Please note: This is a guest piece by Katie Rose, LCSW, a Manhattan based psychotherapist with over a decade of experience treating individuals and couples in New York City.
I often have high-achieving, professionally successful couples come to me looking for homework, checklists, and skills they can practice in order to improve their relationship. They treat their relationship how they might treat a problem at work: a big issue with various smaller steps that can be triaged and attacked, strategized over, delegated, and systematically worked through until they achieve success.
This isn’t necessarily a bad strategy. Breaking down a big problem into smaller parts while building new skills is a great way to see improvement. But relationships are not problems or puzzles or negotiations that need a good head on your shoulders. Relationships are more like a living, breathing entity that needs nurturing, attention, and tender care. It needs a beating heart in your chest; it doesn’t care nearly as much about what’s in your head, despite the best efforts of many.
I also don’t buy the idea that two successful, high-achieving people could simply be poor communicators who need a few worksheets to improve things. I hear that all the time: “We just need help learning how to communicate better!”
Inevitably, when a couple starts with the issue of communication, I’m listening for how they hear one another, rather than simply how they speak to one another. Often, the problem isn’t that someone doesn’t know how to communicate. It’s that they don’t feel emotionally safe enough to communicate vulnerably.
And even more importantly, I’m listening for whether each partner can hear themselves. What are they actually needing from their partner underneath the frustration? What are they longing for that they may not yet have the words or courage to ask for?
In Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, we’re interested in those deeper emotional needs because they often get obscured by the argument happening on the surface. A partner may say, “You never help around here,” but underneath that might be, “I don’t feel like I can count on you, and I’m scared I’m alone in this.” Another may say, “You’re always on my case,” when underneath that is, “I’m afraid I can’t make you happy, and I’m scared that no matter what I do, I’m going to disappoint you.”
You can teach someone communication skills all day long. But if we don’t understand what is happening emotionally between two people, better communication can simply give a couple more sophisticated ways to have the same fight.
When Your Strengths Become Defenses
Achievement-oriented traits can be wonderful qualities in a relationship. Perfectionism can look like thoughtfulness and conscientiousness. Independence can mean being reliable and capable. High standards can reflect commitment. Problem-solving can make someone an incredibly supportive partner.
The problem is that these same qualities can become defenses when a relationship requires something different from us.
If you’re used to solving problems, it can be incredibly uncomfortable to sit with something that cannot be solved immediately. If you’re used to being independent, needing your partner can feel vulnerable. If you’re used to having high standards for yourself, it can be difficult to tolerate the messiness and imperfection that comes with being emotionally intimate with another person.
And relationships are messy. There are going to be moments when you misunderstand each other, disappoint each other, or need more than the other person can immediately give. This is not a problem, but an opportunity for reconnection.
For someone who has built an identity around being competent and having it together, those moments can feel threatening. Instead of saying, “I’m hurt and I need you,” they may move into problem-solving, criticism, defensiveness, or withdrawal. Those responses make sense when you understand them as attempts to protect oneself. But they can also make it much harder for a partner to see the vulnerability underneath.
When someone who is used to being “the person who has it together” feels rejected or criticized by their partner, they may experience it as something much deeper: I’m failing. I’m not enough. I’m disappointing the person I love.
And when that happens, the instinct is to regain control through over-correcting. Sometimes the most productive thing a high-achieving person can do in their relationship is stop trying to be productive.
Stop Asking Who Is the Problem
I never want to see my couples orient themselves as two people with a problem between them. I want my couples to think of themselves as two people on the same team, tasked with solving a shared problem.
When couples come into therapy, they often arrive with a story about who is causing the problem. One person is too critical. The other is too distant. One doesn’t communicate. The other won’t listen. One spends too much time working. The other is too demanding.
But when we slow things down, we discover that neither person is simply “the problem.” Instead, they are caught in a cycle that has developed between them and reinforces this narrative.
One partner reaches for connection through criticism or pursuit. The other experiences that as pressure and pulls away. The withdrawal makes the first partner feel even more alone, so they pursue harder. The increased pursuit makes the second partner retreat further.
Pretty soon, both people are reacting to each other, neither feeling understood, and both becoming increasingly convinced that their partner is the reason they can’t get out of the cycle.
The content of the argument changes. The emotional cycle stays consistent.
That’s one of the reasons I find Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) so useful. We don’t need to address only the surface-level arguments; rather, we prioritize the pattern they get pulled into and understand what is happening underneath. Once a couple can see the cycle as something they are both caught in, rather than something one person is doing to the other, they have somewhere new to go.
You Can’t Optimize Intimacy
I wish high-achieving couples understood that being successful at work does not necessarily prepare you for the kind of vulnerability that intimacy requires.
You can be incredibly self-aware, emotionally intelligent, accomplished, and good at communicating professionally and still struggle in your relationship. Romantic relationships ask something different from us than our jobs and even friendships.
One piece of conventional relationship advice that high achievers can take too literally is the idea that if you simply communicate clearly enough, you can solve the problem. Sometimes clarity isn’t what is missing. The willingness to let yourself be known is how deep love grows.
A relationship isn’t a performance review because there is no scorecard. Your partner isn’t evaluating whether you’ve successfully completed every requirement of being a good partner. And you don’t have to earn love by performing perfectly. Your partner doesn’t always need you to solve their feelings. They may need you to stay with them in those feelings. To be curious and let yourself be affected by what they are experiencing.
There is a difference between being a great problem-solver and being emotionally available. A problem-solver wants to know: What is wrong, and what can I do to fix it?
An emotionally available partner can also ask: What is happening for you right now? What does this mean to you? Can I let myself understand this before I try to change it?
A successful, highly functional couple might be missing emotional intimacy even when everything else appears to be working. They may communicate about logistics beautifully. They may divide responsibilities, manage careers, raise children, plan vacations, and make decisions together. But remaining productive is not the same thing as connecting.
Couples don’t need another system, another check-in, another communication exercise, or another list of relationship goals. They need to slow down enough to find the people underneath all that competence and to let themselves find each other there imperfectly.