Most people do not fall out of love in a single afternoon. The more common story is slower and harder to name: a marriage that works, by most visible measures, but in which something essential has quietly stopped. The children are looked after. The bills are paid. The weekends are managed. And somewhere inside all of that competent, coordinated, exhausting togetherness, each partner has gradually stopped being a person to the other — and become, instead, a function.

In my clinical work as a forensic psychiatrist, I sit across from people at the extreme end of this process: couples whose marriages have collapsed into litigation, whose accumulated grievances now fill court documents. The archaeology of the breakdown is usually clear by then. But what strikes me, over and over, is how early the erosion began — and how invisible it was to both parties while it was happening.

This piece is for people who are not yet at that point. It draws on the work of three thinkers whose ideas illuminate this experience from very different angles: the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, the couples therapist Esther Perel, and the relationship researcher John Gottman. Together, they offer something more useful than reassurance: they offer a map.

The Contract You Never Knew You’d Signed

Most couples don’t negotiate their marriage; they inherit it. Long before the wedding, each partner has absorbed a complex set of expectations about what a marriage looks like: who earns, who manages the household, who initiates affection, who carries the emotional load, who sacrifices career ambitions, who keeps track of the children’s appointments, and whose stress is perceived as more urgent. These expectations rarely come as conscious choices; instead, they form as assumptions—shaped by the marriages we observed growing up, the gender roles our culture handed us, and the family dynamics that influenced us long before we consciously understood them.

The issue isn't that these expectations are there; it's that they're rarely voiced or compared. Two people enter a marriage, each with their own invisible contract, and for a while, the excitement of being together masks the gaps. But eventually — often after a major life shift such as the arrival of children, a career change, or a health crisis — those gaps become too heavy to ignore.

When unspoken expectations go unmet, neither partner may even be able to name what went wrong. They feel it, though. They feel it as a slow, creeping sense of not being seen.

So far, this might sound like a problem of communication — one that better conversations could fix. But the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers on love and aggression, suggests the picture is considerably more complicated.

The Unconscious Layer: What Kernberg Adds

Kernberg suggests that the expectations we bring to marriage are not just unspoken. Many are truly unconscious, rooted in early attachment relationships and the internal scenarios we developed long before we understood what a relationship was. The contract was never signed because it was never consciously recognised. We don’t just fail to read the invisible contract we have with our partner. In many cases, we have never read it ourselves.

“Partners coming from different categories of internal experience may establish varying degrees of equilibrium that stabilise their relationship while permitting them to enact their world of private madness, contained by protective discontinuities.”
— Kernberg, O. F. (2012)

From this perspective, choosing a partner is partly unconscious. Kernberg explains how partners often select each other for narcissistic completion — an “imaginary twin” who reflects and completes the self. In its healthiest form, this twinship offers deep recognition and satisfaction. However, it has a fundamental vulnerability: anything in the partner that does not match the matching schema is not accepted. When a partner diverges — develops independently, changes, or simply fails to mirror what the other needs — the balance collapses, and feelings of invisibility or disappointment quickly follow. Kernberg also describes what he calls the “skin” dynamic: a demand for complete and continuous intimacy that begins as love but, under pressure, can evolve into its opposite. What started as the desire to be deeply known becomes, over time, a kind of suffocation — an intimacy of hatred rather than love. This is the dark endpoint of a contract that was never made explicit and never renegotiated: fusion that was meant to create closeness instead becomes confinement.

Kernberg importantly suggests that periodic disruptions — brief distance, disagreements, or even breakups — can act as a protective mechanism for couples, helping to keep the intensity of intimacy at sustainable levels. Not every instance of withdrawal signals a problem; some of it is the relationship taking a breath.

**What Esther Perel Understood About Desire and Disappearance**

The Belgian-American couples therapist Esther Perel, in her landmark work Mating in Captivity (2006), approaches the same terrain from a different angle. Her central insight is that the very closeness we build in long-term relationships can, paradoxically, make us invisible to each other.
*“Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energised by it.”*
— Perel, E. (2006), Mating in Captivity

Perel contends that when a partner becomes completely known — or worse, entirely predictable — the curiosity that once fuelled the relationship fades away. The person you initially approached with genuine interest becomes the one managing the mortgage, organising the school run, and going to bed exhausted beside you. Domestic merging can feel like intimacy. But it can also be a form of disappearing.

Her broader cultural observation is especially relevant for contemporary Australian couples. We now rely on one person to provide what a whole village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, continuity, passion, friendship, co-parenting, financial partnership, and emotional refuge. As Perel notes, it is remarkable how much weight we expect one relationship to bear — and how little we acknowledge that the weight itself may be part of the problem.

Gottman and the Micro-Moments That Matter

If Kernberg explains the unconscious structure of the invisible contract, and Perel explores the costs of fusion, the psychologist John Gottman provides the most practically accessible explanation of how relationships break down in real time.

Gottman’s decades of research on couples identified what he called “bids for connection” — small, often non-verbal moments in which one partner reaches out to the other for acknowledgment, warmth, or shared attention. A comment about the weather. A sigh. Showing a partner something on their phone. These bids are easy to miss and dismiss. But Gottman’s research demonstrated that whether a partner “turns toward” or “turns away” from these bids is one of the strongest predictors of relationship longevity.

In distressed relationships, bids go unmet. Over time, partners stop making them. What follows is not dramatic conflict but something quieter and more corrosive: a gradual retreat from the very gestures that once constituted connection. By the time a couple names the problem, they have often been living in a state of mutual invisibility for years.

There is an important distinction Gottman’s work encourages us to recognise: the difference between appreciation and attunement. A partner may thank you for cooking dinner, managing the school run, or keeping the household together — and still not truly see you. Attunement is something more profound. It is the experience of being held in mind: knowing that your partner understands not only what you do, but also what it costs you, and that they carry that knowledge with care.

Making the Invisible Visible: A Path Forward

The good news — and there is sincere good news — is that the invisible contract can be uncovered. It needs honesty, curiosity, and an acceptance of discomfort. But it doesn’t necessarily require a therapist, and it’s always better to address it early rather than later.

Name the contract. The most powerful and simplest intervention is to ask each other what you assumed marriage would look like. Not what you agreed — what you assumed. Most couples have never had this conversation. The answers are often surprising, sometimes painful, and almost always clarifying. In Kernberg’s terms, you are bringing unconscious object-relational assumptions into conscious awareness. In plain language: you are finally reading the contract you both signed.
Distinguish appreciation from attunement. Saying thank you is not the same as showing that you understand what something costs your partner. Attunement involves slowing down enough to notice not just what your partner does, but what it takes from them. This is especially crucial for the invisible labour — the cognitive, emotional, and logistical work that seldom gets recognised because it is never finished and never yields a visible outcome.
Renegotiate at transitions. Every major life change presents an opportunity to revisit the contract. Not because something has gone wrong, but because the terrain has shifted. Couples who incorporate this kind of regular renegotiation into their relationship are far less likely to build up silent grievances that could eventually become irreconcilable. The contract isn't a one-time document; it’s a living agreement.
Practise visibility. Following Gottman’s research, respond to your partner’s bids for connection. Turn towards rather than away. These micro-moments of recognition — practised consistently, in the ordinary texture of daily life — are what prevent a person from feeling invisible. Grand gestures matter far less than dependable attunement.
Maintain individuality. This is Perel’s key insight and Kernberg’s structural warning all in one. A partner who stays a full, independent, interesting person — with their own inner life, friendships, ambitions — is a partner who can still be truly seen. When we reduce ourselves to just functions, we stop seeing each other as people and become just roles. Keeping each person’s uniqueness in marriage isn’t a threat to intimacy; it’s what allows genuine intimacy to exist.

A Note From the Other Side of the Process

I often work with couples and families reaching the end, where the invisible contract has not only broken down but has also become the subject of legal proceedings. From that perspective, the patterns described by Kernberg, Perel, and Gottman are unmistakable and heartbreakingly consistent.

What I want to say to people who are earlier in the process — who still feel the distance opening but haven’t yet given up — is this: the feeling of being unseen is not a verdict on your relationship. It is a signal. It is the relationship asking to be renegotiated, made explicit, brought into the light.

References

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Crown Publishers.

Kernberg, O. F. (1995). Love Relations: Normality and Pathology. Yale University Press.

Kernberg, O. F. (2012). The inseparable nature of love and aggression: Clinical and theoretical perspectives. American Psychiatric Publishing.

Anzieu, D. (1989). The Skin Ego. Yale University Press. [Referenced in Kernberg’s discussion of narcissistic completion and twinship dynamics.]

Perel, E. (2006). Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic. HarperCollins.

Perel, E. (2017). The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. HarperCollins.

The Contract You Never Signed: Why Do So Many Married Couples End Up Feeling Invisible?