Look, I spent forty years of my life thinking that if you could just map out the variables, you could fix anything. Relationships, software architecture, fixing a leaky faucet—it’s all about input and output, right? Wrong. Absolutely, fundamentally wrong, and it took almost losing the best thing in my life to hammer that into my stubbornly detached skull.
I’m an Aquarius. We optimize. We rationalize. My Pisces partner? They feel things—like, really feel things. Deep ocean currents stuff. When things started getting rough between us a few months back, I did what I always do: I created a spreadsheet. I labeled columns: Partner’s Grievance (A), My Rational Response (B), Proposed Solution (C). I was trying to debug the relationship like it was a faulty piece of code. It was pathetic.
This whole mess exploded right after my partner’s big work project failed. They were crushed. Totally devastated. They came home and needed me to just hold the space, right? I listened for five minutes, then I started listing off potential networking contacts they could use to rebound and pointed out the logical flaws in their previous strategy. I thought I was helping. I was just being a gigantic, cold fish.
The next morning, the suitcase was packed. Not slammed, just neatly packed. That’s how serious it was. When I started asking, “Wait, let’s analyze the cost-benefit analysis of separation versus couples therapy,” they just looked at me like I was speaking ancient Greek. They told me I needed to stop being a robot and start being a human being. That’s when the switch finally flipped: logic wasn’t the tool for this job. The tool was messy, terrifying, stupid feeling.
The Detachment Intervention: Phase One
I realized I needed an immediate, radical shift. I scrapped the spreadsheets. I threw out the self-help books that talked about ‘active listening’ as a skill to be mastered. This wasn’t a skill; it was a surrender. My first step? I forced myself to sit down, every single morning, and write three pages of pure, unfiltered emotional sludge. No grammar checks, no rational summaries. Just what my stomach felt like. I was forcing myself to access the internal noise I usually filtered out with intellectual pursuits.
- I stopped using the phrase “I understand your logic.”
- I replaced it with “Tell me more about how that made you feel.” Even though it felt absolutely fake and manufactured at first.
- I committed to saying “I feel terrible about that,” even when my brain was screaming, “No, intellectually, this is just inconvenient.” I had to override the impulse to fix things and just acknowledge the pain.
- I drove myself crazy doing guided meditations specifically focused on somatic awareness—feeling where emotions sit in the body—which, honestly, felt like watching paint dry, but I stuck with it.
This was agonizing. I’m a high-functioning human being; I don’t deal with agony. But the alternative was permanent loneliness because I optimized my way out of intimacy. I chose the temporary torture of vulnerability over the comfort of emotional distance.
Wading into the Pisces Ocean
The real test came when my partner decided to come back—tentatively. Their return wasn’t smooth. Pisces energy means there’s a lot of emotional residue, a lot of backtracking and high-intensity mood swings. In the past, I would have immediately retreated into my study and analyzed the inconsistent behavior as a sign of instability I didn’t need to engage with.
This time, I stayed put. I stopped myself from finding technical solutions. One afternoon, they were having a full-blown existential spiral over a burnt dinner—they took it as a personal failure of epic proportions. My initial instinct was to point out that we could just order takeout and that the statistical probability of this happening again was low. That’s the old me. Instead, I fought down the urge to rationalize, I walked over, pulled them close, and just held them. I didn’t say anything for a full five minutes. Five minutes of doing nothing but providing physical presence felt like running a marathon, I swear.
I let myself absorb the chaos. I stopped trying to fix their sadness. I stopped trying to define their anger. I just acknowledged it. I finally whispered, “Yeah, that sucks. That really, really sucks.” It’s incredible how much that short, messy phrase accomplished compared to the five pages of well-structured analysis I would have drafted previously. It cracked open something essential between us.
The Ongoing Mess
It’s not perfect. Yesterday, I nearly slipped up and tried to explain the neurological basis of why their anxiety about our finances was irrational, but I caught myself just before the words tumbled out. I mentally deleted the explanation. Instead, I just said, “That must feel scary,” and then I sat with them and reviewed the bank statements together, focusing on their comfort level, not the raw data efficiency.
This whole practice is less about optimizing the relationship and more about de-optimizing myself. It’s about recognizing that sometimes, the most intelligent response is the one that feels the dumbest and the most vulnerable. It means I have to embrace the mess and stop being so damn efficient in my emotional life. It means I’ve finally started building trust, not through shared intellectual pursuits, but through shared, acknowledged, unedited feelings. It turns out, that’s how you actually make it work. Who knew?
