Quick summary: Couples can maintain every outward sign of a healthy relationship, including physical closeness, communication and shared time, while the underlying psychological dynamic quietly shifts from mutual encounter towards power or dependency, meaning the same loving gesture can either sustain intimacy or slowly erode it depending on what drives it. This matters for mental health and well-being because relationships organised around regulating or being regulated by a partner, rather than genuinely meeting them, tend to produce the chronic low grade distress, anxiety and disconnection that bring people into therapy long before either partner can name what has gone wrong. For clinicians and relationship counsellors, the practical implication is that treatment focused only on increasing loving behaviours will have limited effect unless it also addresses the unconscious organisation beneath those behaviours, making this distinction a useful diagnostic lens in couples work and a relevant consideration for public health messaging on relationship well-being.
Two people can love each other, stay together and keep doing the things we associate with a healthy relationship, and still lose the experience of intimacy along the way. They may still talk, embrace, have sex, spend time together and care for one another, so that from the outside everything looks intact. Yet something has shifted, and one or both partners may find themselves asking why they no longer feel close to someone they still, in every practical sense, share a life with. The relationship continues while the sense of actually meeting each other starts to fade.
In my work as a psychologist, I have become increasingly interested in what happens beneath observable relationship behaviour, in the unconscious psychological organisation that stands behind it. The same behaviour, it turns out, can be organised by entirely different inner dynamics, which is part of why watching what a couple does together tells us so little about how connected they actually feel.
Two psychological positions: Power and connection
I think of two psychological positions that can emerge in intimate relationships as a masculine and a feminine position. I use these terms in an archetypal and psychological sense rather than as descriptions of biological sex or gender. A woman may occupy what I describe as the masculine position, a man the feminine one, and the positions can shift within the same relationship over time or even within a single conversation.
What distinguishes the two is the direction of psychological experience. The masculine position is organised around the experience of my impact on you: I move closer and something happens in you, I withdraw and something happens in you, and my warmth, distance, silence or presence can visibly affect your inner state. Its central challenge is therefore power, not because men necessarily seek power as such, but because intimacy creates a fundamental discovery, which is that I can affect you.
The feminine position begins from the opposite direction. It is organised around the experience of your impact on me, so that your closeness matters, your distance matters, and your emotional availability affects me because you have become significant to my inner world. Its central challenge is connection, and the question that follows from it is whether I can allow you to matter to me without losing myself. Power, in this model, is the experience of my impact on you, and connection is the experience of your impact on me. What matters clinically is what these two experiences become over time.
When understanding becomes power
Love involves attention. When I love another person, I am interested in them and want to understand them more deeply, and this kind of understanding stays open, because the other person is never completely known. The more I understand you, the more I encounter you rather than the less.
But a different psychological movement can begin in almost the same place. I observe your patterns, learn what reassures you and what frightens you, notice what makes you approach and what makes you withdraw, and gradually the wish to understand you more deeply curdles into something else: I have figured you out. I know how you work. I know what happens if I withdraw, and what happens when I return, and which words calm you and which silence makes you anxious. Without either of us quite noticing, you have become, in my experience, a comprehensible system, and once I believe I understand the system, another possibility opens up, which is that I know how to operate it. This is the shift from understanding another person to experiencing power over them. Love continues to discover a person; power begins to operate a system.
Consider a woman who is upset, whose partner approaches and embraces her. The behaviour itself tells us very little, because one inner movement behind it might be a simple recognition, I see how you are right now and I am with you, while another might be closer to I know how to change your state. The outward action is identical in both cases, but the psychological centre is not. Love notices how you are; power notices what can be done to you.
When connection becomes dependency
The feminine position begins with another truth of intimacy, which is that you can affect me. That is not, in itself, dependency. To love someone is to allow them to become significant to you. But connection can undergo its own unconscious transformation. Instead of asking who you are, I may gradually begin asking what I need to do to get what I need from you. Should I become quieter, more understanding, less demanding? Should I wait, explain, tolerate, adapt? Almost without deciding to, I stop simply encountering you and start organising myself around your response, until you become the source of something I need to obtain, whether that is love, closeness, safety or reassurance. Connection becomes dependency when preserving the connection matters more than preserving myself.
Dependency, though, can just as easily turn into struggle. You withdraw, so I withdraw further. You make me wait, so now you will wait. You become cold, so I become colder still. Having discovered how you can affect me, I discover, in turn, how I can affect you, and the sensitivity that once served connection begins to serve power instead. What could have supported intimacy starts to support control, and I may even win the exchange, in the narrow sense that you come back, or apologise, or soften first. But I wanted love, and what I achieved was a victory, which is not the same thing. Defeating the person you wanted to love is not loving them; I have not left the system of power so much as changed which side of it I am standing on.
Regulation instead of relationship
There is a deeper similarity running underneath these apparently different dynamics. In the masculine position, once influence hardens into power, I am no longer simply encountering you but regulating you. In the dependent feminine position, I am no longer simply encountering you but regulating myself in relation to you, adjusting and adapting in an attempt to preserve or restore the connection. And when dependency tips over into struggle, I stop regulating myself around you and start regulating you instead. This is why power, dependency and the struggle that can follow from it often amount to different ways of doing something to a relationship rather than being in it: managing it, adjusting to it, anticipating it, controlling it, restoring it, withdrawing from it, provoking it, trying to win it.
There can be a great deal of psychological activity going on inside a relationship organised this way, even as something simpler and more difficult quietly disappears, namely the basic experience of being with another person. Power regulates the other person, dependency regulates the self in relation to the other, and a struggle for power reverses the direction of regulation again, whereas love, when it is working, simply meets the other person as they are.
The hidden dynamic behind behaviour
These processes are rarely conscious. A person does not usually think, I have figured you out and now I am going to control you, and nobody consciously decides, I am going to lose myself in order to obtain your love. On the surface, both partners may still behave in ways that look loving: they embrace, they care for each other, they communicate, they have sex, they set boundaries, they spend time together. But behaviour alone does not reveal what psychologically organises it. I may set a boundary because I am staying connected to myself, or I may perform the identical outward action because I want you to feel my withdrawal and react to it. What matters is the hidden dynamic organising the behaviour, and the quality of psychological orientation towards the other person, something that can often be felt in a relationship long before either partner is able to put it into words.
When intimacy disappears before the relationship does
In the masculine position, the other person can gradually become a system to be figured out. In dependency, they become a source from which love has to be extracted. In a struggle for power, they become an opponent to be made to react. A system, a source, an opponent: in each case, what starts to disappear is the other person as another person, and this may be one of the quieter ways intimacy fades in a long relationship. It is not necessarily when a couple stops having sex, or stops embracing, or even stops saying “I love you,” that closeness begins to go. It can start much earlier, when two people gradually stop encountering one another as two separate, living subjects. The relationship may carry on existing while the actual meeting between the two people has already begun to disappear, which also helps explain why simply adding more loving behaviours does not always restore closeness. More dates, more communication, more sex and more affection can all be valuable in their own right, but if the underlying unconscious organisation of the relationship stays the same, the quality of the connection tends to stay the same too.
Returning to the other
The deeper task, then, is probably not simply to behave more lovingly, but to rediscover the other person as another person rather than as a system I know how to work, a source I know how to draw love from, or an opponent I know how to provoke. That means returning, again and again, to some fairly basic questions: who are you, what is happening in you, and can I go on wanting to understand you more deeply, while also asking who I am beside you, and whether I can let you matter to me without abandoning myself in the process.
The two positions then face their respective challenges again in a slightly more grown up form. In the masculine position, I can affect you, and the question becomes whether I can stay interested in you rather than becoming organised around my ability to affect you. In the feminine position, you can affect me, and the question becomes whether I can stay connected to you without abandoning myself, and without letting that connection curdle into a struggle for power. Mature intimacy, on this account, is fairly ordinary to describe even if it is hard to sustain: I see how you are, and I am with you; you matter to me, and I remain myself. The task is to keep discovering another human being without turning them into a system we know how to operate, to let another person affect us without that turning into dependency, and to go on being two separate people who continue, again and again, to meet. Intimacy does not necessarily end when a relationship ends. Often, it begins to end earlier than that, when the meeting between two people quietly stops.
Angela Tittel, MSc, is a Hamburg-based psychologist specialising in trauma, anxiety and relationship dynamics. She is the founder of PSYDEUM, a depth psychological, solution oriented therapeutic approach.
