Relational executive dysfunction does not present as chaos. It presents as an unnecessary delay.

Couples do not implode; they idle.
Repair does not explode; it evaporates.

This happens because the same executive systems that allow adults to initiate, sequence, and complete complex tasks degrade rapidly under emotional load—a phenomenon well established in cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Diamond, 2013; Arnsten, 2009).

In intimate relationships, that degradation expresses itself in three predictable failures.

There is a particular kind of adult who arrives at therapy already fluent.

They understand their attachment style.
They can explain their childhood without bitterness.
They have done the reading, the reflecting, the reckoning.

And yet—inside the relationship that matters most—their body does not cooperate.

They interrupt.
They shut down.
They leave the room too early or stay too long.

This is not resistance.
It is not denial.
It is not a lack of insight.

It is a lack of nervous system literacy.

There is a particular kind of couple-therapy sentence that almost never makes it into marketing copy:

“We were doing better before we started talking about all of this.”

Sometimes it’s said sheepishly, as if the couple is failing the assignment.

Sometimes it’s said with real alarm, because something that was once tolerable has become unbearable—not due to a new betrayal, but due to new clarity.

This article names that phenomenon without dramatizing it.

Insight is powerful. It is also not neutral.

In some relationships, insight functions like an intervention with side effects: it can temporarily (and sometimes persistently) increase distress, sharpen resentment, destabilize homeostasis, or reorganize the moral ledger of a marriage.

Medicine has a word for harm caused by treatment: iatrogenic.

Relational Neurodivergent Burnout is a state of chronic nervous-system exhaustion that develops when a neurodivergent partner must remain persistently adaptive, explanatory, or self-regulating inside an emotionally static or asymmetrical relationship.

It is not a diagnosis.

It is not fragility.

It is a dyadic outcome—produced by how two nervous systems interact under sustained relational pressure.

In short: relational neurodivergent burnout occurs when one partner’s nervous system becomes the primary regulator of the relationship over time.

This form of burnout does not arise from a single conflict.

It accumulates quietly, through repeated moments where one person absorbs strain so the relationship can keep functioning.

Most neurodivergent couples do not come to therapy saying,
“We don’t love each other.”

They come in tired.

Not dramatic tired.
Not collapse-on-the-floor tired.

The quieter kind.

The kind that shows up as flattened tone, reduced curiosity, shorter conversations, and an unspoken sense that everything takes more effort than it should.

They are not failing emotionally.
They are overdrawing relational capacity.

What they are experiencing has a name.

Neurodivergent Relationship System Overload.

A condition in which a relationship is not broken, but a wee bit overextended.

Emotional Exhaustion Is Not a Personality Issue

Many neurodiverse couples arrive with the same exhausted question:

“Why do we keep having the same conversation?”

They’ve talked it through.
They’ve cried.
They’ve agreed.
Sometimes they’ve even had a good therapy session about it.

And then—days or weeks later—it’s as if the conversation never happened.

One partner feels stunned and increasingly alone.
The other feels confused, sometimes accused.
Both begin to doubt their sanity—or each other.

This pattern is not a failure of communication.
It is not gaslighting.
It is not indifference.

It is often something quieter and far more structural: asymmetrical emotional working memory.

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.

Partners don’t search this phrase casually.

They search it after months—or years—of trying to be patient, informed, fair, flexible, and kind.

They search it when they still love their partner but can no longer ignore the quiet arithmetic of the relationship: who carries what, who notices what, who repairs what, and who rests.

“One-sided” is careful language.

It’s what people say when they are trying not to accuse the person they love of something harsher, even as their own reserves thin.

This piece is not about blame.
It’s about structural imbalance—and what happens when that imbalance goes unnamed.

Modern relationships are not failing because people lack empathy.

They are failing because we have made explanation the price of care.

Somewhere along the way, emotional safety was redefined as verbal performance: the ability to narrate feelings clearly, justify reactions promptly, and explain oneself on demand.

What began as a reasonable desire for understanding hardened into a specific, near-normative moral expectation.

If you cannot explain what you feel, how you feel it, and why you feel it—preferably in real time—you are now suspect.

This shift has been disastrous for many couples. Not because explanation is bad, but because it has been mistaken for bestowed attention and presence itself.

Neurodiversity has become one of those words that sounds like it’s doing work even when nothing else is. I use it way too much, myself.

It floats. It reassures. It allows everyone in the room to feel progressive without having to move a chair, dim a light, or rethink a deadline.

It is the verbal equivalent of applauding accessibility from a standing desk no one else can use.

Autism, by contrast, remains stubbornly physical. Loud. Exhausting. Inconvenient.

It still requires things—particularly when differences in sensory processing reliably affect pain thresholds, attention, and fatigue in everyday environments, as documented in adult autistic populations by Crane, Goddard, and Pring in Autism.

This difference matters.

As I said in my last post, Neurodiversity is a framework. Autism is a diagnosis. Treating them as interchangeable flatters institutions and strains bodies.

Autism is a diagnosis.
Neurodiversity is a framework.

They are often used interchangeably online, which is efficient for discourse and disastrous for clarity.

One term opens access to services, accommodations, and legal protections.

The other opens access to moral approval—and applause from institutions that prefer language to logistics.

Institutions tend to favor the second.
It’s cheaper.

I’ve learned that autism is not a personality aesthetic.

Autism exists as a diagnosis because certain neurological patterns cluster reliably enough to be studied, identified, and—most importantly—accommodated.

Differences in sensory processing, social cognition, executive functioning, and motor coordination are well documented, with measurable impacts on daily functioning, employment, and health outcomes, as summarized across decades of research in journals such as Autism Research and The Lancet Psychiatry.

I’ve been working with autistic children and their families for roughly twenty hours a week at a public mental health clinic for the past thirteen months.

That proximity has taught me something no amount of discourse ever could.

Before anyone sends me an email beginning with “Well, actually,” let me open with an apology—the academic kind, not the sincere kind.

Besides Marriage and Family Therapy, I also have a degree in Labor Studies, and I am a published researcher in the field.

Which means I have spent an absurd amount of time understanding workplaces, workers, and the elaborate mythologies they construct about their own competence.

So if this piece sounds judgmental, know that I say all of this with respect for working people and… let’s call it realistic expectations of their self-awareness.

With that out of the way:
A new study in Autism Research shows that autistic employees are far less susceptible to the Dunning–Kruger effectthan their non-autistic peers.

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you already knew this.