01/21/2026
Relearning How to Love (or, Stop Consuming Your Partner) || By Taylor Arroganté-Reyes, LPCC
Much of the work of therapy is learning to tolerate what we cannot control. Difficult, of course. But theoretically, simple enough.
Enter scene: partner. Not so simple.
A Pew Research poll from 2021 found that nearly 70% of adults rated their dating lives as “not going well,” and a little over half said dating has gotten harder in the last 10 years.
Be it dating apps, post-COVID society, consumer capitalism, political polarity, or the looming deterioration of our social safety net, something is making love very hard. And setting aside the potential for recency bias, it’s only getting harder.
Love still flourishes in the modern day; I hope you won’t mistake my critique for cynicism. But something’s changed. In nearly every way, our world has been turned over and inside out in the last few decades. Everything exists in context. Love is no exception. Love is just like us: struggling to find its footing in this new world. And ours is a world rife with too much. A constant overload to the system.
Too much, too many.
Too many appointments to keep. Too many bills to pay with too little money. Too many screens and ads vying for every millisecond of our attention. And in turn, too few mental and emotional resources to dedicate to any of it. Painful, overwhelming landscape we have. In this landscape, for the sake of ease, everything gets steamrolled into a product we can consume. A product that can make life a little easier.
Because what is a product marketed to do? Provides a solution to a problem (at least that’s what they try to convince us of!). And to solve a multitude of modern problems, love comes as a neatly packaged solution, heralding connection and meaning and promising the banishment of isolation. Watch any rom-com. You get it!
Love becomes a product we must shop for with the savvy eye of a practiced saver (in this economy!?). A product to hold up against our pros-and-cons list. A product to run through the sieve of our cost-benefit analysis.
Forgive the analogy, but why do we analyze the products we consume? Humming beneath this desire, there looms a question: Will this best meet my needs? And shifting to our connections with other people, one more question beneath that: Will this person meet my needs, and can I meet theirs? And beneath that one, perhaps another two, buried a little further down: Can I do everything in my power to be certain? And can that certainty protect me from pain?
Anyone presented with that question would indignantly respond, “Of course that’s impossible!” The reason being, this is not a conscious drive. Pain avoidance and pleasure seeking are the knee-jerk reactions of a nervous system evolutionarily designed to help us survive. Thankfully, now we have plenty of neurobiology research to validate what Freud (that as***le!) once postulated as the pleasure-pain principle.
So avoid pain, we do. Seek certainty, we will. And to do it, we will mold ourselves and our partners into need-meeting products for each other’s consumption. We attempt to make ourselves and each other understandable and knowable to protect ourselves against the ultimate knowledge that love is beyond our control.
So instead of accepting, we consume each other. We disappear into each other, expecting the other to meet us where we are, to know us fully, and to be known by us.
In Love’s Executioner, Irvin Yalom describes this phenomenon with the language of existential isolation. “Many a marriage,” he writes, “has failed because, instead of relating to, and caring for one another, one person uses another as a shield against isolation.”
But, something so enigmatic as love cannot be pounded into the shape of a shield. So love resists. We push back on the other’s demands; we rebel when the other doesn’t love us the way we want them to. We lob Why can’t you just understand? at one another like hand grenades in the war against our fears. Our relationships become ensnared by this entanglement of our own making. Then nearly seventy percent of us throw our hands up and say, “It’s not going well!”
In Greek mythology, the story of the god Eros (or Cupid) and the princess Psyche (whose name means soul) tells the story of the unknowability of love. Eros and Psyche are arranged to be married; then they fall in love. With one caveat: Eros only visits Psyche in the dark. Theirs is a love that requires mystery, separateness. But the deeper Psyche’s feelings grow, the more she relies on him, the more anxious she becomes to see the face of her lover. One night, while Eros is sleeping, Psyche lights a lamp and holds it up to finally see his face. But nearly instantly, he disappears.
Forcing love into a box of certainty (Psyche’s need to understand, to close the unknown distance between them) made love vanish.
Jean-Luc Marion, a modern French philosopher, writes about this phenomenon. He says, “To love is to accept that one might be loved without being able to return it, and above all without being able to understand it.”
In couples therapy, the concept of “differentiation” is a steady undercurrent of the work. I said up top that much of the work of therapy is acceptance of what we cannot control. Differentiation in this context refers to each individual’s ability to maintain a strong sense of self—thoughts, ideas, identity—outside of the other person while still maintaining their relationship. A couples study conducted in 2021 found that a high sense of differentiated self in both partners was the strongest predictor of overall relationship health. Our ability to allow one another the room to meet our needs (or not), to give to us (or not), to be a whole, complex, imperfect person, not an object, can predict our ability to sustain love.
Try as we might (and we try!), we cannot force the distance between us closed by flattening love into a knowable product or by molding our partners and ourselves into something that will meet needs or solve problems.
In the story of Eros and Psyche, after Eros’ disappearance, Psyche sets out on an epic, painful solo quest of transformation (even descending into the underworld!) to eventually reunite with her lover as her own person. A person who has grappled with the end of certainty and wrestled the ultimate unknown of death and come out on the other side.
It is the shattering of a fantasy that makes way for the real work of love. Because good love is what happens after the bubble pops, after the illusion of certainty completely fades. It is the humble work of self-exploration, of accepting the labor of transformation, and of differentiating.
Because the anxious need to flatten love into a known entity is not the end. It’s the beginning. It’s the door finally opening to a path where love becomes not a solution or a shield against the dark, but instead a liberated acceptance of the wild, untamable unknown.
About the Author: Taylor Arroganté-Reyes is a Licensed Professional Counselor Candidate and the owner of Congruence Psychotherapy. In individual work, she specializes in existential therapy and parts work. With couples and partner systems, she specializes in consensual non monogamy and non-normative relationship structures. Her work seeks to invite an open-handedness to the ever-unfolding mystery of life. Her practice is grounded in the belief that genuine relational contact between us and within us can heal, change, and liberate— allowing us to become who we hope to be. If you are interested in working with Taylor, please visit https://congruencepsychotherapy.com/ or email her at taylor@congruencepsychotherapy.com.
