Finding the Self Within the "We": Navigating Solitude and Loneliness in Couples
In the world of modern relationships, we are often sold the concept that intimacy is the antidote to being alone. And frankly it’s a seductive and tantalizing idea- when most of us feel more alone than ever before. We tend to view partnership and romance as a bridge away from solitude. But in the therapeutic encounter, we often find a different truth: the healthiest relationships are not those that eliminate solitude, but those that learn to navigate it and not to fear it.
There is a profound difference between the loneliness that stems from disconnection & misunderstanding and when separation feels like the only way to feel yourself and find your cues. Often couples can’t find those edges of each other and either merge into each other (“I just want to spend every moment together” and “when we’re upset I feel like the world is ending”). In these moments, we often lose touch with our consistent sense of the other person. We’re prone to “other” each other to find the other as alien, against you, oppositional, and unknown.
Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas famously spoke of the "unthought known"—those parts of our internal world that we feel and experience but haven't yet put into words. It remains unexamined but guiding so much of us. In a relationship, these unexpressed templates can create a strange kind of tension- where we feel like our reactions feel huge, dire, and the attachment panic is insurmountable. These templates are not generalizable although our anxious brains tend to try to apply them and project them out in every direction possible.
In couples work we often sit at the "edge of what can be spoken," fearing that if we truly knew ourselves, or if our partners truly knew us (all aspects and parts of us) we might lose the very ties that bind us together. This leads to a common paradox: we stay in the "known" of a repetitive fight cycle because it feels safer than the new territory of our own individual needs and healing from old self-referential stories.
Loneliness & Solitude in the Couple
Solitude is especially evident in couple’s work, where the "intimate space" between two people becomes a stress-test, all of the sudden your person represents every person and if they/he/she can’t love you then no one will... We see the long held stories about the "other" come to life, get reinforced, or hopefully be updated.
The therapeutic task is to move away from purely interpreting the "fight" and move toward "holding" the solitude and difference of each individual. When we can hold our own self-alienation without collapsing into a defensive reaction, we create room for something new to emerge. Esther Perel famously wrote about the labor of relationships centering on navigating separateness and togetherness. Or as a museum cue card at the New York City Jewish Museum’s Joan Semmel: In the Flesh elegantly asked, How to feel intimacy without annihilation?
Taking Space
In couples taking breaks, pausing, ending a fight can often feel like failure or punishment like “just leave” or “I can’t be here”. Dependent on the texture of the couple, often taking emotional or physical space offers a moment to regroup and regulate our nervous systems and a productive pause in escalation. The goal of navigating solitude is not to become isolated, but to become integrated and whole. When we stop being afraid of the "unthought" parts of ourselves including emptiness, doubt, inner-deadness, we no longer have to vanish into the other/the relationship/the work role etc in order to belong. We find that the most resilient connection is one where two distinct solitudes can meet, recognize one another, and notice the edges where you and I exist and what we share. As Mary Morgan wrote, a “creative couple” is where new dances and ways of being can emerge. Scary and destabilizing as it often can feel, many new experiences can emerge in the risk to really embrace solitude and difference in partnership or any relationship really.
