I sometimes say to couples, “It means nothing.”

That usually lands with confusion, and at times resistance. From their perspective, it clearly does mean something. Something happened, something was felt, and something has already been interpreted. The reaction is not random.

We are meaning-making. We are constantly trying to make sense of what happens so that we can orient ourselves. This is especially true in relationships. We do not only register behaviour. We interpret it, assign meaning to it, and locate it within a broader understanding of the other person and the relationship.

This does not mean we are making things up. But there is always a step between what happened and what it means. That step becomes obscured, and meaning begins to feel like fact. It becomes a fixed reference point, shaping what is noticed, what is assumed, and how subsequent interactions are understood.

Over time, relationships develop constellations of what things mean, shaped by assumptions, intentions, and references to the character of the other person.

The distinction between what happened and the meaning assigned to it is critical. Meaning shapes experience, the assumptions we make, and the conclusions we draw. It begins to define the other person. They become intentional, careless, rejecting, controlling, or indifferent. The interaction narrows around those meanings. One partner feels attacked. The other feels misrepresented. Defences rise, and the conversation collapses into accusation and counter-accusation. In that sense, arguments about meaning are often where conversations fall apart in the moment, and over time they expose the deeper fault lines in the relationship.

Couple therapy is disruptive in many ways. It disrupts conversations and patterns, but an essential part of that disruption is slowing down the speed and certainty with which events are turned into fixed meanings. Meanings settle and become taken as truth, functioning as templates through which everything else is understood. The work is not only to explore meaning, but to open it up again.

Meaning is not reality, and movement in the relationship can only happen when some of these meanings are challenged and deconstructed. Not because we stop assigning meaning, but because unless we stop assuming what something the other did means, we cannot step into conversation with curiosity and openness to hear their side.

This is where “it means nothing” is used as a therapeutic intervention. It is not a dismissal of experience, and it is not a claim that nothing happened. It is a deliberate interruption. It cuts across the automatic movement from behaviour to fixed meaning and creates a pause before the interaction spirals. At the same time, it normalises what is happening by locating it within the broader context of stress, distraction, and ordinary human limitation, rather than immediately treating it as a statement about the relationship.

So I will stay with what something meant to one partner, but I will also question how that meaning has been constructed, and at times interrupt it directly.

Yes, he did not pay attention. Yes, he was abrupt. But it sounds like he was preoccupied with something happening at work. The behaviour occurred, but the meaning attached to it may not be accurate. It may not be about the relationship or about how he feels about you.

Or another example. Yes, you had an argument. You have both described how stressed you have been about what is happening in the region. That level of stress does not disappear when you are together. It shows up in the relationship. But has anything actually changed in your commitment to each other?

In these moments, “it means nothing” functions in two ways. It interrupts the escalation of meaning, and it normalises the presence of stress, imperfection, and misattunement. It allows the interaction to be understood without immediately turning it into evidence of something fundamentally wrong between partners.

Relationships often become the place where external stress, internal states, and accumulated tension are expressed. Not everything that happens in a relationship is about the relationship. Part of the work is to allow for that.

To acknowledge that people will not always be regulated, attentive, or available. That moments of disconnection occur, not as evidence of something fundamentally wrong, but as part of being in a relationship while also living in a wider world. Locating some of these moments outside the relationship reduces pressure. It prevents every interaction from becoming a statement about commitment, care, or intent, and allows for imperfection without immediate escalation.

This also shows up in the work itself. Couples may lapse in between-session tasks. They may return from a holiday or a period of disruption and find that the structure has slipped. This can quickly become interpreted as a lack of commitment, leading to blame or shame. At times, I will model the same stance. Of course this did not happen. You had a house full of people. Everything was disrupted. That does not need to become something more. We continue from here.

The alternative is not to eliminate meaning, but to change how it is created. The aim is to facilitate conversations where meaning becomes something that can be examined, questioned, and co-constructed, rather than imposed and defended. Where what just happened can be explored without either partner needing to become the victim or the aggressor, and where two people can arrive at an account of what happened together, rather than defend competing truths.

“It means nothing” is not a conclusion.

It is an interruption that opens space and a normalisation that reduces pressure. Allowing things to mean nothing creates room for conversation and reduces the pressure on the relationship. Not everything that happens is about the relationship, and not everything needs to be made to mean something about it.