Before I start, I want to be upfront—this isn’t a typical light or seasonal post. However, it’s an important message that I felt it was right to share now.
Christmas often brings families together emotionally and physically, even when underlying issues are present. When we view this season as an opportunity to nurture and reinforce our family connections rather than idealize them, it opens the door to honest conversations.
Today may not be the right moment to read this in full, and that is understandable. Please bookmark it and return when you can. It speaks to something I witness regularly in my work, and to a quiet crossroads many women find themselves approaching.
Last week, I sat with a couple who have been together for nearly eight years—a blended family. Shared responsibilities. A life built slowly and with effort. By the end of the session, the woman was quietly acknowledging something she had likely been circling for a long time: she no longer believed the relationship could survive because her partner could not meet her emotional needs. Unfortunately, his response was one of acceptance. Although no words came from his mouth, deep down, I knew he felt the angst of not being enough, or not being the version of what she had dreamed this marriage would be.
This is not uncommon in my room. And it doesn’t matter how often it happens, it still wrecks my day – wrecks my week. I am not trying to make this about me and my ego as a therapist. What I mean is that societal and cultural pressures just chewed up another marriage and spit it out into the street. Another one bites the dust.
He is a black-and-white kind of man. Practical. Steady. A provider. When conflict escalates, he becomes angry, shuts down, and, at times, threatens to leave. For her, this creates emotional unsafety. She feels unseen, unheard, and alone inside the relationship. She believes he does not care to understand her emotional world because he has never allowed himself to enter it.
This moment, painful as it is, is not unusual. It is often the beginning of the end.
Many women today are not leaving relationships because they do not love their partners. They are leaving because they have concluded that their emotional needs will never be met, and that this lack is too significant to live with.
The question we rarely pause to ask is whether we are clear about what we mean by emotional needs.
There is an important difference between emotional connection and emotional safety. Emotional connection is about being understood, mirrored, and responded to. Emotional safety is about knowing that the relationship itself is not at risk when emotions rise, fall, or become difficult. These two are often conflated, but they are not the same.
Men and women often relate to emotional life differently. This is not a flaw. Many men experience emotions more concretely and situationally, and usually feel overwhelmed when asked to remain present in heightened emotional states. Many women experience emotions as something that needs to be processed, named, and shared to feel settled. When these differences are interpreted as moral failures rather than differences in orientation, resentment grows quickly.
What I see more and more is women asking men not only to love them, but to become emotionally fluent in the same way they are. To speak the same language. To stay regulated in moments where they themselves never learned how. For some men, this is possible. For others, it is not, at least not to the degree being asked.
This is where emotional expectations can quietly become destabilizing.
When the survival of the relationship hinges on one partner’s ability to meet the other’s full emotional range, the relationship itself becomes fragile. Every conflict carries existential weight. Every moment of withdrawal feels like abandonment. Safety erodes not because love is absent, but because the threshold for what counts as “enough” becomes impossibly high.
This is not to excuse anger, shutdown, or threats of leaving. Those are serious and damaging behaviours that must be addressed. But addressing them does not always mean demanding more emotional articulation. Sometimes it means strengthening the ground beneath the relationship so that emotion does not have to do all the work.
In long marriages, feelings fluctuate. They thin out under stress, fatigue, illness, grief, and responsibility. What carries couples through those seasons is not emotional intensity, but trust, commitment, and the quiet decision to stay oriented toward one another even when closeness feels out of reach.
This is difficult to hear in a culture that has taught women to listen closely to their emotional truth and to treat it as the final authority. Emotional truth matters. But it cannot be the only measure of a marriage.
I know this not only as a therapist, but as a woman who has lived through the consequences of emotional expectations becoming too heavy for a relationship to hold. There was a time when my own marriage could not survive on feeling alone. What saved it was not better emotional language, but a return to commitment, restraint, and the willingness to rebuild trust slowly, without guarantees.
Many relationships do not end because they are empty. They end because they are asked to carry more than they were designed to bear.
This is not a call for women to want less. It is a call to want wisely. To distinguish between what we need to feel connected and what we need to feel safe. And to consider whether the stability we are seeking might come not from asking more of emotion, but from strengthening the foundation that allows emotion to rest.