8 Counterintuitive Truths About Love That Can Change How You Relate
I recently had the privilege to sit down with Nozipho Mbanjwa-Tshabalala as part of her Podcast After the Fires. We covered quite a few topics under the episode’s theme: ‘Building a Love that Heals’. Topics I am passionate about and themes that I believe can help many couples.
I encourage you to watch the full episode here:
Most of us enter relationships hoping love will feel like a safe arrival: find the right person, avoid the big mistakes, and everything should eventually settle into ease.
But intimate relationships do not work that way. They expose old protective habits, test our ability to stay present under stress, and repeatedly ask us to choose connection over instinct. The encouraging part is, even though it may sometimes feel that we are broken, it is not true. It means we may just be stuck. The good news is, love is a practice, an art even, and one we can learn to master.
Here are 8 topics I’d like to highlight from our conversation that may help you learn a little more about this thing we call Love.
8 Counterintuitive Truths About Love
1. Childhood wounds shape how you love, not necessarily whom you love
It is tempting to believe that healing your past will finally lead you to “the right person.” But childhood wounds do not operate like a dating filter. They shape the way we behave once love is available: what we tolerate, how we ask for reassurance, how we manage conflict, and whether closeness feels safe.
“Our childhood wounds determine how we love the person we find.”
This distinction matters because it brings intentionality back into the relationship. Healing is not a transaction that guarantees a perfect partner. It is the work of becoming more aware of the patterns we bring into any partnership.
2. Disconnection is not the problem, staying in disconnection is
Healthy couples are not couples who never misunderstand each other, get irritated, withdraw, or feel unseen. Disconnection is inevitable whenever two distinct people try to build a shared life.
The real measure of relational health is repair: Can both people recognise the distance and find a path back?
“Healthy couples are couples who are able to find their way from disconnection back into connection time and time again.”
This reframes conflict. A difficult moment is not automatic proof that the relationship is failing. It may be an opportunity to practice repair, honesty, and emotional return.
3. Connection requires more intention than modern couples realise
Connection is not merely an idea or a romantic feeling. It is a neurobiological experience that requires closeness, presence, and a regulated nervous system.
Many couples spend surprisingly little time each week in intentional connection, as little as six and a half minutes a day. The issue is not that couples do not care. It is that work, logistics, screens, responsibilities, and exhaustion quietly consume the conditions connection needs.
“Connection is a neurobiological experience that you can only experience in closeness.”
A relationship cannot live on efficient coordination alone. “Did you pay the bill?” and “Who is collecting the children?” may run a household, but they do not nourish a bond. If you’re raising children, I’ve written more about this in Finding Intimacy After Kids.
4. Your brain often chooses familiar pain over unfamiliar health
One of the hardest truths in love is that the nervous system does not automatically prioritise what is good for us. It often prefers what it recognises.
“Our brains do not choose what’s healthy for us. It chooses what’s familiar to us.”
This helps explain why people can remain in relationships that hurt them, even when leaving may look obvious from the outside. Familiarity can feel safer than uncertainty. Someone who learned to minimise their needs, dissociate from pain, or endure instability in childhood may unconsciously normalise those same conditions later.
This insight is not an excuse for harm, especially abuse. It is a call for compassion paired with support, safety, and conscious interruption of old survival patterns.
5. Opposite attachment styles can become an invitation to grow
An emotionally independent, achievement-oriented partner may pair with someone who leads with emotional closeness and reassurance. One person can prioritise competence and provision; to the other, presence and connection is priority.
These differences can create real friction. Yet they can also be an invitation rather than a verdict.
“The art is not just to accept the difference, but to also step into the complexity of the invitation to growth on both sides.”
The goal is never for one person to win or for both people to become identical. It is for each partner to stretch beyond the narrow strategy that once kept them safe.
6. The “to-do list” can quietly crowd out the “love list”
Achievement, caregiving, providing, organising, and solving problems can all look like devotion. Sometimes they are. But productivity can also become a sophisticated way to avoid emotional presence.
The memorable contrast is between a “to-do list” and a “love list.” A life can be efficiently managed while the relationship inside it becomes emotionally disconnected.
Making room for unhurried conversation, affectionate touch, curiosity, and playfulness is not an indulgence. It is intentional actions for the emotional safety that intimacy depends on.
7. The patterns built to prevent pain often recreate it
Couples can unconsciously construct a “psychodrama”: a repeating cycle where each person’s protection ‘default’ activates the other’s deepest wound.
For example, one partner may feel lonely and protest through anger or withdrawal. The other, already sensitive to abandonment, experiences that reaction as proof they are being left. Both people try to protect themselves, and both end up recreating the very pain they fear.
“How we react, the patterns we’ve built to protect ourselves against pain recreate the pain.”
Naming the cycle is powerful because it turns the problem from you versus me, into us versus the pattern.
8. Vulnerability works better than accusation, but it is a learned skill
When pain is activated, the brain’s first goal is survival, not connection. Some people become “big”: defensive, angry, controlling, or grandiose. Others become “small”: ashamed, silent, appeasing, or withdrawn.
Neither reaction naturally creates closeness. Vulnerability does.
Instead of saying, “You’re late again,” the more connecting message may be, “I miss you,” or “I felt afraid I did not matter.” This is not about suppressing needs or tolerating bad behaviour. It is about communicating pain as an invitation rather than a weapon.
“To articulate pain in the language of invitation voices fear and true vulnerability.”
Love Is Less About Discovery Than Development
The thought I want to leave you with, is this: many relationships are not destroyed by an absence of love. They become stuck in cycles that neither person knows how to interrupt.
“We’re not broken, we’re stuck.”
This idea sits at the heart of the book I’m working on, which grew out of nineteen years of sitting with couples who feared they were broken, when really they were stuck.
A thriving relationship requires two people who are willing to reflect, take accountability, and change. Not two flawless people who happened to meet at the right time. The question is less whether you have found the right person. It is rather: what skills, courage, and curiosity are you willing to develop to love well?
I am always grateful for the opportunity to discuss these issues. Thank you Nozi for putting these important topics on the table.
If these ideas resonate, my online course The Art of Loving turns them into practice. It’s a guided way for couples to learn the skills of connection and repair together, at home and at their own pace.
And if you’d prefer to work through this with me in person or online, you can book a session here.
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