Esther Perel on how political polarization, economic insecurity, and prolonged uncertainty strain relationships. When external stress rises, couples fight more and divorce rates climb. The pressure from the world outside seeps into what happens at home.
When you are in a period of liminality where the big dilemmas are not getting answered, all the unknowns are filtering onto your relationships, and the relationship becomes the holder of all that stress, and that is part of the divorce rate at the moment and the weight that has felt on the relationships. It's not just people didn't get along. People needed in the relationships to deal. From the political polarization to the racial reckoning to the economic insecurity to the ambiguous loss, to the prolonged uncertainty, all of that fell on relationships. This is the story of the last two years that people know they feel it, but they don't necessarily articulate it.
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