"We always said we could get through anything."
A woman said this to me in a first couples session, sounding almost confused. She and her husband had been together twelve years. They'd survived a cross-country move, the death of his father, and two years of infertility treatment. Every hard thing had proven the same story: we're stronger than whatever happens to us. Honestly, they felt stronger than most of the couples they knew.
Then he lost his job. He started drinking more, then hiding it. One night he told her he didn't see the point of going on. She sat up with him until morning.
By the time they came to see me, they felt betrayed. Not just by each other, but by the relationship itself. "I thought we would hold," he said. "I don't know what we are now."
If that sentence lands for you, this post is for you.
(Details are changed and combined to protect privacy.)
The Relationship as Superhero
The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut wrote about our lifelong need for someone strong and steady to lean on. As kids, that's usually a parent. As adults, many of us quietly hand that job to our relationship.
The "we" becomes a kind of superhero. It will protect us. It can absorb anything. As long as we have each other, we'll be fine.
This belief isn't foolish. It helps couples stay committed, forgive small things, and feel safe. But it has a hidden cost: when a relationship is idealized, nobody looks at it closely. It gets relied on, not understood. Couples like this often don't know where their limits are, because they've never had to find out.
When Something Bigger Than Love Shows Up
Some crises are too big for any relationship to handle on its own. Three come up in my office often:
Addiction. A partner turns to alcohol or drugs for comfort instead of to the relationship. It can feel like an affair with a substance.
Suicidal feelings. When someone you love says they don't want to live, it can feel like proof that your love wasn't enough. That's one of the most painful things a partner can face.
Job loss. It shakes identity, money, routine, and pride, none of which loyalty alone can fix.
When the superhero relationship fails one of these tests, couples often swing to the opposite extreme. If we weren't perfect, maybe we were never real. One partner blames the other, or both decide the whole thing was a lie.
Kohut noticed that losing an idealized figure all at once is traumatic, while losing it slowly, in manageable doses, helps us grow. The goal in therapy isn't to restore the fantasy. It's to help the couple let go of it gradually, without throwing away the real relationship underneath.
What Babies Teach Us About Strong Couples
Researcher Beatrice Beebe studied mothers and babies frame by frame on video. She found that they fall out of sync constantly, many times a minute. What builds a secure bond isn't avoiding those misses. It's the experience of finding each other again, over and over.
Even more surprising: the most closely tuned-in pairs weren't the most secure. Constant, perfect attunement often reflected anxiety. Healthy pairs had some looseness, some misses, and lots of repair.
The same is true for couples. Strong relationships aren't the ones that never break. They're the ones that have practiced coming back together. The couple I described had survived earlier crises, but they'd treated each one as proof they were unbreakable, rather than noticing how they'd actually repaired.
What Actually Helps
Mary Morgan, a couples therapist from London's Tavistock tradition, describes a couple state of mind: the ability to see your relationship as something you both belong to, and can also step back from and think about together. It's not a superhero. It's more like a shared project, valuable and resilient, but also limited and in need of care.
If your relationship is facing a crisis that's bigger than the two of you, a few things can help:
Grieve the old story. It's okay to mourn the belief that you could handle anything. That loss is real.
Notice the small repairs. A softened tone after a fight, a hand on the shoulder, an apology. These matter more than grand gestures.
Get outside support without shame. Addiction treatment, psychiatric care, and couples therapy aren't signs you've failed. Your relationship was never meant to be the only safety net.
Look for the "we" you can think about, not just lean on. Ask together: what does our relationship need right now?
Near the end of our work, the wife said, "We're not the couple who can handle anything anymore. We're the couple who knows how to ask for help." Her husband said, "I think that's better."
I think so too.
If you're in crisis or worried about a partner's safety, call or text 988 (in the US) to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
