Most people asking whether they’re ready for a relationship are working from a story our culture tells about how relationships are supposed to work. Most of us have absorbed it without ever examining it.
It goes like this: First, I’ll work on myself. I’ll build the career, make the money, find my friend group, do years of therapy, travel, have enough sex to get it out of my system. And then, once I’m complete, I’ll be ready for a relationship.
It’s a total myth. The relationship is what gets you ready for a relationship.
Where the Expectations Crisis Begins
This way of thinking is one of the quiet engines behind what I call the expectations crisis: the widening gap between what we’ve been taught relationships should feel like and what they actually involve.
When you believe you’re supposed to arrive at a relationship finished, healed, optimized, and fully formed, then the normal challenges of long-term partnership feel like evidence that something has gone wrong. Low desire shows up, and you panic. Bitterness creeps in, and you assume you chose the wrong person. Ordinary friction reads as failure.
But these aren’t signs of a broken relationship. They’re the curriculum.
You Don’t Get Ready for a Relationship First
Here’s the deeper myth underneath the readiness myth: we think we’re individuals who become one when we commit or marry. In reality, it’s the reverse. We become one first, and then we spend the rest of the relationship learning to become individuals.
That’s the developmental task for all of us. We form a bond. We connect, we merge, we fall in love. And then comes the harder, longer work: learning to be independent within that bond. To assert ourselves. To know what we actually want. And then to take the real risk: exposing ourselves and our desires to the person who matters most to us.
Falling in love requires fusion. Staying in love, and staying in desire, requires learning to stand on your own while staying connected.
Why Desire Fades (and How It Comes Back)
This is where so many long-term couples get stuck with low desire, and why the usual advice (date nights, novelty, scheduling sex) so often falls flat. Those things treat the symptom.
Desire needs space to breathe. As Esther Perel has argued, love wants closeness but desire needs distance. When two people are fused, when they’ve grabbed onto each other so tightly that neither can tell where one ends and the other begins, there’s no gap left for wanting. You can’t lust for someone you’ve absorbed.
The truth that scares people is this: you will never fully know your partner. Ever. Some people respond to that mystery by clutching tighter, trying to close the gap, and then wonder why the erotic charge is gone. But that unknowability isn’t the threat. It’s the source. Long-term couples who maintain desire are the ones who learn to see their partners as genuinely separate, individual beings, mysterious to us always.
The shift happens when you start to individuate: when you risk being fully yourself while staying connected to your partner. This is what Dr. David Schnarch called differentiation, and it’s the engine of desire in long-term relationships.
Couples Therapy: Where You Get Ready for a Relationship
Couples therapy is the container that pushes this process forward. But the work itself belongs to each individual in the room.
It means taking responsibility for yourself. Detaching from your expectations of your partner. Dealing with your own disappointments instead of outsourcing them. Having enough humility to notice when you’re not actually looking at your partner. You’re looking at a mirror.
I’ll be honest: this work is uncomfortable at the beginning, the way every genuine growth process is. Not every couple can push through that early discomfort. But the couples who do transform their relationships to a level they never imagined possible.
Because here’s what I’ve learned as a therapist: I don’t help couples become a stronger We. They’re already a We. That’s why they’re in my office. I help them become stronger I’s.
That’s what gets you ready for a relationship. The relationship itself.
Jon Prezant, LCSW, CST is an AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist providing couples therapy and sex therapy via telehealth in New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Florida. Schedule a consultation.
