Why Your Relationship Is Probably Like The Stock Market.

RELATIONSHIPS • February 04, 2018

One thing I’ve learned as a therapist (and as a human) about being in a long-term romantic relationship is this: there will be points, possibly many points, where you want to quit it.

Maybe it’s because you can’t stand your wife’s loud breathing for one more moment, or the breakdown in communication with your boyfriend feels insurmountable, or it’s been six months since you had sex with your partner since becoming new parents.

You may be fantasizing about breaking up, divorcing, getting on Tinder. Finding someone better, smarter, more sexuality compatible, or just generally less annoying. You may think your relationship is dead and it’s not going to get any better.

Why are relational ruptures and hard moments in relationships so painful?

And you are so not alone in feeling like you want to quit your relationship. This is SUCH a common feeling!

But there are a few tools and one metaphor I like to share with my therapy clients when they feel like this. Tools and a metaphor that, when considered, could help reduce your despair about the state of your relationship and, dare I say? even make you feel a little more hopeful.

“Someone once told me a story about long-term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through Africa, and I would still never know all there is to know about that continent. To stay the course, to stay intentional, to stay curious and connected – that’s the heart of it. But it’s so easy to lose track of the trail, to get tired, to want to give up, or to want a new adventure. It can be so easy to lose sight of the goodness and mystery within the person sitting right in front of you.” – Joy Williams

Why is your relationship actually a lot like the stock market?

Your relationship is probably a lot like the stock market.

Specifically, your relationship is probably filled with high highs and low lows which, as we all know, is par for the course with investing in the stock market.

But there’s a really big difference between taking a snapshot of the stock market on any given day versus looking at the overall trends over time.

On any given day you could feel total despair and want to get out as you see your stocks plummeting, potentially costing you thousands. Or you could feel like a rock star as you watch your investments get bullish and contemplate buying even more.

But neither of these scenarios would be an accurate portrayal of your portfolio’s overall performance nor indicative of a likely long-term reality for you.

Why?

Because when we step back and observe and analyze 100 years of data from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, we see that, while wild ebbs and flows are inevitable, the stock market has steadily risen and gone up over time.

How does the stock market metaphor actually apply to your relationship?

Well, if you take a snapshot on any given day, it’s probably not going to be a very realistic indicator of your overall relationship health either.

“We all have restlessness in long-term relationships.” – Helen Fisher, Ph.D.

If you take the snapshot on a day when you’re at each others’ throats, scrambling to get to work after discovering your engine won’t turn over and the dishwasher has flooded the kitchen, this isn’t likely to be representative.

Conversely, if you take the snapshot while you’re both on vacation, carefree and unencumbered and feeling blissfully back in love over margaritas, that’s probably not the most representative scenario either.

However, if you step back and look at the arc of history between you two, accounting for those daily/weekly/monthly highs and lows, would you see an overall upward growth trend, too?

For a lot of us, probably.

But it can be really, really hard to remember this when you’re in a big dip, a market crash, your own proverbial 2008 relationship meltdown if you will.

So what’s there to do then?

What four tools can help you survive the low points in your relationship?

First of all, I want to clarify that not every relationship is meant to be stayed in forever.

A successful relationship can be one that you stay in, and it can be one that you both decide to leave.

And certainly, if there is domestic violence, addiction, or severe mental illness in the relationship, you need to consider many different factors way beyond what the scope of this article is addressing.

But for many of us not in situations like this, life begs the question of us often: how do we make it through the inevitable dips in our relationship that we mostly want to stay in?

Tool #1: Remember it’s a snapshot, not the whole story.

Using the above metaphor, reflect on the general trend of your relationship. Since you both got together, despite the “market fluctuations”, has there been a general upwards trend?

Have you both grown up a little more together? Are you more compassionate and tolerant and a better team that you were at the beginning? Have you become a better person in any way because of time with your mate?

Challenge your thoughts if you can only/want only to see the “dips” in your relationship. In rare cases, this may be true. But for most of us, there’s likely some highs and upward growth, too.

Try and recall and reflect on that and see if it helps support you in those times of “market dips” in your own relationship.

Tool #2: Be patient. Play the gratitude game. Reconnect back to why you fell in love with this person in the first place.

Like with so many things in life now, many of us want instant gratification and quick fixes. Swipe right, one-click ordering, all relationship problems resolved speedily.

But this isn’t really realistic.

Life is long and full of challenges. And so too will be our romantic relationships. And not all the problems within them will be solved overnight.

So it’s important to remember the secret ingredient of time as a balm to your relationship pain. The way things feel today may not feel the same in three months, six months, or a year from now.

Can you practice patience in your drive to see the unfulfilling dynamics between you resolved? I’m not saying that you need to be passive and do nothing about it (see tool #4), but I am saying, can you give it time to see the problems resolve? Can you practice patience?

And while doing that, can you practice the Gratitude Game with yourself, reflecting on 10 reasons you do actually like your mate (make this a daily practice!), can you reflect and reconnect back to why you fell in love with that person in the first place?

Those reasons are still likely true and valid and real and present within your relationship. They just may be covered up by what feels like “plummeting stocks” type feelings right now.

Tool #3: If you do want to break up, agree that you will break up in a regulated state.

If you feel like you want to quit your relationship and your partner does too, can you both agree to postpone and make that decision in a time and emotional space where you both feel emotionally regulated?

In other words, can you both agree not to break up when you’re at a low point and instead wait until things feel a little more stable?

Of course, definitely, give yourself permission to feel your feelings and reflect on them for the good information they contain. Your feelings are valid and contain clues for you. But making a decision when you are emotionally dysregulated or flooded is likely not going to be the best place to make a decision from.

So take some time and agree with your partner that you’ll discuss the possibility of separating and “quitting the stock market” on a day when you feel a little more stable.

And, indeed, bring this conversation to tool #4.

Tool #4: If you are in a dip and are floundering, get help before getting out.

I cannot emphasize this enough: long-term romantic relationship can be HARD. Really hard. And sometimes you may need to get some professional support to help you both cope and heal the patterns and scar tissue that’s built up over your years together.

That’s totally okay and normal and natural!

You would go to the doctor to get help treating an infection, wouldn’t you? You’d hire a lawyer to create a will and trust? Similarly, if your relationship is in pain and needing support and it’s beyond your scope and capacity to figure it out, why not seek out professional help, too?

So to that end, when your “stocks are dipping” and you’re in a proverbial “market crash”, I really highly recommend you seek out a couples counselor that you both feel comfortable with.

Someone who can help you weather the dips and possibly “tweak your portfolio” without jumping ship and selling off all of your stocks. Find someone who can support you in the painful times of your relationship.

What is the most important thing to hold onto when your relationship feels like it’s crashing?

I hope you found this metaphor and these tools helpful!

Now I would love to hear from you in the comments below:

Leave a message in the comments below so our community of blog readers can benefit from your wisdom.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: Attachment Styles: A Complete Guide.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
• Johnson, S. M. (2004). The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection. Brunner-Routledge.
• Siegel, J. J. (2014). Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies. McGraw-Hill Education.
• Fisher, H. (2004). Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Henry Holt and Company.
• Schore, A. N. (2001). The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health. Infant Mental Health Journal.
• Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press.
• Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Three Rivers Press.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.
• Johnson, S. M. (2008). Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Little, Brown and Company.

The Neuroscience of Relationship Volatility

Understanding why relationships feel like the stock market — why the highs and lows are so emotionally intense — requires a brief visit to the neuroscience of attachment. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has documented extensively how the attachment system and the survival system share neurological real estate. When the person you love withdraws, your nervous system doesn’t experience it as mild disappointment. It can experience it as threat.

This is especially true for people who come from relational trauma backgrounds — where the attachment figures in childhood were also the source of danger or unpredictability. For these individuals, the normal fluctuations of adult partnership can feel genuinely catastrophic. The “market dip” of a disconnected week triggers the same neurological alarm as the original wound.

Understanding this doesn’t mean staying in relationships that aren’t working. But it does mean something important: your worst moments in a relationship — the moments where you’re most certain it’s over, that they don’t love you, that this can’t be fixed — may be your most activated moments. And activated moments are the worst time to take the snapshot.

Kira, a client of mine — a physician in her late thirties who came to me after nearly leaving her marriage during a week-long fight — described it this way: “I was completely convinced it was over. I had a whole narrative about why we’d never work. Then we had a decent conversation, I slept for two nights, and I looked back at that narrative and didn’t recognize it. I was reading from an old script.”

She was. The old script had been written in childhood, by relationships that did end in abandonment. Her marriage wasn’t that. But her nervous system hadn’t learned the difference yet.

When the Metaphor Has Limits

I want to be careful here, because the stock market metaphor is useful but not unlimited. Not every relationship is worth staying in. Not every dip is a normal market correction. Some relationships are genuinely harmful — characterized by chronic contempt, active abuse, or sustained emotional unavailability that doesn’t improve regardless of effort or support.

The question that matters isn’t “is this relationship hard right now?” but “is this relationship, over time, trending toward more safety, more repair, more genuine connection?” If the answer is no — if the trend line is actually flat or declining, despite honest effort and professional support — then the metaphor shifts. Sometimes the right move is to sell.

But most of us aren’t in that situation. Most of us are in relationships that are genuinely good, in the way that all genuinely good relationships are also genuinely hard — and the work is learning to read the trend line rather than the daily ticker.

Sue Johnson, PhD, psychologist and developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and author of Hold Me Tight, puts it beautifully: the core question in any intimate relationship is whether the partners can reach for each other and be met when it matters most. Not in every moment. Not with perfect consistency. But enough, and consistently enough, that the attachment stays secure. That’s the long game. That’s what the trend line measures.

What Couples Therapy Can Do That Neither Partner Can Do Alone

I want to say something direct here, because I’ve watched too many couples try to navigate the “market crashes” of their relationship without any support, grinding through them on willpower and good intentions and watching the goodwill erode over time.

Couples therapy, when done well, isn’t about managing conflict. It’s about interrupting the cycle. When you’re in a dip — when the stocks are plummeting and you’re both flooded — you can’t see clearly enough to navigate out. A skilled couples therapist can hold the view that neither of you can hold in that moment: the long-term trend, the patterns underneath the conflict, the attachment needs driving the cycle.

Sue Johnson, PhD, psychologist and developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and author of Hold Me Tight, documented how most relationship conflict is actually driven by attachment panic — the terror of losing emotional access to your partner. From the outside, the fight looks like it’s about the dishwasher or the tone of voice or who forgot to pick up the dry cleaning. From the inside, it’s one partner saying “are you there for me?” and the other partner not being able to hear the question through the noise of their own activation.

A couples therapist helps you hear the question. And helps your partner hear it. That’s the change that makes the dips survivable — not eliminating the dips, but having a map for getting through them that includes the other person rather than mobilizing against them.

If your relationship is in a significant dip, I’d encourage you to not wait until you’re considering leaving to get support. Earlier intervention is almost always more effective — both because the goodwill is still present and because the negative patterns haven’t yet calcified. Reaching out for support isn’t a sign that the relationship is failing. It’s a sign that it matters enough to fight for.

And for the driven women reading this who are navigating relationship challenges alongside everything else in their lives: you deserve a relationship that is a source of genuine nourishment rather than another performance arena. You deserve a partner who can hear you in the dips — not just celebrate you at the peaks. That relationship is possible. And it typically requires doing the individual work — understanding your attachment style, processing your relational trauma history — alongside the couples work. Both tracks, running simultaneously, is where the deepest change happens.

How Attachment History Shapes Your Market Response

The way you experience the “dips” in your relationship isn’t random — it’s shaped by your attachment history. Specifically, by what you learned, in your earliest relationships, about what happens when someone you love withdraws, goes quiet, becomes unavailable.

For someone with a secure attachment history — where caregivers were consistently available and responsive enough — a partner’s bad week or emotional withdrawal tends to register as “they’re having a hard time.” It’s uncomfortable, but it’s not destabilizing. The underlying sense of security in the relationship doesn’t break.

For someone with an anxious attachment history — where the primary caregiver was inconsistently available, sometimes warm and sometimes withdrawing — the same withdrawal can feel like the beginning of abandonment. The nervous system learned, very early, that love is unstable and that any reduction in connection needs to be immediately corrected. The hyperactivated response to the market dip — the pursuit, the urgency, the need to immediately repair — is an old pattern, not a current reading of the situation.

For someone with an avoidant attachment history — where vulnerability was met with distance or criticism, where emotional needs were most safely managed alone — the dip can trigger the opposite: a kind of shutting down, a pulling back, a move toward self-sufficiency that looks to the partner like rejection and actually makes the dip worse.

Understanding your attachment style changes how you navigate the market. It gives you a map for what’s happening when you react — is this a current reading of the situation, or an old script? And it gives you language for what you need that goes deeper than the presenting conflict. If you haven’t yet done a clear inventory of your attachment patterns, it’s one of the most valuable pieces of self-knowledge you can develop. Understanding attachment styles is a place to start.

Both/And: Holding the Complexity of Your Experience

In my work with clients, I find that the most important breakthroughs happen not when someone chooses one truth over another, but when they learn to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

You can be grateful for what you have and grieve what you didn’t get. You can love someone and acknowledge the harm they caused. You can be strong and still need help. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the texture of a fully lived life.

The driven, ambitious women I work with often struggle with this because they’ve been trained to solve problems, not sit with paradox. But healing isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a process to inhabit. And the both/and is always where the deepest growth lives.

The Systemic Lens: Seeing Beyond the Individual

When we locate suffering exclusively in the individual — “What’s wrong with me?” — we miss the larger forces at work. Culture, family systems, economic structures, and intergenerational patterns all shape the terrain on which your personal struggle plays out.

This matters because the driven women I work with almost universally blame themselves for pain that was never theirs alone to carry. The anxiety, the perfectionism, the chronic self-doubt — these aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive responses to systems that asked too much of you while offering too little safety, attunement, and genuine support.

Healing begins when you stop asking “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking “What happened to me — and what systems made it possible?”

Medical Disclaimer