'Til Stress Do Us Part

When I first opened my therapy practice, I purchased a small, beat-up, two-seater couch from IKEA’s as-is section. It was $50 and all I could afford. A friend helped me carry it up to the fifteenth floor of a city building, shove it into my tiny office, and cover it with a brown slipcover. Since then hundreds of couples have sat on that couch as they yell, cry, laugh, and share with each other.

In those early years, the couples therapy I offered was fairly generic. Two people sitting side by side would tell me what was going on and I would coach them on how to communicate their frustrations with each other. While these skills are certainly important, the couples I was working with would come back week after week, sometimes year after year, complaining that while things had gotten better in some ways, they were still arguing in the same manner when things got difficult.

I was doing everything I had been taught to do in school and yet I was missing one key component—recognizing the role stress plays in how couples can navigate everything from intimacy to communication to decision-making.

A few years into my work, I got married following a whirlwind romance. Andrew and I met, moved in together, and got married all within two years. Everything was great until we had our first baby. Suddenly, I felt like I didn’t know my husband or myself. We went from being happy and connected to angry and withdrawn. I knew what was going wrong. We were too critical and defensive and too wrapped up in everything—our baby, our jobs, our activities—except each other.

I would tell myself exactly how to avoid the next argument, repair the ruptures, and build our connection. Stop rage texting, I would remind myself. Even though I’m tired, I am going to put my damn phone down and listen when he talks to me, I’d commit. And yet day after day and night after night, I would behave in ways I couldn’t even identify. And so would he.

One night, after a particularly bad argument, I spent time researching exactly why I was so unhappy. I came upon an answer—something called mental load disparity. The mental load is defined as the cognitive effort involved in managing life responsibilities and decision-making. This might include planning a trip, researching which dentist your family should go to, remembering birthdays, and delegating chores, a type of labor that often falls mostly to women.

As I continued to research the mental load, I became more and more shocked that not only had I never heard of it as a woman but also as a couples therapist. I knew I was letting my clients down by not pointing out this heavy burden in the relationship.

For the first year following that argument, I attributed all of our unhappiness to the way the mental load was being distributed in our family. I went on an obsessive journey to better understand how it wasn’t only impacting me, but also my relationships. But then, things with the mental load improved. My husband got better at noticing the toilet paper was low and became the only person in charge of doctor’s appointments.

Yet as I became less and less burdened with managing our lives, we still faced fairly challenging arguments and points of disconnect. I was frustrated. If the communication skills I was taught in school and the mental load research I had so strongly grasped onto weren’t making as big of a change in my relationship as I had hoped... what would? Were we doomed? Then the pandemic hit. Everything in our lives changed drastically without notice, and my husband and I were grasping at straws to maintain our jobs, show up as loving parents, and take care of each other.

I experienced a paradigm shift. I realized it didn’t matter how much I knew about relationships because if I was stressed out and overwhelmed, the “skills” I had weren’t going to improve my marriage. Similarly, teaching couples communication skills in therapy wouldn’t help if underneath it all was stress and overwhelm. Having nice conversations solves nothing when you’re drowning.

Since then, I've worked with couples to help them understand the role stress plays in their relationship and how they can overcome it, together. By learning how to self-soothe, co-regulate, and "organize" their stress in a new way they can build a partnership in which they are protecting each other from the lifetime of stressors we all face.

Stress Essential Reads

How a Bit of Stress Can Keep Your Workplace Running Smoothly

Could a Dog Know I’d Recently Been Attacked by Another Dog?

This post is an excerpt from my book, 'Til Stress Do Us Part.