The Weight We Place on Love — Are We Expecting Too Much from One Person?

An overloaded car packed full of belongings, representing the idea of asking one relationship to carry more weight than it can hold - are we asking too much?

There's a particular kind of loneliness that settles into a relationship: the loneliness of feeling unseen by the one person who's supposed to know you best. It's one of the most painful experiences a couple can have, and it's becoming increasingly common.

But why? Many of the couples I work with are committed, caring, and genuinely trying. So what's making connection so hard to hold onto?

Part of the answer, according to psychotherapist and author Esther Perel, lies less in the couple themselves and more in what we've come to expect from them.

A relatively recent invention

For most of human history, the idea that one person could meet all of our needs would have seemed strange. People were embedded in wider networks of community, family, and friendship. The couple existed within a broader structure that held it. Emotional support was spread across many relationships, and belonging was something found in extended networks rather than in a partner alone.

That world has changed. Communities have fragmented, families live further apart, and working hours have stretched longer. Increasingly, we turn to a romantic partner to fill all the spaces those wider structures used to occupy.

One person, every role

Perel describes the modern expectation of a partner with striking clarity: we want them to be our best friend, our co-parent, our financial partner, and our passionate lover, all at once, for life. We want the security of commitment alongside the excitement of desire, to feel fully known and still occasionally surprised.

These are not small asks, and they can pull in opposite directions. When a single relationship is expected to carry the full weight of our emotional world, it becomes fragile. A period of disconnection or a friendship that suddenly feels too close can start to feel like a fundamental threat. The stakes get impossibly high.

The burden on the partner

What this means in practice is that our partners are set up to fail us. Not through lack of love or effort, but because no one person can realistically be everything to another. The expectation itself is the problem.

When a partner doesn't intuitively understand what we need, it can feel like abandonment. When they want time alone, it can feel like rejection. These reactions make sense when one person is carrying your entire emotional world. They become easier to hold once you recognise that the expectation underneath them may not be fair to either of you.

This doesn't mean lowering the bar for love. It means getting clearer about what a relationship can realistically offer, and what needs to be nourished elsewhere.

What might help

Perel suggests that one of the most generous things we can do for a relationship is maintain a life outside it: friendships, interests, a sense of identity that doesn't depend entirely on a partner's reflection of us.

That can feel counterintuitive. Surely investing more in the relationship is the answer? But a relationship between two people who each have a rich inner life is often far more resilient than one where two people have quietly fused into each other, executing the logistics of shared life while losing the emotional contact underneath it.

In couples counselling, I return to this often. Not just the dynamics between partners, but the wider context the relationship is living in. Who else is in your life? Where else do you feel held? What are you asking of each other that perhaps needs a broader answer?

A different kind of question

If your relationship has been feeling strained, it's worth gently asking whether the strain is really about what's wrong between you, or about carrying more than any two people should have to carry alone. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for a relationship is build a bigger life around it.

If you recognise the pattern of reaching for a phone instead of each other at the end of a hard day, or sense that connection has quietly slipped into parallel living, couples counselling can offer a space to look at this together. I work with couples navigating exactly these kinds of questions, and I'd be glad to talk if you'd like to explore what that might look like.

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