Snigdha Mishra cis. She/Her

[ Gratitude, Life goals , happiness, couple goals , couple therapist , snigdha mishra , relationships, India ]

Your parents’ marriage was your first classroom. And like most classrooms, you didn’t get to choose what you were taught.
You watched how they handled conflict, how they showed affection or didn’t, who compromised and who held ground. And your nervous system quietly filed all of it under “this is what marriage looks like.” You never saw them as two people who were also figuring it out. You only ever saw them as your parents.
In my work with Indian couples I see this constantly. The enmeshment between family and marriage runs so deep that people often can’t tell where their parents’ relationship ends and their own begins. They’re arguing about something that happened last Tuesday but they’re actually playing out a dynamic that is decades old and was never theirs to begin with.
The most freeing thing I help couples do is step out of that inherited frame entirely. To stop asking “is this how a marriage is supposed to work” and start asking “does this work for us?”
You don’t have to repeat what you witnessed. You don’t have to rebel against it either. You just have to be honest enough to build something that actually belongs to the two of you. 💛
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“Letting each other be in imperfect alignment.”
This is one of the quietest and most radical things a couple can actually do. And in the Indian context, it is also one of the hardest because we were never really taught that difference inside a relationship is okay. We were taught harmony. Which often meant sameness, or at least the performance of it.
So couples exhaust themselves convincing, correcting, waiting for their partner to finally come around. Not out of cruelty but out of a genuine belief that love should eventually produce agreement.
It doesn’t. And it isn’t supposed to.
Two people can see the same situation differently, want different things on a Tuesday evening, process grief at completely different speeds and still be deeply, genuinely committed to each other. That’s not a gap in the relationship. That’s just two whole people sharing a life.
The couples who find their way to something real aren’t the ones who agree on everything. They’re the ones who stopped making agreement the condition for connection.
Grow together. Not into each other.

Save this if it says something your relationship needed to hear today. 💛

This is comforting. But it’s only half the truth.
I’ve sat with enough people after painful relationships to know why this kind of writing spreads the way it does. When you’ve spent months, sometimes years giving your best to someone who consistently made you feel like you weren’t enough, you need to hear that you weren’t the problem. That need is real and it’s valid.
And yet.
In nearly two decades of working with couples and individuals, the most important shift I’ve seen people make isn’t when they stop blaming themselves. It’s when they get genuinely curious about themselves. There’s a difference, and it matters more than most people realise. That’s where real
Change and healing happens .
“The problem was never you” can become a way of closing a door that actually needed to stay open a little longer. Not to punish yourself. Not to take responsibility for someone else’s emotional blindness. But to ask the one question that actually moves people forward: what did this relationship show me about the patterns I carry? About the places where I still confuse love with effort, or loyalty with self-erasure?
Adler believed that a sense of worth built on another person’s recognition is not really self-worth at all. It’s borrowed confidence. And borrowed things eventually have to be returned.
The person who couldn’t see you was a mirror, not a verdict. But mirrors are only useful when we’re willing to look into them honestly.
So yes, your worth didn’t disappear because someone failed to recognise it. And also, the most powerful thing you can do now is not just walk away feeling vindicated. It’s to walk away knowing yourself a little more deeply than you did before.
That’s not self-blame. That’s how people actually heal.

If you’re in the middle of making sense of a relationship that hurt you, save this. Come back to it when you’re ready.

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