Name the season
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The people you love can handle almost anything you’re going through. What they can’t handle is not knowing if it ends.
There’s a version of this conversation that happens in relationships all the time, and it sounds like a fight about hours but it’s a fight about something else entirely.
One person is working late. A lot. The other person is frustrated, and the frustration comes out as “you’re never here” or “you care more about work than you care about us.” The person working late gets defensive, because they’re building something that matters and they feel like their partner doesn’t understand. Both people leave the conversation feeling unseen. Nothing gets resolved. It happens again two weeks later.
But if you listen to what’s underneath the argument, it’s almost never about the hours themselves. It’s about whether the hours are temporary. The question the frustrated person is trying to ask, and usually can’t articulate, is: “Is this a phase, or is this just our life now?”
That question is the whole thing.
What certainty does
In 2016, researchers at University College London ran an experiment where participants played a video game that involved lifting rocks. Some rocks had snakes under them, and if a snake appeared, the participant received a real electric shock. The researchers tracked stress through physiological markers like sweating and pupil dilation.
The finding was counterintuitive. Participants who knew for certain they were about to get shocked showed less stress than participants who were uncertain about whether a shock was coming. Certainty about a bad outcome produced less anxiety than ambiguity about any outcome. Your nervous system can process a known difficulty and adjust to it. Ambiguity keeps the stress response running on a loop because your brain can’t file the information and move on.
This is the same mechanism operating in your relationship when you’re in a hard season and haven’t named it. Your partner can absorb long hours, missed dinners, distracted evenings, weekends spent working. People are built for hard stretches. But they can only absorb difficulty they understand. The moment they start wondering whether this is how it’s going to be forever, the stress stops being about the situation and starts being about the uncertainty, and uncertainty is the thing that erodes trust, not the work itself.
