The Difference Between Needing Space and Growing Apart Is a marriage meant to last forever? It’s a question you may be asking yourself — not out loud, not to each other, but at 2am when you can’t sleep. Maybe humans aren’t designed to be together this long. People are living into their 80s and 90s now. Is this just… what happens? And underneath that question, the ones that feel even harder to say: Have they lost interest in me? Will we ever have sex again? What would my l

Photo by Andrew Southam Tracy Sondern, LMFT, a couples therapist in Los Angeles reflects on breast cancer, marriage, and what the hardest year of her life taught her about relationships. When Diagnosis Brings Clarity This month marks the 25th anniversary of my last cancer treatment. I was diagnosed with breast cancer at 38, and what followed — the lumpectomy, the chemo, the radiation — was also, unexpectedly, one of the most clarifying years of my life. Before the diagnosis,

It starts quietly. Dinner is on the table. Nothing is technically wrong. And yet you look across at your partner and feel something you can’t quite name — a slight distance, a missing frequency, like a radio station you used to tune into perfectly that’s now coming in with static. You still love each other. You’re still functioning. But something has shifted. What you may be experiencing is what therapists call a midlife life transition — one that, in my experience, couples f