Marriage, Motherhood & the Messy Middle; What happens when the therapist gets real

Your Spouse Hates Your Favorite Series And That’s Not The Problem

• Carrie Cohen • Season 2 • Episode 3

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Forget shared playlists and TV queues—the real glue in a lasting relationship is how your energies meet when life gets loud or painfully quiet. We pull back the curtain on compatibility and make a bold claim: what keeps couples close is the ability to co-regulate, repair quickly, and adapt your nervous systems to each other without losing yourself.

We unpack the three core nervous system states—safety, fight or flight, and shutdown—and show how the same situation can play out completely differently depending on your state. Then we map that science to everyday married life: why some arguments explode from nothing, why others resolve with ease, and how small signals like breath, tone, and eye contact can flip a moment from threat to trust. You’ll hear why complementary personalities can actually make negotiation smoother, how deep friendship forms the bond that carries you through hard seasons, and what it means to rebuild connection when you’ve slipped into roommate mode.

Across real stories and practical strategies, we contrast surface-level matching with energetic compatibility: the flexible dance where sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow, and both of you learn to hold steady or shift when it matters most. We offer simple practices to rewire your patterns—state naming, agreed pauses with return times, micro-rituals that anchor safety, and daily bids for attention that slowly restore intimacy. If you’ve been asking whether you still like the same shows, try a better question: can we create a synergy that helps both of us feel seen, settled, and alive?

If this conversation moves you, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs hope, and leave a quick review so more couples can find these tools. Your support helps this community grow.

Thank you for listening to Marriage Motherhood & The Messy Middle; When the therapist gets real!


Speaker:

Hi there, I'm Carrie Cohen, and welcome to Marriage Motherhood and the Messy Middle, what happens when the therapist gets real. This is where I pull back the curtain and share the raw, unfiltered stories that you will not get anywhere else from me. And after 25 years as a psychotherapist, I have learned that the most powerful thing that I can offer is actually not going to be polished advice. It's going to be letting you inside my head so you can hear how I think about things. So buckle up because today I am talking about compatibility in your marriage and why Netflix compatibility is BS and what actually matters. I thought this was a really fun, catchy title because we all these days talk about, like we talk about this with other couples too. What are you guys watching? What's on? Like, are you guys watching together? No, he doesn't like it or uh she doesn't like that kind of show. And so, um, so I want to talk about uh this that everyone's obsessing over. Do we like the same shows? Do we like the same activities? Do we have the same politics? Now that might actually be a problem for people if they don't these days, but we are not talking about politics on this podcast. So uh you don't have to worry about getting any of that here. Um, and the other thing is that even dating apps reinforce this surface level matching, right? Um uh I have a lot of clients in their late 20s who um who have been with me for a long time. And those are some of the things that I hear from them. It's like, are you a social drinker, a daily drinker, you don't drink at all? Uh, you know, are you into travel? You're not into travel. Uh, do you are you interested in long term, open to short term, right? There's all these selections. And I'm going to tell you really what the secret to compatibility is. Um, because the freaky couples who have everything in common get divorced. So that is that kind of compatibility and overlap is less important. Now, of course, you need some things in order to be able to uh have enough in common and enough overlap, right? Otherwise, what are you gonna talk about? But I have the secret to um compatibility. So that compatibility method, like surface level interests versus like what actually creates lasting connection, um, which is what I'm gonna dive into. And really this idea that like shared hobbies, I mean, Steve and I like to do a lot of the same things, and then there are things that we don't also like to do together. Um and so it's fine. And personality-wise, our personalities are really different. I actually think it's easier for couples when you have different personalities than when you have the same personality. Um, because the there's a um, there's a lot more, it's like if you're both really strong about the same things, like how do you negotiate when there's a difference? If you're both really type A or you're both really organized, like I think there's could be a lot of headbutting as opposed to uh one partner cares about one set of things, the other one cares about another set of things, it actually makes negotiating a lot easier because it's like, oh, well, I don't really care as much about that as you do. So you take that one. And oh, well, I don't really care about this one. This one doesn't like, I'm not gonna go to the mat on this thing. So you take that. It makes it easier to negotiate, to compromise. And I will tell you that there are really um, I can't really think of anything that Steve and I couldn't negotiate or compromise on. And we always we we learned to figure out what was most important to each, and we would defer to the other on that. That started as something unspoken, and then we talked about it as time went on. Um so what actually does matter well, it's actually energetic compatibility, is what I call it. How your nervous systems dance together. And so here's what I mean, okay. When people say like, oh, I get a different vibe from that person, or I get a bad vibe or a good vibe, um, or people talk about what someone's essence is, that's nervous system energy. Okay, that is that is your nervous system. And your nervous system is the gatekeeper and the dictator of how you move through life relationally, interpersonally with yourself. Uh, your nervous system, when you are in a particular state of your nervous system, that is going to determine how you are going to communicate with someone. So you could have the same incident come up and be in a place of safety where your social engagement system is turned on and respond to that situation with a grounded, mindful, intentional response. Or you could be in a nervous system state of sympathetic activation, fight flight, and respond to that exact same situation from a different place energetically, and it's going to be a different place. It's going to be you might fight back, you might lash out, you might feel the need to run. That's the flight response. Or you could have that same exact situation and be in a nervous system state of dorsal vagal shutdown. And then your response to that exact situation is going to be one of hopelessness, despondence. What's the point? So, this is why I say your nervous system is the dictator, it is the gatekeeper. So, to me, what actually matters matters that what actually matters most is energetic compatibility. It is the ability to shift your energy to meet each other. And maintaining your own energy state without becoming an island onto yourself, and also being able to shift your energy state to meet your partner without losing yourself. That is the dance. Because the more a couple can co-regulate and have this beautiful dance of your energies and your nervous systems, the stronger you're gonna be your bond, your connection, and the way that you interact and move through life, the stronger it's gonna be by doing that. So um, I will die on that hill, actually, that energetic compatibility is where it's at. So when I work with couples, this is what I'm thinking about. I am thinking about what is their energetic compatibility? I Steve and I have had these conversations a lot, and it's like, so you know, he has been doing crossword puzzles since he's a kid with his uncle and his brother, and they love doing that. I'm not a crossword puzzle. And we have another couple that we hang out with a lot, and she loves crossword puzzles, and so they'll do crosswords together, and it's great. Um, I don't need to be a part of that. Um, and so I'm I'm probably more social than Steve. We do a lot of couples things together, but I have a higher social need, and so I probably historically have done more social things than him separately, and that's fine. He's like, great, good for you. I don't really care. Now I would say that our daughter is 16 and we have more freedom in general. He probably does more things. Um, but like that's fine too. So um what really is important is having a bond, right? Having this bond. And that's a bond that you build through friendship. And so Steve and I were actually friends first. We met at work, we were friends first. And um, I was married before, and my um ex-husband, God, he swore that I cheated on him with Steve, but that just shows you how he didn't know me. That's so out of integrity for me. I don't shame people who do that. I've worked with plenty of clients who have, but it's just out of my own integrity. I would never do that, hence why I divorced first. Um, but Steve and I were friends for about a year and a half before we started dating. And in that year and a half, we developed just such a really amazing friendship. And we developed this really great bond together. And that bond then developed into a connection. So when I when I look at, I look at bond and connection. I have a couple that I work with and I said this to them the other day. They've had so many challenges that they've had to overcome in 35 years, but they're so strongly, deeply bonded. And that's why they've stayed together. And so what they are working on with me is how they how they navigate their connection and the differences and their intimacy needs and their love needs because they want to stay married. They're so bonded, but they just have so many differences and and challenges in their connection. And truly, after 34 years, like there's lots of things that you get to work on with your partner. Um, but what I said to them was, gosh, you two are just so bonded. I, it's just a beautiful thing. And I know that that's what you've gotten you through. And I know that you don't want to just get through, like you want to really thrive and just, you know, have the next, I don't know if it's maybe it could, I don't know, I think it's gonna be 34 years, but the next, you know, few decades, um, two decades maybe, like not just getting through, but like really just thriving and having this deep, deep relationship. And so when you have a deep bond and then you can work on your connection, you get that. And so Steve and I were talking about this, and it's like we just love hanging out together. Like we love being together. We've always loved being together. We always like like if all the people I could pick to hang out with, he's always my first person. And same for him. Now, that doesn't mean we don't do anything with other people, but it's like we are that for each other. And that's an energy thing. That's a bond, okay, but that's also an energetic compatibility. We really thrive, we have a really great synergy. And so when you're thinking about your marriage, it's like I want you to think about the energetic compatibility or the synergy that the two of you have together and how you navigate that. And that is a really strong foundational piece of work. Lots of couples who come to me, they're on the outs, they're not as strong as they could be. They feel more like roommates than lovers. And the work that we do in that really has to do with nervous system work. It's creating this energetic synergy so that you're dancing together in this beautiful way from a nervous system perspective rather than butting heads all of the time, right? That is no fun to go through life butting heads with someone. It's like you do this with your kids. Like typically when your kids are adolescents, you're going through this period of butting heads with them. And then you usually come back to a nice synergy from an energetic perspective. So this is a shorter episode, really helping you think about and see what my thoughts are about how to think about compatibility. Um, because I talk about this, um, I talk about compatibility in my social media. And it's like the reason why you're roommates and not soulmates anymore is not because you're not compatible. It's it's like you're living parallel lives. And the default for a lot of couples, if you don't continue to nurture your relationship, is you'll just be, you'll just default into this roommate pattern. It's like my favorite analogy is the crock pot one. Set it and forget it. Marriage is not a crock pot, you cannot set it and forget it. You have to always be mindful of it and aware of it and working on it like my garden out back, which we've neglected. And um, now we have to redo it because it's a mess. So this is really about meeting each other where you're at, without losing yourself, um, and without becoming an island onto yourself, knowing when to match your partner in their energy, knowing when to lead, knowing when to follow, and building this energetic flexibility instead of hobbyists. So that's that's where we're at today. Um, so that's what's been swirling around in my mind about the idea of um compatibility. Uh and are we why are we interested in the same shows as opposed to energetic uh and energetic synergy? So I hope for you hearing my thought process helps you deepen your own way of working through some of these things. And um, if you want to know how to um experience more of my work, just go ahead and check the links uh down below in the show notes and you can explore all the ways in which you can work with me, should that be something you are interested in. And thank you again for letting me think out loud with you. I will see you in the next episode for some more real, raw, unfiltered thoughts from this therapist's brain. Until then, remember you're not broken. You are just protected.