Are We Incompatible? Understanding Values, Impasses, and Process Issues in Relationships

Something that I hear a lot as a couples therapist is this idea around incompatibility. It often shows up in sessions when folks are feeling really burnt out. Perhaps it’s on the heels of multiple fights that have shown up again and again. Perhaps it’s around differences in life goals and dreams, values, sex, family, how people spend their time, or what each person wants the relationship to look like. But either way, every so often someone will look at me and ask something like, “Are we just incompatible, Danielle?” And every time this lands in the room, I get really curious, because sometimes, yes, what we’re looking at is a very real impasse between two people who love each other and nonetheless want profoundly different things from their lives. But a lot of the time, what couples call incompatibility is actually something else.

Sometimes it’s a values difference that has become very polarized. Sometimes it’s two protective nervous systems colliding with one another. Sometimes it’s a neurotype difference that probably is not going anywhere and needs more acceptance than resolution. And very, very often, it’s a process issue—where the way that two people have learned to respond to difference has become so painful that the difference itself starts to feel impossible.

This distinction matters because the path forward is very different depending on what you’re actually dealing with.

I think incompatibility has become a bit of a catch-all term in relationships. We fight all the time, so maybe we’re incompatible. You want to spend Saturday with friends and I want to spend it at home together, so maybe we’re incompatible. You need more emotional processing than I do. You like to talk immediately when you’re upset and I need hours before I can even figure out what I’m feeling. Maybe we’re incompatible.

And there may be something very real underneath all of these differences, because people are different. We have different temperaments, cultures, histories, neurotypes, desires, attachment strategies, values, interests, needs, capacities, and ideas about what makes a meaningful life. I don’t think it is useful to flatten all of those differences into “this is just your attachment cycle” or “you can compromise on anything if you love each other enough.” Sometimes two people really are asking fundamentally different things of a relationship.

But difference is not necessarily the same thing as incompatibility.

What I usually want to understand first is what kind of difference we’re actually looking at. Is this a true relational impasse? Is it a values difference that can potentially be negotiated over time? Is it an enduring difference that needs accommodation and acceptance? Or has the process around the difference become the larger problem? Those are not the same thing, even though they can feel very similar when you’re living inside them.

Difference is not necessarily the same thing as incompatibility.

There are some issues that I do think can create very real relationship impasses. I want children. I absolutely do not want children. I need to be partnered with someone who shares my religion. I am not religious and I do not want to become religious. I want a monogamous partnership. I increasingly feel that I need to explore polyamory or some other form of consensual non-monogamy.

These are difficult situations because they are not simply disagreements about where to eat or how to spend a weekend. They may be attached to incredibly deep visions of how someone imagined their life unfolding, who they understand themselves to be, the kind of family they want to build, or the kind of freedom and congruence they need in order to feel like themselves.

When I work with couples around these issues, there is often still a lot we can explore. We can look at the narratives underpinning each person’s position. We can look at values, family, culture, identity, fear, expectations, and authorship. Sometimes people discover that something they originally experienced as completely fixed actually has more room around it than they imagined. Sometimes the opposite happens and someone becomes even clearer that, no, this really is central to the life I want.

And when we get there, I have to be honest that these are the situations where I tend to get a little tight as a therapist. When I realize that what we’re dealing with is primarily process, I can often exhale. The process might be brutal. The couple might be exhausted. They may have been stuck in the same negative cycle for ten years. But I can usually see a path. We can slow down what happens between them, understand the protection underneath it, work with attachment injuries, help them reach for one another differently, help them tolerate difference without immediately experiencing it as rejection or abandonment. There is work to do.

But when I am sitting in front of two people who deeply love one another and have chosen someone whose most important vision for the future directly conflicts with their own, that’s harder—because sometimes staying together means grief. One person may have to grieve becoming a parent. Someone may have to grieve a particular religious or cultural family life. Someone may have to grieve a form of relational freedom that feels deeply important to them. And sometimes that grief can be metabolized and a different life can become genuinely meaningful. Sometimes it cannot.

There is not always a therapeutic intervention that makes two mutually exclusive futures suddenly compatible.

At the same time, a values difference is not necessarily the same thing as a values impasse, and I think this is where couples can get into trouble.

When I engage in premarital counseling, one of the biggest things I spend time looking at is values. Values can absolutely change throughout our lives, but they tend to be a little more stable than preferences, and they are often deeply connected to identity, culture, community, family, and the stories people carry about what a good life looks like. But two people do not have to possess identical values in order to have a viable relationship.

One person may deeply value community, friendship, novelty, and being out in the world, while their partner deeply values quiet, home, predictability, and lots of quality time together. Those are real differences. The question is whether those different things can coexist inside the same life.

This is where I often want couples to zoom out and look at values longitudinally. Couples can get incredibly stuck trying to decide whose value will be honored in this exact moment. Do we go to the party or stay home? Do we spend the holiday with your family or mine? And because attachment is always somewhere in the room, the actual decision can quickly become loaded with much more meaning than the decision itself.

If you loved me, you would want to stay home with me.

If you understood me, you’d know how suffocated I feel when I never get to see my friends.

Now a values difference has become an attachment emergency.

But perhaps the question is not always, whose value wins tonight? Perhaps the question is, can we build a life over time in which both of these things have somewhere to live? Maybe sometimes I go to the party and you stay home. Sometimes you come because participating in my community matters deeply to me. Sometimes I intentionally protect an entire quiet weekend because I understand that rest, home, and intimate time together matter deeply to you. We do not necessarily need to satisfy both values equally in every individual moment in order to honor both of them within the relationship.

That asks for collaboration, compromise, and a fairly high degree of differentiation—because differentiation requires us to tolerate the fact that my partner can want something different from me without that difference automatically becoming a referendum on whether they love me enough.

A lot of what couples describe as incompatibility is actually happening here, in process. A process problem is not necessarily about the original issue itself. It is about what starts happening between two people when the issue shows up. One person gets anxious and begins pushing for resolution. The other gets overwhelmed and withdraws. The first person experiences that withdrawal as abandonment and pushes harder. The second person now experiences the pursuit as criticism, pressure, engulfment, or failure, and retreats even further.

Eventually the couple is having the same fight about sex, chores, money, the in-laws, texting, social plans, emotional availability, or the dishwasher, but underneath it is an increasingly rigid process that keeps amplifying the original difference.

This is one reason that fighting frequently does not, by itself, tell me that a couple is incompatible. It tells me that they are fighting frequently. I want to know how they are fighting. What happens immediately before the escalation? What meaning does each person make of the other’s behavior? What attachment alarm gets activated? What protective strategy comes online? And then what does that protective strategy evoke in the other person?

When I can begin to see that process clearly, I often feel a tremendous amount of hope. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. These cycles can be incredibly painful and deeply entrenched. But a process can be interrupted. People can develop different ways of communicating, reaching, regulating, repairing, setting boundaries, asking for space, asking for closeness, and making sense of one another.

Sometimes the relationship does not need two different people. It needs a different process.

Complex trauma can make this much harder because trauma often makes these relational moments feel much bigger than the present moment itself.

Imagine that one partner grew up with a father who was emotionally distant and who withdrew affection or care whenever the child cried, became upset, or reached out in pain. That child’s nervous system may have learned very early that emotional need leads to disconnection. Now imagine that this person grows up and partners with someone whose own protective response when overwhelmed is to go quiet, turn inward, or leave the room. The withdrawing partner might simply be trying not to escalate. But the other person’s nervous system experiences something completely different: here it is again. I’m hurting and I’m alone. When I need you, you disappear.

And then perhaps they pursue. They ask more questions. They get louder. They follow their partner into another room. If the withdrawing partner grew up with an intrusive, volatile, critical, or emotionally unpredictable caregiver, that pursuit might land directly on their trauma system as well. Now both people are responding not only to each other, but to entire adaptive networks built long before they ever met.

Sometimes what we are seeing is not evidence that two people are fundamentally wrong for each other. We are seeing two highly coherent protective systems that happen to repeatedly activate one another. And particularly when both partners have significant trauma histories or attachment injuries, changing this can take time. Insight is important, but insight and integration are different things.

There is another category that deserves more attention, particularly in my work with mixed-neurotype couples, and that is the reality that sometimes two people have differences that are genuinely neurological. They are not necessarily going to communicate those differences away.

I have experienced this in my own relationship. I have ADHD and autism, and the ADHD part of my brain tends to move very quickly when I cook. I make messes. There are splatters. Cabinets are open. Ingredients end up everywhere. Of course the mess bothers me too, and I know it will get cleaned, but my brain is already moving toward the next step and the next step and the next one, and I often have very little awareness of what I am leaving behind in real time. My partner is autistic, and visual mess in the kitchen stresses his nervous system in a way that it simply does not stress mine. I don’t think there is going to be a future where he is magically desensitized to that. And despite my best efforts, I don’t think there is going to be a future where I suddenly cook like someone with a completely different brain.

In a certain sense, you could call that an incompatibility. But this is where acceptance becomes an incredibly important part of relationship work, because the underlying difference is only one part of the story. Historically, the much larger problem for us was what happened around the difference. He would see the kitchen and get activated. When activated, he sometimes sounded critical, even when what he was saying was quite objective. You made a big mess.

Yes. I did. That is factually accurate.

But on my side, particularly with rejection sensitivity and a very deep desire to get things right for the people I love, that could land as something much larger. I’ll never be good enough for him. I never get anything right for this man. Why is he so critical? Can’t he just chill out? And then, of course, he would create his own meaning. She doesn’t listen to me. She knows this is difficult for me and she doesn’t care.

Now we are no longer dealing with splatters on the stove. We are dealing with an entire relational cycle built around what those splatters supposedly mean about our love for one another.

Thankfully, we have done a lot of work on that process. The underlying neurotype difference is still there. I still make more mess than he would like. He is still more distressed by it than I wish he were. Those moments can still have a sting. But they do not rock the relationship in the way they once did because we are much less likely to fan the difference with negative meaning-making. He can understand that my mess does not mean I do not care about him. I can understand that his distress does not mean I am chronically disappointing him or failing some impossible test. And both of us can still make behavioral accommodations because understanding a neurological difference does not mean we stop caring about its impact on the person we love.

Compatibility may not mean an absence of friction. Sometimes it means that the friction no longer becomes an indictment of the relationship.

I think this is also where couples can get caught in another difficult pattern: trying to decide which person is right. Values differences have a way of becoming moralized very quickly. Someone is selfish. Someone is controlling. Someone is too needy. Someone is avoidant. Someone cares more. Someone is not committed enough. Someone has the healthier value system.

And I understand why this happens, because when an important value feels threatened inside an attachment relationship, the stakes can feel enormous. If your difference feels like a threat to my future, my identity, my belonging, or the security of our relationship, it can be very difficult to remain curious about why that thing matters so much to you.

But differentiation asks us to hold a much harder position: this matters deeply to me. Something different matters deeply to you. Neither one of us has to become morally defective in order for both of those sentences to be true. That does not mean that every relationship should continue regardless of differences. Sometimes understanding the legitimacy of both positions is precisely what allows two people to recognize, lovingly and painfully, that they cannot build the same life. But it also prevents us from manufacturing pathology simply because our partner wants something different.

I also think values deserve some exploration before we treat them as fixed. Someone might say, “Family is one of my core values, so my spouse needs to attend every holiday with my parents.” Okay. Maybe. But I would probably get curious.

What does family mean to you? What does your partner’s absence signify? Is attending every holiday actually the value, or is the deeper value loyalty, belonging, cultural continuity, being chosen, keeping your parents happy, protecting yourself from their disappointment? What story did you inherit about what a good spouse does? What happens inside of you when your partner chooses something different?

Values do not emerge in a vacuum. We inherit stories about marriage, gender, sexuality, money, parenting, family, religion, independence, commitment, work, success, and what people who love each other are supposed to do. Sometimes those stories feel deeply authored and congruent with who we are. Sometimes, when we start pulling at them a little bit, we discover that they are much more inherited than chosen. Neither finding is wrong. But I think we owe ourselves the curiosity.

Maybe.

I don’t think incompatibility is a meaningless concept, and I don’t think all couples can or should find a compromise around every issue. There are genuine impasses. There are relationships where staying would require one or both people to relinquish something so central to themselves that the cost becomes too high.

But before deciding that a relationship is fundamentally incompatible, I think it can be useful to ask a few more questions. What here is genuinely immutable? What might be more flexible than we’ve assumed? What needs compromise? What needs accommodation? What needs acceptance? What is an actual values difference, and what is the story we have built around that difference? And what part of our suffering is being created by the process we enter every time this issue comes up?

Sometimes the answer is that two people want different lives. Sometimes the answer is that two people have never learned how to hold difference without turning it into danger. Sometimes their nervous systems keep inadvertently hurting one another. Sometimes a trait really is not going away and the work is grieving that, accepting it, and learning how to build around it. Sometimes a couple does need to make a very painful decision about whether love is enough when the futures they want cannot coexist.

And sometimes what sounded like “we are incompatible” at the beginning of therapy becomes something much more workable once we understand what is actually happening.

I think that’s why I am slow to use the word. Not because incompatibility isn’t real, but because before we decide that two people cannot fit, I want to understand exactly what it is that isn’t fitting.

If you’re navigating questions about compatibility, values, or a cycle that keeps pulling you apart, I offer Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy in Pasadena and via telehealth across California.