Hey Reader,

I find myself having the same conversation with men and women over and over again, and it usually sounds something like this: "I've done the work. I've stayed grounded. I haven't collapsed or reacted or made it about me. But I'm exhausted, and I don't know where the line is between being a compassionate partner and slowly erasing myself. I don't want to walk away from someone just because things are hard. But I also can't keep doing this indefinitely. So at what point does staying become a problem?"

That question is an honest one, and it deserves an honest answer. But before I give it, I want to tell you about a hike.

A few years ago, several of us from the community climbed Mount Washington together in the middle of summer, one of those brutal northeastern days where the humidity sits on your skin before you've even left the parking lot, and by the time you've been moving a couple hours your shirt feels permanently attached to your body and everybody starts quietly reassessing how much "type two fun" they actually signed up for.

The beginning of those hikes always feels communal. Everybody starts together, talking, laughing, sharing snacks, adjusting gear, moving at roughly the same pace because the trail is still forgiving enough that differences in conditioning and mindset haven't fully revealed themselves yet.

Then the trail steepens.

And mountains do what mountains always do: they spread people out.

Some people naturally pull ahead because they've found rhythm. Some fall back because they're struggling physically. Some get quieter and more internal. Others become oddly chatty because talking distracts them from discomfort. Little groups form and dissolve. Eventually the trail stops feeling like one collective experience and becomes something much more personal happening in the presence of other people.

By the time we reached the upper scree fields near the summit, everybody was having their own private conversation with themselves (and I bet they were peppered with many expletives!).

That last section of Mount Washington is miserable in a very specific way. Endless fields of loose boulders, most of them about the size of shoeboxes, forcing every step to become deliberate and awkward right when your legs are already cooked and your patience has started evaporating. It's not technical climbing, but it grinds on you psychologically because the summit keeps appearing close while never quite arriving.

And because this is what naturally happens on difficult climbs, some of the guys reached the summit earlier than others. Nobody planned that. We didn't assign leaders and followers. Nobody made it mean anything. It was just how things unfolded.

What struck me afterward was how instinctive it was for the men who reached the top first to want to share the experience immediately. Pictures. Selfies. Messages to loved ones. Excitement. Relief. That feeling of finally breaking out above the tree line after hours of heat and exhaustion and suddenly seeing the world open beneath you. We radioed back to the others still climbing – not trying to rub it in, but to share our joy and victory with our companions.

Meanwhile, some of them were still down in the scree, overheated, frustrated, exhausted, slipping from boulder to boulder while trying not to roll an ankle, and the reality is that when you're still deep in the hardest section of the climb, somebody else's summit experience can land very differently than they intended. Even if you love them. Even if you're genuinely happy for them.

Fatigue, pain, and loneliness narrow people.

Sometimes another person's joy and celebration collide directly into our awareness of our own struggle and come out sideways.

Standing there later, sweaty and sunburned and laughing about the whole thing, I remember realizing how perfectly it mirrored the middle seasons of marriage. Early marriage usually still feels like the communal part of the climb: shared pace, shared momentum, shared identity. That's part of why it feels so intoxicating at first — two people temporarily experiencing life almost like one nervous system. But if a marriage survives long enough, real differentiation eventually begins happening whether either person likes it or not. One person begins confronting themselves more deeply first, starts healing first, develops stronger internal footing first, reaches a vista first. And when they naturally turn to share that experience with the person they love, it is very common for the other person, still deep in their own scree field, to respond not with celebration but with irritation, grief, fear, defensiveness, or sadness.

Not because the relationship is failing, or because somebody is toxic, or because you suddenly discovered an attachment mismatch that a thirty-two-year-old influencer with an Instagram following is confidently diagnosing from a sixty-second clip.

Honestly, I think social media has done enormous damage to people's understanding of long-term love because almost every normal season of differentiation now gets framed as pathology. Somebody pulls ahead emotionally for a season and suddenly strangers online are screaming narcissism, avoidant attachment, emotional abuse, energetic misalignment, or whatever the algorithm is rewarding this week. Meanwhile, how many of the people giving this advice often have lived experience navigating the long middle stretches of marriage? How many know that two people can stop walking in synchronized lockstep for a while, but can learn how to remain connected without demanding identical pacing?

That middle season is where a lot of marriages either deepen or die.

Because eventually one person radios back from a vista while the other is still slipping around in the boulders, and both people have to decide what the difference in elevation means. That's the real tension — not the pacing itself, but the meaning we each assign to it.

The immature part of us immediately wants to collapse the whole thing into black-and-white absolutes. Either we fuse completely or something must be wrong. Either you celebrate me perfectly or you're unsafe. Either we move together emotionally at all times or the relationship itself becomes suspect.

But long trails don't work that way, and neither do long marriages.

I think people need someone willing to say that out loud, because there seem to be few voices right now willing to normalize the middle seasons without catastrophizing them. Sometimes your wife is going to be discouraged while you feel clear. Sometimes your husband is going to be awakening internally while you feel abandoned and exhausted. Sometimes one person is breathing mountain air while the other is still climbing through fog and loose rock. That is not automatically evidence of failure. It is often evidence that growth is actually happening.

Now, that does not mean every situation should simply be tolerated indefinitely. There is a line, and most men can feel it intuitively even if they struggle to articulate it. There's a difference between somebody struggling on their trail – and behaving as such – and somebody demanding you carry them.

There's a difference between emotional aggravation born from exhaustion and a persistent insistence that you surrender yourself to manage another person's emotions permanently. A partner saying "I'm hurting, I'm frustrated, I feel alone down here" is very different from a partner saying "your freedom is unacceptable unless you abandon it and come back down here to regulate me."

One is human struggle.

The other is an invitation into self-erasure.

And most people asking whether they should leave their relationship have not actually learned to distinguish between discomfort and self-abandonment yet. They feel another person's distress and immediately assume something has gone fundamentally wrong instead of realizing they may simply be standing at different elevations for a season.

Usually the first work is not leaving. Usually, the first work is developing enough internal authority to lovingly hold on to yourself without collapsing, rescuing, or surrendering yourself. That's the part very few people teach anymore, because boundaries without contempt require maturity, and maturity is significantly harder to monetize than outrage.

I don't say any of this from above the trail. I'm in the same mountains everybody else is. I've been the guy standing at the vista wanting badly to share beauty with someone still suffering below it, and I've been the exhausted one in the scree listening to somebody else describe freedom while quietly wondering if I even had the energy left to keep climbing and kinda half-wishing they'd choke on their trail mix.

Both experiences are profoundly human, which is why I hope to see more couples take heart rather than panic when they stop walking side by side for a stretch.

The trail spreading out does not necessarily mean you are heading toward different destinations. Sometimes it just means you've finally reached the part of love where two whole people are being formed instead of one fused identity trying desperately not to feel the strain of differentiation.

If you find yourself there right now, feeling out of sync, feeling discouraged because somebody you love seems emotionally miles ahead or miles behind you, maybe the question is not whether the relationship is broken.

Maybe the question is whether you still trust yourself and the trail enough to keep walking without demanding that love always look like matching pace.

I'd love to know where you are with this. Where are you standing right now, and what is it costing you? Hit reply and tell me.

And if you're at a place where you need more than a newsletter, where you're tired of trying to figure this out alone, and you want someone in your corner who's actually been in the mountains, reach out. That's what I'm here for.

— Sven