We're Breaking Up Over Promises We Never Made
Most couples don't fail because they break agreements—they fail because they never made them.
There’s a conversation happening in every relationship that no one is actually having. It goes something like this:
Two people meet, fall into something resembling love, and proceed to build a life together based on assumptions they never bothered to verify. He thinks “commitment” means weekly date nights and shared finances. She thinks it means daily emotional check-ins and merged friend groups. Neither says this out loud because, well, shouldn’t it be obvious?
Spoiler: It’s not.
This is the paradox at the heart of most relationship failures. We don’t break up because someone violated the terms. We break up because we never agreed on what the terms were in the first place.
The parallel relationship phenomenon
I see this pattern constantly in my practice. A couple sits across from me, both devastated, both convinced the other person changed the rules. But when I dig deeper, what emerges isn’t betrayal—it’s misalignment that was there from day one.
Take Maria and Sam. They’d been together for three years when Maria suggested moving in together. Sam’s response? “I thought we were keeping things casual.” Maria was blindsided. Casual? They’d met each other’s families. They’d talked about future vacation plans. How is any of this casual?
Here’s the thing: Sam wasn’t lying. In his mind, the absence of explicit talk about marriage meant they were taking things slow. To Maria, meeting the parents was the relationship equivalent of a binding contract. Same relationship, entirely different interpretations.
This is what I call the parallel relationship problem. You’re not in the same relationship. You’re in adjacent ones that occasionally overlap but are fundamentally built on different premises.
Here’s the irony: this problem is relatively new.
For most of human history, marriage wasn’t about love—it was a social and economic arrangement with clearly defined roles. Everyone knew what they were signing up for because the terms were culturally scripted. You didn’t need to negotiate who did what or what commitment meant. Society told you.
Then came the Romantic Revolution. Suddenly, relationships were supposed to be about passion, emotional fulfillment, and personal compatibility. Which sounds beautiful until you realize we kept the assumption that everyone should just “know” what the relationship requires—except now, without any shared cultural script to follow.
In the 1950s, divorce was the exception—fewer than 1 in 5 marriages that began then ultimately ended. But as cultural attitudes shifted and no-fault divorce laws emerged in the late 1960s and 70s, making it far easier to exit struggling relationships, divorce rates surged dramatically. By 1980, the divorce rate had more than doubled. Today, about 40% of first marriages end in divorce, and second marriages fare even worse at roughly 60%—suggesting that simply trying again doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
Here’s the paradox: women now initiate approximately 70% of divorces, a number that climbs to 90% among college-educated women. Greater economic freedom has given women the power to leave—but leaving is often the consequence of never having negotiated in the first place. When the invisible contract finally reveals itself as incompatible, exit becomes the only option. What looks like empowerment is often just the freedom to escape a deal that was never explicitly made. We’ve traded being trapped in bad marriages for being free to leave relationships we never properly built.
The statistics suggest we haven’t gotten better at relationships—we’ve just gotten better at leaving ones that don’t work. But, we’re still recognizing it too late, after years of operating on incompatible assumptions instead of explicit agreements. The real failure isn’t in the leaving. It’s in never having the conversation that might have prevented years of misalignment in the first place
So we ended up with the worst of both worlds: the expectation of deep romantic connection plus the assumption that the terms are obvious. Except they’re not obvious anymore. They’re wildly individual. And we’re all just winging it, hoping our partner’s version of love matches ours.
The truth is: it usually doesn’t.
And the aforementioned statistics hint that this is not working out too well.
The invisible contract
Every relationship operates on an invisible contract—a set of unspoken rules, silent assumptions, and unstated expectations that govern everything from how often you text to what counts as emotional support to whether watching TV together qualifies as quality time, or what good sex should look like.
The problem? This contract was never negotiated. It was assumed into existence.
You assume your partner shares your definition of “quality time.” They assume you understand their need for alone time doesn’t mean they love you less. You both assume the other person knows what you need without you having to say it, because shouldn’t they just know?
No. They shouldn’t. And they don’t.
This is where relationships fracture. Not in the big, dramatic moments, but in the slow accumulation of missed expectations, unspoken frustrations and resentment building up over time, eventually manifesting as anger, and the growing realization that you’re both following different playbooks.
Three contracts, one relationship
Here’s what most couples don’t realize: your relationship isn’t governed by one invisible contract—it’s governed by three.
The first contract is practical. It’s about logistics, money, household responsibilities and roles, who does what and when. This is the contract people sometimes talk about, usually when they’re annoyed about dishes.
The second contract is emotional. It’s about how you handle conflict, what level of emotional intimacy is expected, how you show up for each other during hard times. This contract is rarely discussed, but it’s where most couples live or die.
The third contract is existential. It’s about the story you’re telling yourselves about what this relationship means, where it’s going, what it’s for. This is the contract nobody talks about because it feels too abstract, too philosophical, too much.
But here’s the catch: if you’re not aligned on the third contract, the first two won’t save you. You can split the bills perfectly and have excellent communication skills, but if one person thinks this relationship is heading toward lifelong partnership and the other thinks it’s a beautiful chapter that will probably end someday—you’re doomed.
And here’s where most couples get it backwards: they compromise on their assumptions instead of negotiating their agreements. Compromise is where both people agree to be quietly disappointed. While this may sound healthy and mature, it often just means that two people are lowering their expectations without ever stating what they were in the first place. She stops expecting emotional check-ins because he seems uncomfortable. He stops suggesting they spend less time with her friends because she gets defensive. Neither of them actually negotiates what they need. Instead, they both agree to quietly let their needs go unmet in order to avoid conflict, and resentment builds with every unspoken need. They pretend that this is what partnership looks like.
Real negotiation is different. It’s saying, ‘I need X. You need Y. Let’s design something that honors both, or acknowledge we can’t.’ Compromise without negotiation is just coordinated settling.
The need versus wound confusion
One of the most common mistakes I see couples make is confusing needs with wounds.
A need is legitimate: “I need to feel heard when I’m upset.”
A wound is a trauma response masquerading as a need: “I need you to text me every hour or I’ll assume you’re cheating.”
The difference matters because needs can be met through healthy negotiation. Wounds require healing, not accommodation.
When someone says, “I need you to make me feel secure,” what they often mean is, “I am fundamentally insecure, and I’m hoping you’ll fix that.” But no partner can heal a wound that predates them. They can support the healing process, but they can’t be the cure. We are responsible for our own emotions.
This is where the invisible contract gets especially messy. One person enters the relationship expecting their partner to be their therapist, their validation machine, their anxiety antidote. The other person, unaware of this expectation, just thinks they’re dating someone. The collision is inevitable.
This confusion between needs and wounds is one type of fundamental mismatch. But there’s another category of conflict that’s even more telling.
When conflict becomes fatal
Not all relationship conflicts are created equal. Some are resolvable through better communication, negotiation, and compromise. Others are fundamental incompatibilities disguised as arguments about whose turn it is to take out the trash.
The question isn’t whether you fight—all couples fight. The question is whether you’re fighting about solvable problems or about incompatible values.
If you’re arguing about division of labor, that’s usually solvable. If you’re arguing about whether emotional vulnerability is even important, that’s existential.
This is where many couples waste years trying to fix something that was never broken in the traditional sense—it was just wrong from the start. The invisible contract revealed itself, and it turned out you’d signed completely different agreements.
Designing the relationship you actually want
Most people spend more time researching which Netflix subscription to get than they do explicitly defining and negotiating what they need from a relationship.
We treat love like it should be intuitive, spontaneous, effortless. And while those qualities have their place in romance, building a functional partnership requires something decidedly less sexy: intentionality.
You need to talk about the contract. Out loud. Before it becomes a problem.
What does commitment mean to you? What does quality time look like? How do you want to handle conflict? What are your non-negotiables? What are your fears? What wounds are you bringing to the table?
This isn’t unromantic. What’s unromantic is waking up three years into a relationship and realizing you’re with a stranger whose version of partnership looks nothing like yours.
The goal isn’t to eliminate all ambiguity or draft a 50-page relationship manifesto. It’s to stop operating on assumptions and start operating on agreements. To replace the invisible contract with a conscious one.
Most relationships don’t fail because of insurmountable problems. They fail because two people never clearly articulated what they were building—and settled for compromise instead of negotiation.
You can’t break a promise you never made. But you also can’t build a relationship on promises you never discussed.
So maybe it’s time to have the conversation.
The real one.
The one about the deal you never made.
It might be uncomfortable. It might reveal misalignments you’d rather not see. But here’s what I know: it’s less painful than discovering five years from now that you’ve been living in parallel relationships the entire time.