He doesn’t answer your message and you’re already checking when he was last online. She’s angry at you and it’s hard for you to concentrate at work. The conversation keeps running in your head: what you said, what she understood, and what needs to happen for you to be okay again. He asks for an evening to himself and you hear distancing. She’s disappointed by a decision you made and you start second-guessing a decision you were previously at peace with.
We need the people we love. We want their closeness, lean on them, and are affected by what they feel toward us. A relationship is not a test of independence. Emotional dependency in a relationship begins to constrict me when my ability to remain stable within myself depends more and more on what’s happening with you.
If you’re calm with me, I’m calm too. If you distance yourself, something in me becomes destabilized. If you’re disappointed in me, I start doubting myself. Breaking free from emotional dependency doesn’t require me to stop needing you. It invites me to learn to stay myself even when I need you.
A close relationship creates mutual dependency. My partner’s opinion matters to me, their distance can hurt me, and when things are hard for me I want to lean on them. I want to know that I’m loved and desired in their eyes. All of this belongs to intimacy.
The distinction becomes clearer when the person I love doesn’t give me what I want from them. They’re unavailable, don’t agree with me, want distance, are angry, or hold a different position. That’s where it becomes clear how much room there is in the relationship for two separate people.
I can want your closeness and be disappointed when you’re not available to me. I can be affected by your anger and still hold a different opinion. I can ask you for reassurance without making my reassurance your responsibility.
The tension between closeness and separateness is also found in research on close relationships. In a study that integrated self-determination theory with family systems theory, researchers found that the combination of a sense of closeness and autonomy is linked to more constructive response patterns within the relationship. The researchers point to the importance of maintaining a sense of self alongside connection to one’s partner. Read the research on autonomy and closeness in relationships.
Differentiation enables this movement: to be in deep relationship, to need and lean, without losing my connection with myself.
Emotional dependency reveals itself clearly in moments of uncertainty. Your partner is silent and you must know why. He wants time to himself and you feel a need to immediately restore closeness. He’s angry and you struggle to rest until the anger passes. He doesn’t agree with you and you explain yourself again and again hoping you can get him to see things the way you do.
Attention gradually shifts outward: what is he feeling, what is he thinking, is he still close, is he satisfied with me, are we okay. His response becomes the measure by which I check myself.
This pattern can appear even within a relationship that is not abusive. If alongside the dependency you identify ongoing fear, control, humiliation, undermining of your perception of reality, or a growing constriction of your life, it’s worth looking at the broader relationship pattern. In the article 7 Warning Signs of a Toxic Relationship: How to Recognize You’re Starting to Lose Yourself in the Relationship, I expanded on this distinction.
When your anger is hard for me to bear, I may find myself explaining again, apologizing, moving closer when you’re asking for distance, or giving up something that was important to me. Alongside the genuine desire for repair and closeness, another request may be operating: that you stop feeling what you’re feeling, so I can feel secure again.
If I’ve hurt you, I have a responsibility to look at my behavior, listen to its impact on you, and repair when repair is needed. My responsibility does not give me control over the question of whether you’ll be angry, hurt, or disappointed in me.
I can be worthy even when you’re disappointed in me. Worthy doesn’t mean my behavior is always worthy. I can make a mistake and take responsibility for the mistake, without my value as a person being redetermined by your response to me.
It’s easy to identify one person as “dependent,” while the couple reality is more complex. One partner fears distance and tries to move closer; the other feels the pressure and distances. The distance increases the anxiety, so the first seeks even more closeness, and as they move closer the second feels less space and withdraws even more.
Within this cycle, each person sees the other’s behavior clearly. “I chase you because you’re always distancing,” says one. “I distance because you don’t let me breathe,” says the other. Both sentences can describe a genuine experience, and both leave the other responsible for my next step.
Differentiation invites each person to also recognize their own movement within the cycle. I can see that you’re distancing and check what happens to me when I chase you. You can feel my pressure and check what happens to you when you shut down. The other’s response affects me, and the responsibility for how I act within it remains mine.
In some relationships, one partner becomes the address for almost every decision. “What do you think I should do?” “Is it okay if I buy this?” “Do you think I responded correctly?” The person on the other side can feel needed and significant. They know, advise, decide, and reassure.
Over time, that same position can become a burden. The person who was used to being the address starts saying: “I have to decide everything” or “I’m tired of being responsible for how she feels.” If for years I was the person who knows, holds, and reassures, my partner’s change can also destabilize my place.
When one person starts trusting themselves more, making decisions, and carrying more of their own emotional experience, something changes for the other as well. A shift in emotional dependency changes the dynamic that was created between the two partners.
We come to a relationship with prior experience in connection. Someone who learned in childhood to read the moods of the adults around her well may quickly identify a small shift in her partner’s tone. Someone who experienced conflict as a threat to belonging may rush to appease. In another family, distancing was the way to handle tension.
These are possibilities for reflection, not an automatic explanation for emotional dependency. From a systemic perspective, you can examine what form closeness took in the family you came from: how much separateness was possible in it, what happened when someone wanted something different, how they responded to anger and distance, and who took care of whose feelings.
The past can help me understand why a certain movement became familiar. In the present, I can see how I participate in it and what it costs me.
For someone who doesn’t have a supportive family of origin, the relationship can carry especially great weight. Your partner is the person with whom you share daily life, and in many cases also the one who is with you on holidays, who comes when you’re sick, who knows your history, and who you call when something happens.
The loss of such a relationship can touch much more than separation from a loved one. It can also touch belonging, home, and the question of who will be there for me. This reality deserves recognition and does not in itself indicate emotional dependency.
I wrote about the particular burden a relationship can carry in such a situation in the article My Partner Cannot Be the Family I Didn’t Have. The more the relationship is my central anchor, the more value there is in building a world that has other connections and places of belonging: friendships, community, work, therapy, areas of interest, and people who know me outside my couple identity as well.
This way the relationship can remain a central place of love and belonging without carrying alone the entire weight of my belonging.
You can decide to send fewer messages, consult less, or do more things alone. These steps can help, yet the interesting work happens a moment earlier: I sent a message and he didn’t answer, I see the screen, something contracts, a thought arises, and my hand already wants to send another message.
Maybe I’m afraid he’s distancing. Maybe it’s hard for me not to know. Maybe I need confirmation that we’re okay. If I can stay for a moment with what’s happening inside me, a small gap is created between the experience and the action.
Research in the field of Relationship Mindfulness examined mindfulness within a relationship alongside attachment patterns and couple behaviors. The findings are not uniform across all measures, and the research does not examine the exercise before you, but it offers an interesting basis for reflection on the role of mindfulness within couple interaction. Read the research on Relationship Mindfulness.
Choose a moment when something in the relationship activates you: your partner doesn’t answer, they distance, are angry, ask for space, or say something that raises a fear in you that maybe you’re not okay. Instead of immediately turning to them, try staying for a few moments with what happened inside you.
Stop and notice your body. There’s no need to breathe deeply, calm yourself, or try to feel differently. Check what is already happening in your body in this moment. Maybe your breathing became shorter, your stomach contracted, your jaw tightened, there’s pressure in your chest, or a strong urge to pick up the phone, explain, or move closer.
Choose one bodily sensation that is relatively easy for you to be with—not the strongest sensation. Direct a little attention to it and check its qualities: Is it heavy or light, warm or cold, dense or open, moving or frozen? Does it have clear boundaries or is it spreading?
Check if you can give this sensation a little more room in your body. If there’s pressure in your chest, feel the area around it as well. If your stomach is contracting, notice your back, pelvis, and legs too. If your throat is closing, feel your shoulders and palms at the same time. There’s no need to make the contraction disappear. Your body can hold more than one sensation at the same time.
Also notice what your body wants to do. Maybe it wants to contract, push something away, reach out, cry, hide, or move closer. Don’t immediately perform the action and don’t forcefully stop it. Feel the impulse itself in your body for a moment.
If fear arises, you can give it a simple sentence: “I’m afraid you’ll distance.” If pain arises: “It hurts that you’re not available to me right now.” And if a need arises: “I want you to be close to me.” Say the sentence and notice what happens in your body when you say it. Maybe something contracts, expands, warms, or softens. There’s no correct response that should occur.
Now expand your attention a bit. Feel the chair holding you, the floor beneath your feet, and the weight of your body. Look around you and notice the room you’re in. You can be in contact with the fear and at the same time also with your body, the room, and the things supporting you in this moment.
Stay like this a little longer and check:
How much of this feeling can I carry in my body right now, without demanding of myself to make it disappear and without demanding of my partner to make it disappear for me?
Only afterward check what you want to do. Maybe you’ll want to send a message, ask for a hug, say you were hurt, or wait. The goal is not to choose the most independent option. The goal is for the action to come after you’ve met your own experience, and not only from the urge to immediately change what’s happening with your partner.
Instead of “Why aren’t you answering me? You know what this does to me,” you might be able to say: “I noticed that the distance between us raises a lot of fear in me. I want closeness with you, and when you can, I’d like us to talk.”
The need for your partner remains. What expands is my ability to carry in my body what the relationship stirs in me and to turn to them when I’m also connected to what’s happening inside me.
Love makes us vulnerable. The person I love can make me happy in ways other people cannot, and they can also disappoint me, distance from me, and touch my most sensitive places. Freedom within a relationship is not indifference to all of this.
I want to be able to lean on you and continue feeling my own ground. To ask you for something and remain worthy even if you say no. To listen seriously to your anger or disappointment, to check myself when needed, and not automatically hand over my decisions to them.
If a previous relationship taught you that closeness requires you to disappear, this question takes on additional meaning even when entering a relationship again. In the article How to Start a New Relationship Without Repeating Patterns from a Toxic Relationship, I address this transition: how to move closer again without automatically returning to the forms of connection that already hurt you.
I don’t have to choose between relationship and separateness. I can need you and remain myself.
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For people without a supportive family network.
We will reveal how the lack of a family network challenges and strengthens the couple's relationship, the high prices it exacts from you and your relationship.
Couples therapy will strengthen your sense of security and belonging, so you can be close without losing yourselves along the way.
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Expert in couples therapy for relationships without a supportive family safety net.
Developer of the Couples Constellation approach: a systemic-emotional therapy that brings the couple’s relational dynamics into contact with unspoken family patterns, alongside practical tools that enable movement, connection, and the creation of a deep partnership.
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