December arrives with such theatrical promise—lights twinkling, cookies cooling, the cultural insistence that this month be “magical”—that it’s almost unfair how quickly it exposes the cracks in a relationship.

Couples don’t plan to fight in December. Really they don’t.

They just sorta drift into it the way people wander into snowstorms they should have seen coming.

If November is the month you pretend everything’s fine over turkey, December is the month the emotional bookkeeping comes due.

And couples do fight. A lot.

Not because something is wrong with them individually, but because something peculiar happens collectively: December elevates their expectations and depletes their capacities at the exact same time.

It’s the only month where joy has a deadline. Yikes.

If you want to understand a marriage, don’t watch how the couple behaves on a random Tuesday. Watch them on Thanksgiving.

Watch who opens the wine at 2:30 p.m. “just to breathe.”

Watch who side-eyes the bottle of Chardonnay that seems to be evaporating.

Watch who volunteers to “check the turkey” every fifteen minutes because the basement freezer happens to contain a bottle of vodka no one else remembers buying.

Thanksgiving is the annual stress test of the American relationship.

Family arrives. Expectations bloom. Childhood ghosts reappear with uncanny punctuality.

And alcohol—always the agreeable resident of the holiday table—slides in to help smooth the proceedings, inflate them, or detonate them, depending on the marriage.

According to a comprehensive review in Substance Abuse and Rehabilitation, what determines whether a couple will survive not only Thanksgiving but the ordinary grind of a shared life isn’t simply who drinks more. It’s whether they drink in sync.

Researchers call this the drinking partnership.

There is a moment in a troubled marriage when the arguments stop having edges and start having consequences.

Not the dramatic kind—no slammed doors or clever insults—but the quieter, more existential kind where every gesture feels charged and every decision feels like the wrong one.

This is the emotional double bind: the relational configuration where every available choice injures something essential, and both partners begin to realize—silently, resentfully—that they are trapped inside a psychological geometry not of their making.

A double bind is not the same as a fight.
Fights have content.

Double binds have architecture instead.

There comes a point in many marriages when the noise stops but the suffering doesn’t.

The shouting fades, the arguments flatten, and the couple begins to live together like two exhausted nations engaged in a negotiated ceasefire—no longer fighting, but no closer to peace.

This is Emotional Gridlock: the quiet catastrophe of a relationship that can’t move forward, can’t move back, and can’t bear to stay where it is.

Gridlock is not about dishes, or tone, or who asked more generously last week.

Those are merely the costumes worn by a more existential drama.

Gridlock is what happens when the marriage loses its shared emotional language but continues speaking anyway, like two translators arguing over a text neither of them has read.

It is the stalemate between meaning and fear.

There is a particular kind of forgetting that happens only in the aftermath of an almost-relationship.

It is not graceful, and it is not poetic.

It is the kind of forgetting, for some, that feels like a survival strategy invented by someone who has never actually survived anything.

This is Situationship Amnesia—the neurological blackout that convinces you the person who barely showed up for you might, under slightly improved astrological conditions, be the great love of your life.

There are marriages that move gradually, like weather systems drifting across a landscape.

And then there are neurodiverse marriages—marriages that move in epochs, where each era has its own climate, its own logic, its own form of truth. These marriages don’t simply “grow” or “change.”

They enter distinct emotional eras shaped by the dynamic interplay of two differently wired nervous systems.

Where neurotypical couples talk about communication patterns, neurodiverse couples live inside neurobiological time zones.

Their conflicts often seem to arrive from different centuries. One partner floods; the other disappears. One interprets patterns; the other follows precision. One senses danger; the other senses noise.

Both believe they’re making sense—because within their own nervous systems, they are.

Emotional austerity happens when emotional availability, responsiveness, and warmth get rationed in a relationship.

Here’s how it begins, how to recognize it, and what neuroscience and attachment research reveal about getting out of the scarcity cycle.

You never catch emotional austerity early. No one does.

If people were skilled at noticing emotional shifts on time, couples therapy would be a charming niche job performed out of a converted garden shed. Instead, emotional austerity arrives the way most relationship trouble arrives: quietly, politely, and entirely off the books.

It doesn’t start with a crisis. It starts with a shrug.

You ask how their day was and they offer a single syllable that conveys absolutely nothing. You share something meaningful and get a nod so faint it should be checked for a pulse.

Every ND couple has a moment—often several moments a day—when they realize they are not fighting about dishes, tone, lateness, or even the infamous “You interrupted me again” refrain.

They’re fighting about sensory overwhelm.

No one admits this, because it sounds trivial.

But ask any autistic–ADHD couple, any HSP paired with a sensory-seeking partner, any relationship built on two fluctuating attentional systems: the entire emotional climate can change because one partner heard too much and the other didn’t hear enough.

And still, most therapists treat this as a communication problem, as if you can talk your way out of a dysregulated nervous system.

There are moments when the world feels engineered for someone else.

Someone louder, faster, more resilient to fluorescent lights and notifications.

And then—out of nowhere—the internet offers you a ritual so gentle, so absurd, so strangely effective that you wonder how long you’ve been living at war with your own body.

The shower orange.
A fruit. A faucet. A nervous system finally catching its breath.

This is the sort of thing modern life accidentally invents when it has exhausted every sensible solution to chronic overwhelm. It looks ridiculous from the outside. But so does anything that provides genuine relief.

My clients don’t ask whether a monogamous neurodiverse marriage can survive infidelity because they’re looking for a simple answer.

They ask because something fundamental in the relationship—its orientation, its sense of direction—has shifted.

Neurodiverse couples already live inside a subtle daily negotiation: two nervous systems with different processing speeds, different ways of reading emotion, different thresholds for overload, trying to construct something shared.

Infidelity doesn’t interrupt that negotiation; sometimes it collapses it.

Not always loudly.
More like a building quietly failing behind its own walls.

This isn’t melodrama.
It’s what happens when a relationship built on translation loses the structure that once made that translation possible.

And it leads to the question no exclusive couple ever expects to need:

Is there anything left here that can be rebuilt?

The short answer is yes.
The longer answer—and the one that matters—is how.

There are mornings when the house looks peaceful—sunlight on the floorboards, coffee quietly percolating, the kind of silence that feels borrowed. Then someone walks into the room, touches the back of a chair, and says, gently, “Do you have a minute?”

It’s a harmless question.
It’s practically nothing.

And yet your body responds with a quiet internal flinch, the nervous system version of a low battery warning.

You’re not impatient. You’re not angry. You simply do not have a minute—not emotionally, not neurologically. The budget is gone.

This is emotional bandwidth mismatch: when two nervous systems have unequal capacity at the exact moment one reaches for the other.

Early morning, half-light.
The house is quiet in the way houses rarely are. You stand in the kitchen watching the coffee drip, holding onto the stillness like it’s the last clean surface in your life.

Then you hear it—the soft, almost apologetic way someone clears their throat in the hallway. It’s not loud. Not hostile. Not anything that should matter.

But your body reacts anyway. A small tightening behind the ribs. A shift in breath. The faint sense of being summoned.

Nothing has happened yet, and you’re already tired.

This is where attunement fatigue begins: not with conflict, but with the slow, steady depletion of your ability to track another person’s emotional life without abandoning your own.

We talk about attunement as though it’s a spiritual achievement—limitless presence, infinite empathy, a kind of interpersonal sainthood.

But attunement in its physiological form is not transcendence.

It is labor. Real labor. And the nervous system, generous as it is, has a limit.

Attunement fatigue is the moment the body sends the invoice.