by Sara Stanizai, LMFT.
There's a specific kind of couple I see a lot, and you might be one of them. You've been together a long time. There are shared finances, sometimes tied up in property or a business you built together, and a shared history at this point that would be genuinely painful to untangle.
From the outside, and often from the inside too, it looks like it's working. But somewhere along the way, one or each of you stopped being emotionally reachable. Not hostile, just quietly unavailable in a way neither of you ever fully said out loud.
If that's you, especially if your relationship was never going to fit the default script to begin with, (maybe you're queer or trans, maybe one or both of you is somewhere in transition, whether that's a career, a diagnosis, a move, a loss, or some other life milestone that's changed who you are mid-relationship, maybe you're navigating two different cultures' worth of rules about how a relationship is supposed to work, or maybe, like a lot of people, it's honestly some combination of all of the above), here's what I think is actually going on.
Why do long-term couples lose intimacy even when everything else is fine?
Because the things holding you together and the things that actually create closeness were never the same thing, even though it's very easy to mistake one for the other. Shared logistics, shared history, kids, a business, a house, these are all real and they genuinely matter, but none of them require emotional vulnerability to keep running. You can raise children, build a life, and manage an entire household together while one or both of you stays fundamentally closed off the whole time. The relationship can be completely stable and completely starved at once, and stability is exactly what makes that easy to ignore for years.
What does patriarchy have to do with emotional avoidance in relationships?
More than most couples expect, and I don't just mean men, and I definitely don't just mean straight relationships. When I say patriarchy, I mean the specific system most of us were raised inside: cis, hetero, white, and organized around who gets power and who's expected to accommodate whoever has it. That system doesn't only assign roles by gender. It shows up in every place two people are different from each other, and different from whatever's been quietly set as the default. Class shows up as who's allowed to need things without shame attached. Neurodivergence shows up as whose way of communicating gets treated as normal and whose gets treated as a problem someone else has to manage. Race, immigration history, and culture show up as whose emotional style reads as legible and whose gets read as too much, or not enough, or simply wrong. It's all doing the same job underneath: deciding whose needs are reasonable and whose are a burden.
Queer couples are not exempt from any of this, and that tends to surprise people. Rejecting the default script doesn't erase what got absorbed long before anyone had language to reject it with. The conditioning that says certain people don't get to need things, that vulnerability is dangerous, that control equals safety, settles in years before anyone chooses their politics, and it shows up just as easily between two women, two men, or a couple where one or both partners are trans or nonbinary, as it does in a straight marriage.
A lot of what looks like a simple personality difference, one partner more emotionally available than the other, is actually one of these power differentials wearing a disguise, and power differentials are precisely what make real intimacy feel unsafe.
Why does this matter even more for intercultural or queer couples?
Because you're often navigating more than one rulebook at once, and nobody ever handed you a version built to account for both. An intercultural couple might be balancing two completely different family scripts about gender, conflict, and what closeness is even supposed to look like. A queer couple might be building something with no inherited default to follow at all, which is genuinely freeing, but it also means old patriarchal patterns can sneak back in disguised as something else, since there's no obvious script left to measure it against. Neither situation is a complication to therapy. It's exactly the terrain this work is built for.
What actually changes this, if talking about it hasn't worked?
Naming the pattern honestly, out loud, including the parts that are genuinely uncomfortable to say. Most couples have talked around this for years without ever calling it what it is: an imbalance in who's allowed to be vulnerable and who's quietly expected to hold everything together instead. Once that gets named directly, the work shifts toward closing that gap, not managing politely around it, which is a different job entirely from communication tips or a scheduled date night, since neither of those touches the actual imbalance sitting underneath.
How is your training different from a typical couples therapist's?
I didn't stop at one certification and call it finished. Beyond years of core training in Relational Life Therapy, I've spent years going deep in other couples therapy models well past the introductory level, so I'm not working from a single script the moment a couple's situation doesn't fit one neatly. I have advanced training specifically in transgender affirmative care, which matters enormously for couples where one or both partners are in transition and most existing frameworks simply weren't built with them in mind. I bring in somatic work when a pattern is stuck in the body and talking alone isn't reaching it, and I'm certified in cognitive approaches for when an anxious thought spiral needs something more direct than insight alone. None of this sits apart from the relational work. It's what makes the relational work actually land for the specific couple in front of me, instead of a generic version of couples therapy that quietly assumes everyone started from the same place.
If you recognize yourselves in any of this, held together by everything except the thing you actually want, that was never a sign something's permanently broken. It's a sign the wrong kind of help has been offered so far.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Stability and intimacy aren't the same thing. Many long-term couples are genuinely stable and quietly disconnected at the same time, and that disconnection tends to get worse the longer it goes unaddressed, not better.
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Yes. A significant part of my practice is queer and trans affirming couples therapy, including couples where one or both partners are navigating gender transition. I'm pansexual myself, so this work is personal as well as professional.
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Yes. Cultural background, family expectation, and power dynamics between partners are treated as central to the work, not background context. I'm Afghan-American myself, and my own identity doesn't get read as a person of color at first glance, which has given me a close-up view of how differently people get treated depending on how they're perceived rather than how they actually live and experience the world.
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That's an extremely common starting point, not a dealbreaker. Often what looks like a personality mismatch is actually a power imbalance that can be worked with directly.
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My own background as an Afghan-American, pansexual therapist shapes how I see this work, not just how I study it. You can read more about my background here.
Read more about couples therapy with Sara Stanizai here.