Something shifts in late July. Meetings thin out. The daily commute becomes optional, or disappears altogether. Whatever has been structuring the year — term time, project deadlines, a routine built around other people’s schedules — loosens all at once, and time itself changes shape. For a few weeks, many of us are left with more unstructured hours than we’ve had since last summer, and with them, more direct contact with whoever, or whatever, usually sits in the background of our lives.
This is not only a couples’ phenomenon, though couples feel it acutely. It touches anyone whose ordinary rhythm has been organised, without much thought, around not quite being alone with something: a partner, a friendship, a family, or simply oneself. And it is worth pausing on, because what summer exposes tends to be real, and tends to be worth understanding rather than simply enduring until September restores the timetable.
The psychotherapist Esther Perel has written at length about a tension at the heart of any close relationship: we want security and we want mystery; we want to be fully known and we want to remain, in some sense, still worth discovering. Distance, in small and manageable doses, tends to sustain this. Absence gives the mind somewhere to go. It is part of why reunions, after time apart, so often carry a charge that daily life does not.
Closeness needs space around it. It cannot thrive on constant, uninterrupted contact, however loving or well-intentioned that contact is.
Summer removes that space all at once — for couples suddenly sharing every hour of the day, for friends on a long-planned trip together, for adult children back in a childhood home, for a family under one roof with nowhere else to be. People who are used to relating to each other in the gaps between work and other obligations are asked to relate directly, for hours at a time, with no external structure to lean on. Some find this a relief. Others find it strangely exposing. If unstructured time together has ever ended in a flare-up that seemed to come from nowhere, this is very often why: not because anything went wrong, but because there was nowhere left for old, unspoken tension to hide.
For others, summer brings the opposite arrangement: more time alone than usual. Friends scatter on separate holidays. A partner travels. Colleagues are unreachable. The usual traffic of other people, which does a great deal of quiet work in propping up our sense of who we are, thins right out. Here the difficulty is not too much contact but too little, and what it tends to surface is a different, and often more searching, question: how does it feel to be with yourself when nobody else is arranging your time for you?
Neither pattern is a diagnosis. Both are simply information. Discomfort with unstructured closeness tends to say something about how safety and intimacy are currently built with the people around you. Discomfort with unstructured solitude tends to say something about how reassurance is currently sourced — and how much of it has been coming from other people rather than from within. Summer does not create these patterns. It removes the noise that usually covers them.
Brené Brown’s research on belonging is useful here. She distinguishes sharply between fitting in — adjusting ourselves to be accepted by a group — and true belonging, which she locates in being able to show up as we actually are, including in our closest relationships, without editing ourselves for approval. Unstructured time has a way of testing which one we’ve been practising. A relationship, a friendship group, or a family that has quietly relied on everyone playing a role now has fewer distractions to hide behind; so does an individual who has relied on busyness to avoid sitting with themselves.
Terry Real, the couples therapist behind Relational Life Therapy, offers a complementary lens specifically for conflict. He describes two familiar stances people fall into under strain: a one-up posture of grandiosity, where one person positions themselves as right, superior or blameless, and a one-down posture of shame, where the other collapses into self-criticism or appeasement. Both are ways of avoiding equal, adult contact with another person. Real’s broader point is that healthy connection depends on a shift from a self-focused stance to a genuinely shared one — from protecting an individual position to building something both people are responsible for. Removed routine tends to bring these stances into sharper relief; without the usual choreography of a working week, old patterns of over-functioning or under-functioning in a relationship become harder to miss.
Held together, Brown and Real point to the same underlying question this letter began with: does closeness, or solitude, currently feel like an honest place to be — or like a performance that summer has made harder to keep up?
A client I worked with some years ago — details altered, as always, beyond recognition — came to therapy in early autumn describing a summer that had left them unsettled, without being able to say quite why. Nothing dramatic had happened. There had been no crisis, no falling out. What had happened was several unstructured weeks — some spent with a partner, some entirely alone — during which the usual busyness that filled their days simply wasn’t there. Without it, they noticed things about their relationships, and about themselves, that the rest of the year had comfortably obscured. The summer hadn’t caused a problem. It had simply removed the conditions under which the problem could stay invisible.
Work of this kind is rarely about resolving a single incident. It is about restoring curiosity — toward the people closest to us, and toward ourselves — rather than relying on the shorthand that a busy, well-defended routine tends to produce.
If this summer has brought you more closeness than usual, or considerably more solitude, a few questions worth holding lightly:
- When did you last notice something in a close relationship you hadn’t already assumed you knew?
- Does time with the people around you currently feel restful, or does it feel like something to manage?
- If time alone this summer has brought discomfort rather than relief, what might that discomfort be telling you about how you usually avoid it?
None of these questions need an immediate answer. Existential-phenomenological work of the kind I trained in, under Professor Del Loewenthal, treats questions like these as worth dwelling in rather than rushing to resolve. The point is not to arrive at a verdict by the end of the holidays. It is to notice, honestly, what the change in rhythm reveals — about a relationship, or about yourself — and to carry that noticing forward, rather than filing it away.
Whether what’s surfaced this summer concerns a partnership, a friendship, a family relationship, or simply your relationship with yourself, our team at London Trusted Therapy would be glad to help you explore it properly — whether that means a handful of individual sessions, or longer-term work. You can reach us through any of our three London locations.
Wishing you a restful and honest August ahead.
