A particular kind of exhaustion shows up in long partnerships. It looks like fatigue, but it isn’t only that. It’s the fatigue of a life organized around effort — where doing has become the way someone relates to existence, and stopping feels dangerous.
In a lot of partnerships and marriages, one person is addicted to doing. The sources vary — childhood injury, existential injury, a nervous system that learned vigilance early — but the pattern is consistent. They are fighting life by doing. And they believe, often without knowing they believe it, that if they stop fighting they will be existentially annihilated. So they are terrified. They have been activated for so long that the counterpoint becomes almost impossible to explain — that there is joy in being without purpose, in walking through a forest without direction, in not requiring every sunset to ask something of us.
This is where a metaphor I keep coming back to becomes useful. It’s useful partly because both partners can sit inside it.
Imagine two people in very salty, buoyant water. The kind of water that holds you if you let it. The dead man’s float, or really just non-struggle, allows the body to float. Everything is actually okay. But one partner is treading water. They are kicking, working, staying upright through effort, and they sincerely believe that if they stop, they will drown. They can feel the misery of it. They can feel the exhaustion. But they trust the effort more than the water.
At some point, the other person speaks. Usually gently, often from a position that has already drifted toward enabling or codependence. Hey, have you ever thought that maybe it’d be okay if you just stopped kicking for a little bit? Why don’t we hang out here in the water and enjoy the sun, enjoy the day, without kicking today?
This is where the dynamic shifts in a way that’s difficult to talk about. Because what comes back is not just defensiveness. It’s defensiveness with what I’d call sincere gaslighting.
I want to be careful here. Gaslighting gets thrown around too much. Sometimes it does describe what it was originally meant to describe — a narcissistic person making you question the validity of your own perception of reality in order to manipulate you. We really need another word for the phenomenon I’m describing, because the operative effect is the same but the source is dramatically different.
Because this person believes that if they stop kicking they will drown, the suggestion to float doesn’t register as supportive. It registers as crazy. As unsafe. As lackadaisical. As someone not taking adequate responsibility for the burden. And then they often add something more — well, you just don’t even know. All those times you think you’re floating, that’s actually only because I’m keeping you up.
That last part is where it functions like gaslighting. Because if you keep saying it to the floater — to the person who is not treading water for life — they slowly start to wonder if it’s true. Wait, am I the one who’s crazy for thinking that sometimes you can float in life? That not every sunset requires us to do something? That we can immerse in the moment and find joy, peace, rest, recovery? Am I crazy?
Functionally, yes — they’re being called crazy for being healthy. But the source is different, and that difference matters. It isn’t malice. It’s fear so total it can’t tolerate another truth in the room.
What this dynamic necessitates, if it isn’t named, is a quiet reorganization of the relationship around the treading-water person’s anxiety. The relationship becomes dependent on the person who would rather be floating adopting the mechanism of the person treading water. And then they both start to drown. Because when you’re treading water indefinitely, you don’t have access to recovery or joy, and you are perpetually burning yourself out and reinforcing the fear systems that created the tendency in the first place. The thing meant to keep you alive becomes the thing depleting you.
So at some point, the person who knows how to float has to say something. Not as rejection. As orientation.
It sounds something like this. I’m not crazy. And I think there’s part of you that knows I’m not. I think there’s part of you that wants to be able to float, and you can actually trust that I float really well. You’re worried — really, really scared — that you might lose me, because you know that if we weren’t together I would just be off floating. I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to abandon you. I want you to come with me. But I cannot any longer enable this viewpoint that if you stop treading water you’re going to die. Because paradoxically, it’s killing you and it’s killing me.
What sits underneath all of this is not a question about effort versus rest. It’s a question about trust. Trust in the body, in the relationship, in the fact that some of what holds us is already there and doesn’t require us to produce it. For many of us, that kind of trust was not available early on, so we replaced it with control. Control works for a while. And then it slowly becomes the thing it was meant to protect us from.
The water holds. Effort has its place. And sometimes life is asking something simpler of us than we are prepared to receive.
