There is a particular kind of marital pain that doesn’t announce itself.

There is no yelling.
No infidelity.
No cruelty dramatic enough to justify a decisive sentence.

From the outside, the marriage looks solid—often impressive. Inside, it feels oddly vacant. Polite. Functional. Like a household optimized for survival rather than connection.

This is emotional neglect without abuse, and it may be the most common relationship pattern of modern marriage.

If your marriage feels like a meeting, it is probably functioning very well.
Ironically, that is probably your biggest problem.

Many couples arrive at this realization without drama. There is no betrayal, no major conflict, no obvious unhappiness.

Just a slow recognition that time together feels procedural. Agenda-driven. Strangely professional.

You don’t argue.
You coordinate.

You don’t wonder about each other.
You update each other.

You leave conversations informed—but not nourished.

Short answer: yes, it’s common.
Long answer: it’s common for reasons that quietly tend to hollow marriages out over time.

Some married couples do not talk about feelings in any sustained or reflective way.

They talk about logistics. They coordinate schedules. They solve problems. They exchange information efficiently and politely. They may even be kind.

But emotional language—the naming of fear, desire, disappointment, longing—slowly disappears.

This is not a personal failure. It is a social outcome of modern marriage.

And it is not neutral.

Modern couples are not emotionally avoidant.

They are emotionally over-regulated.

They identify feelings quickly, name them accurately, and share them promptly. They speak fluently in the language of insight—activation, triggers, needs, repair.

They do not withhold. They do not stonewall. They do not pretend not to know what is happening inside them.

And yet, many of these couples report the same quiet outcome:
clarity without closeness, communication without vitality, intimacy without heat.

When emotional regulation replaces emotional integration, intimacy becomes stable—and lifeless.

The problem is not a lack of emotional language.
It is the loss of emotional latency.

Modern couples do not avoid feelings.
They manage them.

They track them.
They narrate them.

They surface them early and often, in the name of health, honesty, and relational hygiene.

And yet—many of the marriages that land in therapy today are not emotionally frozen. They are emotionally over-processed.

The problem is not emotional avoidance.

It’s emotional over-optimization.

It’s January 1st. The air is sharp, the calendar is empty, and if you’re anything like the people I sit across from every week, you’re humming with equal parts ambition and low-grade panic.

Americans love a Fresh Start.

We love the fantasy that the version of us who didn’t exercise, didn’t save, didn’t speak up, or didn’t leave can be quietly deleted at midnight and replaced with someone sleeker and more disciplined by morning.

But here’s the clinical reality:

Change is not a light switch.
It’s a nervous system negotiation.

There is a sentimental belief in modern relationships that fairness will eventually sort itself out if both partners are decent people.

This belief has survived research, experience, and children.

A new study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly examines how household labor and decision-making power affect relationship satisfaction among women partnered with men versus women partnered with women.

The findings are clarifying. They are also not new.

Women partnered with men do more unpaid household labor.
Mothers partnered with men do much more.
And having a “voice” in decisions does nothing to improve their satisfaction.

So much for progress.

There is a touching belief in modern relationships that fairness will eventually appear if everyone has good intentions.

This belief has survived decades of data, countless conversations, and the arrival of children.

A recent study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly confirms what many women already know: fairness does not quietly materialize—especially if you are a mother partnered with a man.

Women partnered with men do more household labor.
Mothers partnered with men do much more.

And being given a “voice” in decisions does not improve the situation.

This is not a misunderstanding.

It is the system operating exactly as designed.

As a passive-aggressive man in recovery, I think that passive aggression has been badly misbranded.

It’s usually described as immaturity, manipulation, or a failure of character—something vaguely petty that emotionally competent adults are supposed to outgrow. Which is convenient, moralizing, and mostly wrong.

Passive aggression isn’t passive. It’s what protest looks like under constraint.

What we call passive aggression is not a flaw in communication. It is a constrained form of emotional protest that emerges when the nervous system perceives direct expression as unsafe, ineffective, or destabilizing to attachment.

Once you understand the system behind it, the behavior stops looking childish and starts looking exhausted.

Most couples ask this question at the wrong time.

They ask it in the middle of a fight, when adrenaline is high and clarity is low.

Or they ask it years too late, after the relationship has become polite, functional, and emotionally inert.

The better question is not “Is this relationship good?”
It is:

Is this relationship still capable of being changed by the people inside it?

In clinical terms, a relationship is worth staying in when it retains mutual influence, repair capacity, and shared moral coherence over time.

That definition matters more than love, history, or effort combined.

Modern relationships in 2025 are not short on language.
They are short on precision.

Words like soft, quiet, emotionally safe, and high-functioning circulate easily in contemporary relationship culture.

They sound humane.
They sound evolved.
They sound therapeutic.

And yet, in clinical rooms, these same words increasingly describe relationships that are stable, competent—and quietly losing emotional consequence.

These terms did not emerge because relationships suddenly became fragile.

They emerged because modern couples became unusually competent—emotionally literate, economically independent, and skilled at self-regulation—faster than our relational models evolved to account for what that competence costs.

Many contemporary relationships are not breaking down.
They are flattening.

This dictionary exists to name that pattern before desire, vitality, and mutual influence quietly ebb, fade, and perhaps even disappear.

Relational involution is a state in which competence replaces consequence and stability persists without felt mutual influence.

Relational involution does not reverse through emotional intensity.
It reverses through the careful reintroduction of emotional consequence.

Most couples stuck in involution are not fragile. They are over-regulated. Their difficulty is not a lack of skill, insight, or goodwill. Emotional impact has been quietly engineered out of the relationship in the name of stability.

The clinical task is not to “open things up.”
It is to restore permeability without overwhelming the system.