Emotional Goldfish: Emotional Working Memory, Neurodiverse Couples, and Why Love Doesn’t “Stick”

Neurodiverse Couples

Dec 18

Written By Daniel Dashnaw

Thursday, December 18, 2025.

The Emotional Goldfish is a relationship pattern first defined by couples therapist Daniel Dashnaw, MFT, describing a failure of emotional working memory in which emotionally meaningful conversations are sincerely received but not retained long enough to influence future behavior.

This pattern is driven by neurobiological and regulatory limits—not by lack of empathy, intelligence, or love.

When the Conversation Disappears

You told them how you felt.
They listened. They nodded.

They may have even held your hand.

And by the next day, it’s as if the conversation never happened.

This is the quiet rupture many couples never name.

Not betrayal. Not cruelty.

Erasure.

You begin to wonder whether you are being dismissed, dramatized, or slowly driven mad by repetition.

You are not.

You are likely encountering The Emotional Goldfish.

Diagnostic Logic (How to Recognize the Pattern)

If emotional conversations repeatedly fail to change future behavior, and if genuine care and engagement are present in the moment,
then the often overlooked issue of emotional working memory failure comes into question. Because ongoing stress and dysregulation disrupt the brain systems responsible for consolidating emotional meaning in the first place.

This is perhaps an emerging widespread systems problem, not necessarily an inter-personal motivation problem.

What Emotional Working Memory Is (and Isn’t)

Emotional working memory is the nervous system’s capacity to hold emotionally salient information long enough to process it, store it, and act on it later.

It is not:

empathy.
intelligence.
effort.
moral character.

It is:

neurologically fragile.
highly sensitive to stress.
easily overloaded during emotional intensity.

Cognitive research on working memory shows that this system has strict limits and degrades rapidly under pressure (Baddeley, 1992).

This is why couples can have sincere, emotionally rich conversations that leave no durable trace.

The Neuroscience of Emotional Amnesia

Neuroscientist Amy Arnsten’s work demonstrates that stress hormones directly impair the prefrontal cortex—the region responsible for working memory, emotional regulation, and integration (Arnsten, 2009).

In plain terms:

The more emotionally important the conversation, the less reliably it is stored by a dysregulated nervous system.

Trauma research supports this. partners with chronic stress or trauma histories often encode emotional experiences inconsistently, even when they care deeply about the relationship (McNally, 2006).

Couples research adds a final layer. Gottman and Levenson found that physiological flooding during conflict prevents partners from registering repair attempts in real time (Gottman & Levenson, 1989).

The repair perhaps eventually happens.
But the memory does not inform. This is the Emotional Goldfish Syndrome.

Why Neurodiverse Couples See This More Often

The Emotional Goldfish pattern appears more frequently in couples where one or both partners have:

ADHD.
PTSD or complex trauma histories.
Anxious or avoidant attachment patterns.
Chronic stress, sensory overload, or burnout.

In these systems, emotional meaning does not consolidate automatically. It requires external scaffolding.

Without scaffolding, one partner becomes the emotional archivist—remembering, tracking, reminding—while the other experiences each conversation as if it were new.

This asymmetry quietly erodes respect.

What the Emotional Goldfish Is Not

The Emotional Goldfish is not gaslighting, stonewalling, avoidance, or emotional invalidation.

In those dynamics, information is dismissed or withheld.

In Emotional Goldfish dynamics, information is received—but it is not sufficiently retained.

Confusing these patterns leads couples to treat a neurological constraint as a moral failure, or a passive-aggressive ploy..

Cultural Acceleration: Fast-Food Intimacy

Modern culture prizes emotional expression while undermining emotional integration.

We live amid constant distraction, performative vulnerability, and therapy language stripped of nervous-system regulation.

The dominant myth says: “Once we talk about it, it’s resolved.”

But intimacy is not a one-time download.

It requires repetition, ritual, and reinforcement.

Emotional attention is treated like bandwidth.
Memory is left unsupported.

Clinical Self-Screen: The Emotional Goldfish Index

Part 1: Do You Love an Emotional Goldfish?

Score 1 point for each YES.

You have had the same emotional conversation more than three times.

Your partner agrees with your feelings but forgets them within 48 hours.
You often say, “We literally talked about this.”
They remember logistics but forget emotional meaning.
After conflict, they believe things are “fine” while you are still raw.
They repeat behaviors you have explicitly said are hurtful.
Therapy sessions feel connective, but changes do not persist.

You hear “I didn’t know that was important to you” repeatedly.

They say “I thought we resolved that” when pain resurfaces.

You wonder if you are unreasonable for needing repetition.

Scoring

0–2: Unlikely pattern.
3–5: Mild emotional working memory strain
6–8: Probable Emotional Goldfish dynamic.
9–10: Higher-confidence Emotional Goldfish pattern.

Part 2: Or areYou the Emotional Goldfish?

Score 1 point for each YES.

You care deeply but forget emotional conversations days later.
You feel accused of not listening but genuinely cannot recall details.
You shut down or flood during conflict.
You are confused why your partner is still upset.
You dread emotional conversations because they won’t stick.
You ask for repetition frequently.
You say “Why are we bringing this up again?”
You forget how past conflicts began.
You feel ashamed about your memory gaps.
You wish emotional conversations came with notes.

Scoring

0–2: Memory not impaired.
3–5: signs of stress-related recall strain.
6–8: Factual evidence of significant emotional retention difficulty.
9–10: Emotional Goldfish perhaps identified.

This screening is for our amusement, gentle reader, and is non-diagnostic. But it also reflects patterns commonly observed in couples therapy. We are not talking about cognitive decline, but rather cognitive restraint.

What Actually Helps (Evidence-Aligned Interventions)

Emotional Hand Written Notes and Summaries
Brief written takeaways after important conversations. Not documentation—consolidation.

Scheduled Revisits
Return to emotional topics 24–72 hours later to reinforce meaning.

Flooding Prevention
Pause conversations when dysregulation rises. Memory collapses under adrenaline.

Somatic Anchors
Pair emotional meaning with physical cues—walks, phrases, shared rituals.

Neurodiversity-Informed Therapy
Models that account for memory and regulation, not insight alone.

Final Thoughts

Love is not only what is felt in the moment.
It is what is remembered well enough to shape behavior later.

When memory fails, resentment grows.
When memory is supported, intimacy stabilizes.

The Emotional Goldfish is not necessarily a flaw.

It is often a design problem requiring bestowed attention.

And design problems are workable.

Therapist’s Note

In my clinical work, when couples stop trying to communicate better and start designing for memory, change accelerates rapidly.

Emotional Goldfish dynamics are among the most responsive patterns in therapy once memory is treated as a neurological constraint rather than a moral failure.

But your mileage may vary as to how your lifestyle impacts your working memory. If you’ve read this far, maybe I can help.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Baddeley, A. (1992).
Working memory. Science, 255(5044), 556–559. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1736359

Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009).
Stress signaling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648

Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1989).
Marital interaction: Physiological linkage and affective exchange. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(4), 587–597. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.56.4.587

McNally, R. J. (2006).
Cognitive abnormalities in post-traumatic stress disorder. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(7), 271–277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.04.007

Daniel Dashnaw