I think about relationships as a rope.
Two people, each holding their own end. The rope between them is the relationship, the actual third thing that exists in the space between two people, with its own weight and tension and history. Sometimes the rope is taut. Sometimes it’s slack. Sometimes it’s frayed in the middle. Sometimes one person is squeezing their end so tightly it shakes the whole line. Sometimes one person is barely holding on. Sometimes one person has reached across and grabbed the other end too, and is holding both for both of them.
When I work with couples, I tell them something that often surprises them: I’m not actually treating either of you. I’m treating the rope. The space between you. That’s my client.
You don’t have to be in couples therapy for this to matter. The rope shows up in every relationship that means something, a parent, a friend, a partner, a sibling, a colleague, a child you raised. Anywhere two people have chosen to be in connection with each other, there’s a rope, and there are two hands.
Most of what hurts in our relationships is what’s happening with our hands.
The grip I see most often, and the one I want to name in this piece, is the one where you start holding both ends.
It looks like love. It feels like love. It’s often described as love. You’re the one who remembers everyone’s birthdays. You’re the one who notices when the rope is going slack and immediately reaches across to pick up the other end so the connection doesn’t drop. You manage the emotional weather of the relationship for both of you. You apologize first, every time. You bring it up when something is off. You repair when no one else will. You make sure the rope stays taut even when the other person has wandered into the next room and put their end down on a chair.
This pattern is exhausting, and you already know that.
What might be newer to hear is that it’s also something else: it’s erasure. By holding both ends, you’ve taken away the other person’s choice to hold theirs. You’ve decided, on their behalf, that the relationship will continue, that the connection will be maintained, that the work will get done, regardless of what they actually do. You’ve turned a relationship into a solo performance with a guest star.
People who hold both ends usually didn’t volunteer for this. They were trained into it, often very young, by being raised in environments where if they didn’t keep the connection alive, no one else was going to. The hand reaching across the gap is a child’s hand, originally. Most of my clients who do this learned it before they could read.
But the cost, in adulthood, is severe. You don’t get to find out who the other person actually is, because they never have to show up, fully, on their own end. You don’t get to feel the difference between someone choosing to hold and someone passively allowing the rope to lie in their lap. You don’t get to receive love, because you’re doing all the lifting on both sides.
And here is the part that’s hardest to sit with: sometimes when you finally let go of their end, the rope falls. You discover that no one was holding the other side at all.
That is grief. Real grief. The grief of finding out that you were the connection, not them. It is one of the hardest discoveries a person can make. It is also, often, the beginning of becoming whole.
So I want to ask you the same thing I’d ask in session, gently, without any rush.
Whose side of which rope have you been holding for both of you?
What are you afraid will happen if you let your hand open, just a little, and let them hold what’s theirs?
Sometimes the answer is: they won’t hold it. And sometimes that answer is the most important thing you’ve ever known.