When our relationship first got rocky early on, everyone told me to try couples therapy. As a good little millennial raised on daily Oprah episodes and bolstered by viral Gabor Maté clips on Instagram, I thought it seemed like the obvious decision. And so for years, from the time we were just dating all the way to the brittle end of our marriage, we sat in front of an array of interchangeable therapists

I thought our troubles were fundamental to our personalities and would require significant work; my husband thought our issues could be chalked up to stressful life events.

I twirled in front of him in a new pair of gold sequin pants before my company’s Christmas party. “How do I look?” I asked, to which he replied, “You didn’t take out the trash.” We were such disappointments to each other.

Teresa No. 1 thought everything was my ex-husband’s fault, but Teresa No. 4 thought it was all mine. Teresa No. 2, after listening to me talk for 51 minutes about how I felt hopeless, shrugged her shoulders at me. “I don’t know what to say,” she replied. I did. I wanted her to say that we should end our relationship with the remaining scraps of dignity we had. She never did, and we instead just moved on to the next Teresa we found. When I cried to Teresa No. 3 that I felt like a failure as a wife, she cried with me, her heavy tears rivaling my own. That night, my ex suggested we should stop seeing her.

Teresa No. 5 told us we needed more sessions more frequently. “There’s a lot of work to do here,” she said, and I wanted to pull her hair. Should there be this much work between two people who ostensibly love each other? Even the ones who seemed to know we were doomed still opened their calendars at the end of each session and urged us to come back, to try again.

instead of helping us see each other more clearly, therapy gave us new words to use to criticize each other. Every constructive lesson became a knife. I learned about trauma responses, and so everything he did elicited a trauma response in me. He was my father! I was his mother! When he learned about gaslighting, everything I did became gaslighting. When we argued about a time he called me stupid, therapy gave him a new explanation for why he said it (repeatedly): “We talked about this. I lashed out because I felt disconnected from you. We need more date nights.”

The kindest thing my ex could have done was leave me, even if we were still trying to make it work. After therapy, on the morose subway ride home where I would hold his limp hand, we’d zone out staring at ads for dating apps. “What should we do for dinner?” he’d ask, and we’d pretend, yet again, to be on the same team.

I don’t regret any of our time with the Teresas; I needed to try just a few more times to make it work, and I needed someone to be a witness to my misery. Teresas No. 1 through No. 6 never told me to leave, but little by little they helped me give myself permission all the same.

my ex made this final assessment about me: No one would put as much work into me as he did. No one would love me enough to try this hard. He would be the only person who’d ever try to keep me. I thought about this a lot as I untangled my life from his, as I went through my calendar and removed the future sessions we had planned with lucky Teresa No. 7. I thought about it when I added sessions for just me and my own therapist — while no one would split the cost with me, I knew it would be worth every out-of-pocket cent. I knew he meant it as a cruelty, but I repeated his words to myself whenever I felt unsure about ending things for good: No one will ever put this particular kind of work into a relationship with me again. No one will ever fight this hard to stay with me.  God. I hope he’s right.

“I yearn for best friends that I’ll still be best friends with in 30 years.”I was convinced that this must be possible because I had read the book A Little Life which follows a group of best friends from college until old age. Until that point I don’t think I had ever imagined—in that much detail—what it would be like to grow old with your friends, but I decided it was something I absolutely wanted.A year and a half later, this vision seems harder than ever. One best friend is in a relationship and is leaving the city soon, another best friend has become harder to reach; the roommates are still there but one of them is moving out soon too. Everyone is always moving somewhere new, dating someone new, working somewhere new.

People talk about how in the strongest friendships, even if you go on separate paths and only see each other once a year, it always feels the same and you can just pick up from where you left off. I appreciate these friendships, but I much prefer consistent presence over the long haul (studying together, cooking dinners, sharing memes) rather than annual hourlong catch-up calls and barely ever talking in between.

Am I willing to make major life decisions in partnership with my friends? To choose, together, which city (and which neighborhood) I’ll be living in, when I’ll settle down, how much I’ll prioritize my career? We are used to expecting this level of alignment out of a relationship, but not friendships.It seems like the only person you can rely on to be there indefinitely, and with whom you can build something long-term, is your partner, and this is nice, but I do find the concept of a nuclear family—two parents on their own raising a few kids in a suburban house—a little depressing, when contrasted with a bustling extended family, many of them living together in the same building, hosting boisterous family dinners and monthly trips to a cottage. How do you build that as an adult, when your actual extended family is on a different continent?

Glass children is a recent designation for children like Nick, Alice, and Monica. They aren’t called that because of their fragility; rather, because their parents look right through their needs to the demands of their siblings. According to the Sibling Leadership Network, an organization supporting siblings, “Glass children are healthy children who have brothers or sisters with special needs. They are typically emotionally neglected, experience severe pressure to be problem-free and perfect, take on parental responsibilities within the family at a young age, and have an overwhelming need to make others happy. All this while receiving little nurturing and support in their development years.

When Monica was six, she always remembers being told by others to be a good girl because her parents have enough challenges dealing with her brother, Mike, with Autism. As Mike got older, his aggression increased, and Monica often became a target. She was hit, and frequently her treasured possessions were destroyed. As a senior in high school, she labored all night, perfecting an essay that would assure her “A” grade in English. The paper was never turned in; Mike got to it the morning it was due. Monica’s parents never knew; Monica didn’t tell them because they had “enough challenges.” She got a “B” and a lecture from her parents that she should have tried harder.

As we gather historical information from patients, ask if they have a sibling with a chronic condition. If so, and the condition placed high demands on the parents, there is a high probability you may be seeing a glass child

Ascertain the expectations imposed on them and the source. Many expectations may have been self-imposed.