The Ache to Be Alike: When the Threat of Differences Show Up in a Couple's Therapy Room

They sat on opposite ends of the couch, barely looking at each other.

He crossed his arms. She looked out the window.

I had asked a simple question, something about what made them feel safe with each other when things were good. She didn’t answer right away. He spoke first.

“I just want us to be on the same page, just like we used to be. We liked the same music, wanted the same things. Now everything’s a debate.”

She sighed. Not an eye-roll exactly, but the kind of sigh that carries years of trying to explain something that doesn’t translate.

“We weren’t the same,” she said quietly. “You just never noticed I was editing myself.”

That’s when I knew we weren’t just talking about conflict. We were brushing against something deeper… twinship.

He wasn’t trying to dominate her. In fact, he was tender in his own way, eager to repair, to fix, to understand. But underneath that urgency was a fear I could feel in the room. “If we’re different, maybe we’re not okay.”

And for her, that sameness he longed for didn’t feel like connection. It felt like annihilation.

Like being asked to disappear in order to stay loved.

In the language of self psychology, twinship lives in the ache to feel “like” someone else. Not similar in tastes or politics or morning routines, but in essence. In one’s emotional makeup. In what it means to be a person moving through this world.

When that need goes unmet in early life, we carry it with us. Some people try to recreate it in adult relationships. Not consciously, not manipulatively. But with a quiet desperation, “If you and I are the same, then I know I belong. Then I know I’m real.”

But when the other person starts to individuate, to assert difference, it stirs up something ancient. Panic. Threat.

Over time, he began to realize he wasn’t asking her to agree with him, he was asking her to make him feel safe.

And she began to see that underneath his need for sameness wasn’t entitlement, but vulnerability.

That shifted things.

He said one day, “I didn’t know that asking you to see things my way was really me asking, do you still see me at all?”

And she cried. Because she finally heard him, not as someone trying to control her, but as someone trying to not disappear.

This is what twinship does in couples, it whispers the lie that we have to be the same to be close. That if you are different from me, I might vanish.

And so often, that whisper is coming from an early wound, the child part of us that never quite felt mirrored, never quite felt like we belonged.

But in the therapy room, when we can name that fear, when a partner can say, “I don’t need you to be me, I just need to know you see me and you’re not leaving,” it creates room for a deeper kind of intimacy.

Not built on sameness, but on recognition. Recognition that different is not a threat. Different is simply different.

Now, they still don’t agree on everything. They still bump into difference. But something’s changed.

Less fear, more curiosity. Less performance, more presence. Less defensiveness, more openness.

And maybe that’s the gift of therapy, not to erase the differences between us, but to help us hold the differences in each of us, without feeling like we’re losing ourselves.

Because sometimes, the most healing thing in the world isn’t to be the same.

It’s to be seen as different, and loved anyway.