about the friction between security and desire, and it sounds almost theoretical until you’ve lived with someone long enough to know the rhythm of their habits. Familiarity is comforting, and it’s also dulling. We want to be fully known, but we also want to be seen as slightly mysterious, slightly unpredictable. And those impulses pull against each other. If I tell you everything, if you witness every mood and insecurity, you may care for me more tenderly, but you might not look at me with the same sense of possibility. That’s not a moral failure. It’s just how human attention works.
This is where the pressure starts to build, because we’ve been told that the right relationship should meet all these needs at once. Popular culture reinforces it, but so does therapy language about transparency and processing everything together. And yet writers like bell hooks have argued that love needs a wider ethic and a wider community to survive. She didn’t reduce love to romance. She placed it in networks of care and responsibility. If you take that seriously, then a couple cut off from strong friendships, extended family, or shared purpose is already strained, no matter how compatible they are.
You can see the same idea in contemporary memoir. Dolly Alderton writes about friendship as the steady thread in her adult life, sometimes more reliable than the men she fell in love with. And it’s telling that so many women respond to that. It suggests we know, somewhere, that romantic love can’t carry the full weight of our need for belonging. But we still treat it as if it should.
And so when a relationship falters, we often interpret it as personal inadequacy. I must not be interesting enough. You must not be emotionally available enough. We turn structural pressure into individual blame. Perel has been criticised for appearing sympathetic to people who have affairs, as if she excuses betrayal, but what she’s often doing is asking what the rupture was trying to restore. Aliveness. Autonomy. A sense of being seen as more than a role. That doesn’t justify the hurt, but it complicates the story.
If we were less invested in the idea that one person completes the circle of our lives, we might approach love differently. We might allow for seasons of boredom without panic. We might build stronger friendships without feeling disloyal. We might accept that closeness and distance move in cycles rather than assuming everything should feel steady all the time.
But that would require giving up a comforting fantasy, and I’m not sure we want to. There’s something deeply reassuring about believing that one person can hold our past, stabilise our present, and guarantee our future. Even if the evidence around us suggests that’s too much to ask, we cling to it. And maybe that’s why so many relationships don’t collapse suddenly. They just strain under expectations we haven’t had the courage to question.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
