The Intimacy Problem No One Is Naming: Emotional Over-Optimization in Modern Marriage
Thursday, January 1, 2025.
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.
What Emotional Over-Optimization Looks Like
These couples are skilled communicators.
They use the language correctly.
They schedule check-ins.
They reflect, validate, repair.
They can tell you exactly what they feel and why they feel it—often before the feeling has fully arrived.
Their conversations sound like this:
“I noticed I’m having some activation around unmet expectations, probably tied to my attachment history.”
Nothing here is wrong. I’ve written many articles on communication skills.
Nothing is cruel.
Nothing is hidden.
And yet something essential is missing.
The Lost Skill: Emotional Latency
Older relational cultures—flawed as they were—contained something we have quietly lost: latency.
Feelings used to arrive slowly.
They ripened in silence.
They became clear over time.
Today, we treat unarticulated emotion as a problem to be solved rather than a process to be lived.
But not every feeling wants to be spoken immediately.
Some emotions need:
privacy before expression.
ambiguity before clarity.
time before meaning.
When we eliminate latency, we don’t increase intimacy.
We flatten it.
Transparency Is Not the Same as Intimacy
Modern marriage has confused access with closeness.
We assume that if nothing is hidden, everything is intimate.
But intimacy is not created by total transparency.
It is created by attunement, curiosity, and earned disclosure.
When everything is shared instantly:
desire has no room to form.
curiosity has no oxygen.
mystery is treated as a threat.
What remains is accuracy without aliveness.
Why High-Functioning Couples Are Hit First
This pattern shows up earliest among competent couples.
They are conscientious.
They are educated.
They have absorbed therapy language fluently.
They do not fight dramatically.
They do not withdraw catastrophically.
They optimize.
Weekly relationship meetings resemble performance reviews.
Conflict is resolved before it reveals anything deeper.
Sometimes Sex even becomes polite, negotiated, strangely administrative.
From the outside, the marriage looks exemplary.
Inside, it feels airless.
Therapy Culture’s Unintended Consequence
Therapy did not cause this—but it accidentally reinforced it.
We taught people to:
label emotions quickly.
externalize experience immediately.
narrate internal states in real time.
These skills are powerful interventions in moments of rupture.
But applied universally, they create a new problem: premature intimacy.
We skipped the developmental step where an emotion is allowed to be unclear, contradictory, or privately metabolized.
In other words, we replaced depth with fluency.
A Necessary Distinction
This is not an argument for secrecy.
It is not a defense of emotional withholding.
It is not a return to silence or stoicism.
It is an argument for sequence.
Some feelings need to be:
felt.
lived with.
partially understood.
then shared.
Skipping those steps doesn’t make you healthier.
It makes you prematurely exposed.
Desire Requires Friction
Esther Perel’s work has highlighted that erotic and emotional desire depend on difference, distance, and unknowing.
When everything is processed instantly:
longing collapses.
polarity weakens.
the relational field becomes flat.
Intimacy requires some degree of friction.
Not conflict.
Not cruelty.
But the tension of two minds that are not fully mapped.
The Quiet Diagnostic Question
The question is no longer:
“Are we talking about our feelings enough?”
It is:
“Are we allowing anything to remain unfinished between us?”
Because mystery is not the enemy of intimacy.
It is the condition that makes intimacy possible.
Final Thoughts
If this essay unsettles you, that’s likely because it describes competence without nourishment.
The couples most affected by emotional over-optimization are not failing.
They followed the instructions.
And now they are quietly somewhat starving inside a relationship that runs perfectly.
If you recognize this pattern, couples therapy should not push you to communicate more.
It should help you slow down, tolerate not-knowing, and rebuild the capacity for emotional latency—so desire, meaning, and intimacy have somewhere to grow.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.