A couple sat in my office recently, both of them tired. Tired of the fight, and tired of having to explain, again, why the fight keeps happening. On the surface it looked like it was about something small — who reached out first, who pulled away, who felt alone in the relationship this time. But the more we talked, the more it became clear: this wasn’t a fight about the last few weeks. It was a fight that started decades before they ever met.
I see this pattern constantly. One partner moves toward. The other moves away. One reaches, texts twice, brings it up again, tries to fix it, tries to be enough. The other goes quiet, gets busy, needs space, disappears into work or friends or anywhere that isn’t this conversation. And the harder one pushes, the further the other retreats — which only convinces the first one to push harder. Round and round it goes.
Neither of them is the villain here. Both of them are doing something that, once, kept them safe.
The two kids in the playground
I tell most of the couples I work with some version of the same thing early on: we don’t walk into adult relationships as two grown-ups. We walk in as two kids who grew up in very different playgrounds, each one having quietly decided, a long time ago, what love requires and what it costs.
One kid might have learned that people you count on can disappear without warning — through no fault of their own, just life — and that the safest thing is to become fiercely self-reliant, to build your own sense of okay-ness so you’re never caught needing someone who might not come through. That kid grows into an adult who’s warm and capable and a little hard to reach when things get tense — not because they don’t care, but because closeness once meant risk.
Another kid might have learned that home was unpredictable, that you had to read the room before you knew whether it was safe to relax, and that the way to keep the people you loved close — or keep the peace — was to try harder, notice everything, fix things before they broke. That kid grows into an adult who over-functions in relationships, who reaches first, who feels a flare of panic when a partner goes quiet, because quiet once meant something was about to go wrong.
Put those two adults in a relationship together and you get exactly what I see in my office most weeks: one partner chasing, one partner retreating, both of them convinced the other one is the problem, and both of them, underneath it, terrified in a very old and very familiar way.
It’s not a character flaw. It’s an old strategy still running.
The chasing isn’t neediness. It’s a strategy that once worked. The distancing isn’t coldness. It’s a strategy that once worked too. The trouble is that a strategy built to survive a childhood living room doesn’t always know when it’s overstayed its welcome in an adult relationship — and left to run on their own, both strategies eventually confirm each other’s worst fear. The pursuer feels chronically unimportant. The distancer feels chronically suffocated. Nobody’s lying. Both are true, and both are old.
What actually shifts things isn’t one partner trying harder to chase less, or the other trying harder to open up more. Willpower doesn’t touch a pattern this old. What shifts things is both people finally understanding where the pattern came from — in themselves and in each other — and learning to recognise the moment it switches on, together, before it runs the whole conversation.
That’s the work. Not who’s right about the dishes. Who’s the eleven-year-old in the room, and what are they still trying to protect.
If this sounds familiar
If you read this and thought “that’s us” — you’re not broken, and you’re not alone in this. Almost every couple I sit with is running some version of this pattern, usually one they’ve never had named out loud before. Once it has a name, it stops being a mystery and starts being something you can actually work with.
If you’d like some support untangling your own version of this, couples therapy — whether in Zurich or online — is exactly the space to do that work in.