It's Not Independence…It's Isolation with Better PR.

This week the country turns 250, and I want to talk about something I've been watching for the last few years, sitting across from people who pay me to help them stay in relationship. Let's see if you can stay with me through this:

Couples are fighting more. Not about anything new, it's the same list it's always been--lightbulbs nobody replaced, the in-laws, who said what at dinner three years ago. What's changed isn't the topic, but the size of the fight and how long it takes everyone to recover from it. A disagreement about a lightbulb didn't used to require a three-day cooling off period. Now it regularly does in houses all over my client list.

And separately, or maybe not so separately, the individuals I see in coaching and in therapy are telling me something I didn't used to hear so often: that they feel disconnected, lost, and that they couldn't tell you who their people are anymore.

I don't think those two things are a coincidence, I think they're the same problem wearing two different outfits.

We Redefined Independence and Didn't Tell Anyone

Fireworks display

Here's my theory, and you're welcome to fight me on it: we have spent the last several years quietly redefining independence to mean something it never used to mean.

It used to mean self-sufficiency, as in: don't need the King's permission and stand on your own two feet. For a lot of people now, independence has come to mean something much worse: I don't need anyone who sees this differently than I do.

That isn't independence. That's just isolation, with better branding.

Here's the fine point that gets left out of the nostalgia for that supposedly tougher, more freedom filled past everyone keeps invoking: it never actually excluded needing each other. People borrowed sugar, showed up with a casserole when someone was sick, and helped raise the barn because nobody could raise it alone. Needing your neighbor wasn't a character flaw, it was just how a functioning community worked.

Now, needing another person, a spouse or a neighbor, has somehow become evidence that something is wrong with you, especially if they are different from you! We've built a whole vocabulary of insults for it: "codependent," "pathetic," "snowflake." People will use these about someone who simply wants to be close to another human being, who wants to need and be needed, as if interdependence were a diagnosis instead of the entire point of a healthy relationship.

I love a good boundary, and I teach people how to build them for a living. But somewhere in the last few years, "boundary" turned into the all-purpose exit ramp out of any relationship or interaction that got uncomfortable, and a lot of people have been driving down it: cutting off friends, coworkers, sometimes their own spouse, the second someone says or believes the "wrong" thing out loud.

What's Actually Showing Up on My Couch

Here's where it gets less theoretical and more like Tuesday at 2pm in my office.

The topics haven't changed in the relationships I support. Nobody is suddenly more passionate about a lightbulb than they were a decade ago. What's changed is what happens the moment one person disagrees with the other. Nobody seems to be listening past the first sentence anymore.

The old move in a fight was to make your case and try to win. The new move is to make your case, not hear a word of the response, and keep going until the other person is too exhausted to disagree. This means arguing about who forgot to replace a lightbulb can now require actual repair work, the kind you'd expect after a real betrayal.

I ask couples what they were even fighting about by the time it ended. Half the time they can't tell me. It started as a lightbulb and ended as a referendum on whether their partner respects them at all. That gap, between the size of the original disagreement and the size of the blowup, is the thing I'm watching get wider and wider.

Here's the part that would be funny if it weren't so expensive: the fight that takes three days to recover from could usually have ended in the first ten minutes, if either person had listened and been genuinely curious in what the other one was upset about. And more often than you'd think, what they were upset about was exactly that: not feeling listened to. The irony is that the fight about feeling unheard is fueled by neither person listening...

And the people who come in alone, doing their own work in individual sessions, keep landing on a version of the same ache: a creeping loneliness they can't quite explain, given how full and connected their lives look from the outside. They have plenty of people in their orbit and still experience that nobody actually knows them or could be trusted with the parts that aren't polished. Disagreement of any kind has started to feel too risky to survive, so people are shutting down conversations that feel vulnerable and isolating themselves in the process.

I don't think it's an accident that both are happening in the same handful of years. Somewhere along the way, we stopped treating disagreement as a normal, survivable part of being close to someone, and started treating it as a threat to manage and win.

We Built This Country on People Who Couldn't Stand Each Other

Two hundred and fifty years ago, thirteen colonies that agreed on shockingly little managed to stay close enough, long enough, to build a country. We currently struggle to survive a family group chat.

I'm only half joking. The actual skill required to build something with another person, a marriage, a family, a country, has never been agreement. It's tolerance for staying in the room with someone you don't fully agree with and not needing them to be wrong for you to feel safe. That's the whole job, the one I do in my office every day, and it turns out it's been the job for the entire life of this country, despite failing at it spectacularly these last few years.

What we've built instead is a life where we only feel safe with people who think the way we do, and we've started mistaking that safety for strength. It isn't strength and there is evidence all around us of the problems we have built on this mistaken idea.

The Thing Worth Trying This Week

If you're headed to a cookout this weekend already braced for the moment someone says the thing that's going to make your jaw tighten, here's the only thing I'd ask you to consider: that bracing feeling is not actually information about whether the relationship is worth keeping. It's just your nervous system doing its very predictable, very old job.

You still get to decide what you do with it.

You can decide that disagreeing with someone, even about something that matters to you, doesn't automatically disqualify them from your life. You can decide that the people who voted differently, believe differently, post differently, may not all be evidence of a character flaw you need to protect yourself from. Some of them might be, and we have real work to do to solve these problems. But plenty of them are just your family, your spouse, or the neighbor down the street who happens to think differently than you about something you feel strongly about.

This country did not get to 250 on agreement. It got here on people who fundamentally could not stand each other and chose to stay in it anyway. Maybe that is the real lesson we all need to be focused on this July 4th.

So happy birthday, America. Here's hoping the next 250 years bring us back to the actual things that give this country the greatness it aspires to. We each have a part to play, and your part begins in your home.

If this is the work you and your partner are doing right now, the lightbulb fight that takes three days, the slow drift toward feeling like roommates keeping score, I'm recording a brand new, live version of the Marriage Accelerator built around exactly this. Join me for Marriage Accelerator LIVE. or join me at Kripalu in September!