Preparing to Leave

Preparing to Leave

(On Recognition, Rejection and the Difficulty of Not Knowing Another Mind)

Vasilis had not thought of twenty-seven as old until people began asking when he was going to settle down.

At a family christening in Palmers Green, the question had already found him twice before the coffee was served. Auntie Eleni asked whether there was anyone special. One of his father’s friends told him not to leave it too late. His mother said nothing at first, only watched him on the dance floor with Nicola, Marina’s six-year-old daughter, standing on his shoes while he moved her carefully between the other children.

The children rarely had to begin again with Vasilis. He remembered what they had told him the week before and listened when they resumed halfway through, taking their disagreements and enthusiasms as seriously as they did. When the music ended, Nicola ran back towards the others and Despina came over. “You’ll be a lovely dad,” she said.

Vasilis was still smiling when he answered, “I’ll have to find someone first.”

Despina told him he would. She did not hesitate, as though certainty might be given if it was spoken quickly enough.

Across the room, Nicos noticed them and broke away from Petros and the men from the factory. He came over, adjusting the loosened knot of his tie, then placed one hand on Vasilis’s shoulder and looked towards the children still moving around the dance floor.

“Vasili,” he said, in the tone that meant advice had already become instruction, “look at you. All afternoon with everybody else’s children. You’re good with them. So what are you waiting for?”

Vasilis said finding someone to have them with might be a useful first step. Nicos did not take the joke. At Vasilis’s age, he said, he and Despina were already married. They had not waited until everything was settled because life did not settle itself for anybody.

“You meet a good woman, you make a decision and you build something together. That’s how it works. You don’t sit there asking whether every little thing is perfect, and you’re not going to find a wife looking at yourself in the gym six days a week.”

A couple of the men close enough to hear laughed. Vasilis smiled and said he would cancel his membership in the morning. Nicos’s hand tightened briefly on his shoulder.

“You may laugh, Vasili, but I’m telling you. The years go quickly. Your brother understood that. He met a good woman, they made a home, now look at him.”

The joke ended for Vasilis when Nicos mentioned Petros, though his father appeared not to notice. Nicos returned to the men and within moments they were talking about something else. Vasilis remained beside his mother, smiling when somebody looked towards him. He thought about the exchange for most of the drive back to Winchmore Hill.

By most visible measures, his life was going well. He had chosen a path away from his father’s factory and built a career in marketing, working between a London office and the family dining table. He earned well, had longstanding friends and trained with a seriousness that had once taken him onto a bodybuilding stage. Meeting women was not difficult. The trouble began when one of them started to matter.

The first weeks of a relationship usually felt easy. Vasilis could be funny, attentive and generous without monitoring himself. A Saturday date might stretch into Sunday morning, leaving him certain that something had begun. During the days that followed, however, his attention moved towards smaller changes. A reply arrived at lunchtime when it had once come before work. A message ended differently. Plans that had sounded settled became less clear. None of these details proved very much on their own, but Vasilis rarely experienced them on their own.

He compared one week with another and the warmth of one goodbye with the last. He told himself he was not making demands; he was simply noticing what was there. By the time a woman actually ended the relationship, he had often spent weeks rehearsing the loss.

This was the problem he brought into therapy. In his first session, Vasilis said that relationships always ended and then worked backwards through the last few years, presenting their different beginnings as evidence of the same conclusion. He could meet somebody on a Saturday and feel certain that the connection was real. They might eat, drink, laugh, have sex and talk until neither wanted to look at the time. By Tuesday, if she had not replied in the way he expected, the entire relationship could feel altered.

When the therapist asked what he believed he knew in those moments, Vasilis answered, “When someone’s pulling away.” Asked whether he was usually right, he almost smiled. “Eventually.” There was no satisfaction in the answer. He sounded tired.

What Counted as Work

Nicos trusted work that left evidence behind. By the end of a day, something had been cut, welded, assembled or delivered. If it was wrong, the fault could usually be found. If it broke, somebody was responsible for putting it right.

He had come to London from Crete at twelve and grown up in the home of his uncle Manolis and Manolis’s wife, Kalliopi, while his parents remained behind. Nicos rarely told the story as though anything exceptional had happened. He had gone to school, learned English and started earning as soon as anybody would pay him. By eighteen he was working full-time in metal fabrication. The rest of the story, as he usually told it, was work.

The factory began as a small workshop in Tottenham with second-hand machinery and money Nicos had borrowed from people who expected it returned. Over the years it moved into larger premises and employed men who had known him long enough to argue with him safely. It survived periods when orders became scarce, customers failed to pay and Nicos spent evenings at the kitchen table examining figures he did not discuss with the children.

Vasilis knew that his father was proud of what he had built. Nicos never needed to say so. The factory existed. Men came to work there each morning. Vans left carrying things that had not existed before somebody made them.

Vasilis had chosen work that produced little his father could touch. On the days he worked from home, he used one end of the dining-room table. His laptop sat beside a notebook, his headphones and a second cup of coffee Despina had brought after the first went cold. Nicos sometimes returned from Tottenham during the day because he had forgotten paperwork or needed something from the house.

“Not going in today?” he asked once, placing his keys on the kitchen counter.

Vasilis looked up from the screen. “I’m working from home.”

“I know.”

The answer contained nothing obviously dismissive. Nicos opened the post, asked Despina whether there was coffee and began talking about somebody at the factory who had ordered the wrong material. Vasilis returned to his laptop, unable to recover the concentration he had before his father entered the room. For the next hour, he remained aware of how little his work resembled work from the other side of the table.

The difficulty became clearer when a national campaign Vasilis had helped lead finally launched. For three months, he had worked through meetings, presentations, rejected concepts and late revisions with agencies that spoke about urgency as though they had invented it. The finished campaign appeared across social media, on retail websites and in shops throughout the country. When Despina asked him to show her, Vasilis opened one of the adverts on his phone. She watched it twice, pleased by how much it meant to him even if the work itself was unfamiliar, then passed the phone to Nicos. His father studied the screen before asking which part Vasilis had done. Vasilis explained that the strategy and central idea had come from his team, that he had led much of the work and that other people had designed, filmed and produced the final material.

Nicos watched it again. “Where is your name?”

“It isn’t on it.”

His father handed back the phone. “Then how does anybody know you did it?”

Despina told him that Vasilis knew what he was doing. Nicos looked genuinely confused by the intervention. “I didn’t say he doesn’t.”

Perhaps he had meant nothing more than the question. Vasilis could not prove otherwise. That did not stop him hearing the familiar doubt beneath it: three months of work and nowhere, on the finished thing, could anybody point to the part that was his.

Practical work created a more direct conflict. One Saturday, Vasilis was putting up a shelf in the small room Despina used for ironing. He had measured the wall, marked the fixings and drilled the first two holes before Nicos appeared in the doorway. His father watched in silence for long enough that Vasilis became conscious of every movement.

“It’s out,” Nicos said eventually. Vasilis told him it wasn’t and that he had already checked. His father crossed the room, placed the spirit level against the pencil line, frowned and reached for the drill. Vasilis said he had it. Nicos replied that he was only helping. When Vasilis said he had not asked for help, his father looked at him as though this were both ungrateful and beside the point. He kept hold of the drill while Vasilis held out his hand. Despina called from downstairs to ask what they were arguing about; Nicos answered that nobody was arguing, and Vasilis stepped back.

His father widened one of the holes, replaced a wall plug and fixed the bracket before giving the drill back. The whole thing took less than ten minutes. When he finished, he ran the spirit level across the shelf and nodded once. “There.”

The shelf was straight. Vasilis never knew whether it would have been straight if he had been allowed to finish it.

Petros had always seemed better at avoiding this kind of encounter. As a teenager, he learned how to make himself useful at the factory, knew which questions to ask and rarely challenged Nicos while he was showing him something. Vasilis had done well at school and eventually chosen marketing, a decision his father had never opposed. Nicos helped with the university costs, drove him there with his belongings and carried the heaviest boxes without waiting to be asked. His support was not imaginary. Neither was the distance between being supported and being understood.

By twenty-three, Vasilis had entered his first bodybuilding competition. The preparation had begun long before the final diet. Years of training had broadened his shoulders, thickened his back and changed the way clothes sat on him. During the months before the show, the work became more exacting. Vasilis weighed every meal, followed the programme closely and sent weekly photographs to Andreas, a respected coach whose judgement he trusted enough to accept instructions he would have argued about from almost anybody else.

Andreas could be severe, but his criticism rarely humiliated him. If Vasilis’s conditioning was behind schedule, he said so and adjusted the plan. If Vasilis’s form broke down, Andreas corrected the movement. The judgement remained attached to the thing being judged; it did not spread quietly into everything Vasilis was.

Nicos understood the size Vasilis had built more easily than he understood what the competition required of him. He could see the weight on the bar and the muscle his son had added, but the meals measured to the gram, the posing practice and the gradual reduction in food appeared excessive. At dinner, he would look from Vasilis’s shoulders to the carefully weighed plate Despina had prepared and ask how a man that size expected to live on so little.

“You spend all year making yourself bigger, then before the competition you stop eating.”

Vasilis explained that he was not trying to lose the muscle. The purpose of the final phase was to reduce enough body fat for the work underneath to become visible.

Nicos listened, then glanced at the food again. “The muscle is already visible. You can see it from the other side of the room.” Nicos said it as though this settled the matter. Vasilis heard the joke, but the unintended compliment remained with him.

On competition day, Nicos came with Despina. They sat in an auditorium full of families holding bags of food and competitors moving through the building under layers of tan. He complained about the price of parking and asked why all the men were orange. When Vasilis came onto the stage, Nicos watched without looking away.

Vasilis placed well. His father congratulated him afterwards in the language available to him: several of the other men had looked too thin, Nicos said, while Vasilis had carried himself properly. It was not quite what Vasilis had wanted, but it was close enough to matter.

Months later, one of the men from the factory mentioned that Nicos had shown everybody the photographs. “Your dad was proud,” the man said. “Kept saying, ‘That’s my boy.’”

Vasilis thought about the words for days. He valued them and resented receiving them from somebody else.

By twenty-seven, he was no longer competing, though the possibility of returning remained. He trained six days most weeks and still worked with Andreas, following a programme closely enough that unexpected changes irritated him. A strong session could restore order to a day that had felt scattered. A failed lift, an unflattering photograph or a comment from Andreas could unsettle him just as quickly.

When Vasilis was angry, training gave the feeling somewhere to go. He could add weight, control his breathing and continue until his muscles failed for reasons that could be named. The gym did not always make him feel good, but it made cause and consequence easier to locate.

Relationships refused that arrangement. Effort did not guarantee closeness, and greater effort could sometimes make closeness harder to sustain. There was no agreed programme for waiting, no number of repetitions after which another person’s mind became clear. Vasilis could work harder than he had worked before and still find himself unable to tell whether anything between them was becoming stronger.

Katerina

Katerina joined Vasilis’s team about a year before he entered therapy. Her family was Greek-Cypriot, and there was an immediate familiarity between them that required little explanation. She pronounced his name correctly on the first morning and understood why a telephone call from his mother might begin with a question about whether he had eaten. They compared family weddings, argued over which foods belonged properly to which island and developed the kind of ease that made other people at work assume they had known each other longer than they had.

They worked well together. Messages that began with campaigns or deadlines continued after the working day had ended, moving gradually towards family, dating and the ordinary complaints that become intimate through repetition. Katerina sent him photographs while she was away and occasionally messaged him when something happened that she knew he would find funny. Vasilis began looking for her name on his phone without acknowledging that he was doing so.

After a team night out, they remained in the bar after most of their colleagues had left. Nothing unmistakable happened. They sat closer because the music was loud, shared another drink and talked with the unguarded warmth that can emerge when an evening has outlasted its original purpose. Katerina touched his arm once while laughing. When they eventually separated outside the station, she hugged him and told him to message when he was home. Vasilis travelled back convinced that the relationship between them had changed.

A few days later, he asked whether she wanted to have dinner with him. The question was careful enough that Katerina could have pretended not to understand, but she did not. She told him she loved spending time with him and had never thought of it as anything other than friendship. Vasilis made the exchange easier for her. He said he had probably misread things, assured her that it was fine and changed the subject before she had to say anything more.

They continued working together. Katerina still sought him out at lunch and messaged him outside office hours, though Vasilis began replying with greater care. He had expected rejection to create distance. Instead, he was required to remain alongside somebody who liked him, valued his company and had still not chosen him in the way he wanted. He did not speak about Katerina when he first entered therapy. He spoke about Alexandra, his manager.

Alexandra had promoted him once and regularly praised the quality of his work, but Vasilis believed she was preventing him from progressing. When a senior role became available, he applied and was unsuccessful. Alexandra told him that he was talented and ambitious, but that she wanted to see greater consistency in the way he handled pressure and disagreement before placing him in a position that required him to manage other people.

In therapy, Vasilis reduced the conversation to a conclusion. “She doesn’t rate me.” When the therapist asked what Alexandra had actually said, Vasilis repeated the feedback almost word for word. The therapist observed that the feedback and Vasilis’s conclusion were not quite the same thing.

The distinction irritated him. Vasilis had expected therapy to help him understand why other people behaved as they did. Instead, the therapist kept returning him to the uncertain space between another person’s actions and the meaning he attached to them. Vasilis understood the distinction perfectly well. What he did not understand was why uncertainty should be treated as more trustworthy than the answer his experience had already provided.

Olivia

Five weeks into therapy, Vasilis matched with Olivia on a dating app. They moved to WhatsApp two days later and arranged to meet after work the following Thursday at a small Italian restaurant off Upper Street. Vasilis arrived early, having changed his shirt twice and checked the menu often enough to know what he would order before he sat down.

Olivia was seven minutes late. She apologised, blaming delays on the Victoria line, and seemed sufficiently untroubled by the delay that Vasilis decided he liked her before they had ordered drinks. She was twenty-six and worked in publishing, sharing a flat in Crouch End with a friend from university. She spoke about her younger sister with an affectionate exasperation Vasilis recognised, and described her job through stories about writers, missed deadlines and people who sent urgent emails late on Friday afternoons.

She asked about bodybuilding after Vasilis mentioned that he had competed. At first she teased him about taking food scales on holiday, then listened seriously while he explained what the preparation involved. Most people either admired the discipline or regarded it as ridiculous. Olivia appeared able to find it ridiculous and impressive at the same time.

The restaurant staff had begun clearing the tables around them before either noticed how late it was. Outside, Vasilis offered to drive Olivia home. She said Crouch End was out of his way; he told her it was not far enough to matter. Their conversation continued in the car, without either of them appearing ready for the evening to end.

When he stopped outside her building, Olivia remained in the passenger seat for a moment before leaning across to kiss him. By the time Vasilis reached Green Lanes, a message had appeared on the dashboard screen. She thanked him for the evening and said she would like to see him again. He pulled into a side road to reply, though the message could easily have waited until he reached Winchmore Hill.

They met again four days later and twice the following week. Olivia’s interest was easy to recognise. She suggested plans rather than waiting for Vasilis to make them, sent voice notes during her journey home and messaged him about things that had nothing to do with arranging their next date. The relationship had not yet developed enough history for silence to acquire meaning.

In therapy, Vasilis stopped speaking about the women who had left. He described Olivia instead: the places they had been, the things she had said and the parts of her life into which he had already begun imagining himself. He remained careful with the future tense, but it entered the room nonetheless. Olivia wanted children eventually and had no interest in dating casually for years without knowing where a relationship might be going. She had been speaking generally, but Vasilis heard the conversation as though it already included him.

In one session, he suggested that perhaps the previous relationships had failed because he had been meeting the wrong women. The therapist did not challenge the possibility. For the first time since the work began, Vasilis appeared to feel that the problem he had brought into therapy might already have been solved elsewhere.

A few weeks later, Olivia became unexpectedly free on a Saturday afternoon. Vasilis had promised to take Theo into central London to spend birthday money he had been saving, but the opportunity to see Olivia felt difficult to refuse. He telephoned Marina and said he would take Theo the following weekend instead.

Marina reminded him that her son had been talking about the trip for days. Vasilis said it was only a postponement and that Theo would understand. His sister was quiet for long enough that he accused her of making the situation more significant than it was. Marina replied that she was not the one who would have to explain it to him.

The following weekend, Vasilis arrived at her house early. Theo was waiting near the front door with his coat already on.

“Are we definitely going this time?”

Vasilis laughed and assured him that he was. He kept the promise, but the fact that Theo had felt the need to ask remained with him.

Nothing to Talk About

Seven weeks after meeting Olivia, Vasilis arrived for his session smiling and said he did not really have much to talk about.

He meant it. The campaign at work was going well, and Alexandra had complimented a presentation he had given to senior management. Olivia had stayed at his house the previous weekend while his parents were away at a wedding. Sleeping with her in the bedroom he had occupied since adolescence had felt faintly ridiculous, particularly when she found a photograph of him at fourteen, heavier and wearing a football shirt large enough to reach his knees. She laughed until he took it from her, then accused him of pretending he had always looked the way he did now.

When the therapist asked what it was like to arrive without an immediate problem to solve, Vasilis said, “Good. Isn’t that the point?” There was no challenge in the answer. For the first time since the work began, he appeared relieved rather than watchful.

A little later, he mentioned Sunday lunch. Petros and Marina had both come with the children. Olivia had left earlier that morning, and Despina asked how things were going. Before Vasilis could say much, Nicos looked up from his plate and told him not to frighten this one away.

The remark drew the kind of laughter that required nothing from anybody. Petros smiled. Marina looked towards Vasilis and then away again. Despina told her husband to leave him alone, though she was smiling too. Vasilis laughed with the others because refusing the joke would have made it more important than he wanted it to be. In therapy, he repeated the sentence with the same smile. When the therapist asked what had been funny, the smile disappeared.

“It was just Dad being Dad.”

Nicos’s humour often worked by locating a weakness before anybody else could. When Vasilis was sixteen and a girl from school turned him down, his father told him there were plenty of others and perhaps the next one would have better eyesight. Despina had said, “Nicos,” in the warning tone she used when she wanted him to stop without openly confronting him. Petros laughed, Vasilis laughed and the evening continued. Years later, he could still remember where everybody had been sitting.

The therapist asked what happened after the comment at Sunday lunch. Vasilis said that nothing happened; they carried on eating. When the therapist clarified that he meant what had happened between Vasilis and his father, the same answer came again. “Nothing.”

Despina approached him later while he was putting plates into the dishwasher. She told him not to take any notice and reminded him that he knew what his father was like. Vasilis had heard the sentence throughout his childhood. It usually helped him move past the immediate humiliation. It also meant Nicos rarely needed to know that there had been anything to repair.

The therapist asked whether his father knew the joke had affected him.

“What’s the point?” Vasilis said. “He’d tell me I was too sensitive, and then we’d have another argument about whether I was allowed to be annoyed by the first one.”

The session that began with nothing to discuss had moved a long way from Olivia. Vasilis spoke about Nicos finishing the shelf, asking whether he was going into work and showing the bodybuilding photographs to the men at the factory without ever telling his son directly that he was proud of him. None of these examples proved that Nicos thought little of him. Vasilis knew that. The uncertainty was precisely what troubled him. His father’s affection was often clearest when somebody else reported it.

Over the following weeks, Nicos’s childhood entered the therapy in a form it had not held within the family. Vasilis had always known the facts: his father came from Crete at twelve, lived with Manolis and Kalliopi and began earning as soon as he could. These details had usually been told as evidence of Nicos’s resilience. Less was said about what it might have been like to arrive in another country without his parents or to depend upon an uncle whose protection came with its own rules.

Manolis worked hard and expected the same from everybody around him. He drank, disappeared for nights and was repeatedly unfaithful to Kalliopi. The affairs were never entirely secret. Different relatives knew different amounts and protected the arrangement by speaking around what was already understood. Kalliopi remained with him until her death from cancer eleven years earlier. By then, Manolis spoke about the length of their marriage as though duration had settled every question about its quality.

Nicos could speak about his uncle with gratitude and contempt in the same conversation. Manolis had housed him, found him work and taught him how to survive. He had also treated fear as weakness and apology as surrender. Nicos had not reproduced his uncle’s infidelity, but some of the rules surrounding manhood had travelled with him. Work demonstrated care more safely than words did. Practical help could be offered without anybody having to acknowledge vulnerability. A joke could wound and still be defended as a joke.

Vasilis wanted this history either to explain his father or leave him fully responsible. He found it difficult when therapy allowed both possibilities to remain. Nicos had been shaped by what happened to him, but he had also shaped what happened to his children. Understanding the first did not cancel the second.

That difficulty became more visible one Sunday at Marina’s house. Nicola had emptied a box of Lego onto the living-room carpet. Nicos complained that the pieces would disappear beneath the furniture and then lowered himself onto the floor beside her.

Nicola was trying to build a small house and had fixed one wall in the wrong place. When the roof would not attach, she became frustrated and pushed the instructions towards her grandfather. Vasilis expected Nicos to take the model from her. He could already imagine his father’s hands completing it quickly, correcting the mistake before Nicola understood what had happened.

Instead, Nicos turned the instruction booklet around and pointed to an earlier picture. “Look again, koukla. Something’s in the wrong place.”

Nicola studied the page, removed the wall and tried again. Nicos waited. He did not reach across or move the pieces towards her. When the roof finally fitted, Nicola looked at him with the pleasure of somebody who had solved the problem herself. Nicos smiled and told her she had done well.

Vasilis watched from the doorway. He loved seeing them together and felt ashamed of the resentment that followed. Nicola had done nothing except receive something good from her grandfather. Vasilis did not want it taken from her. He wanted to understand why the patience Nicos offered her had been so difficult to find when his own hands were on the tools.

When he brought the scene into therapy, he initially described it as evidence that his father had always possessed a tenderness he had chosen not to offer him. The therapist wondered whether choice was the only possible explanation. Vasilis heard the question as another attempt to excuse Nicos and said so. The therapist did not withdraw it, but neither did he insist that Vasilis adopt a more forgiving account.

They ended the session without resolving the disagreement. Vasilis remained angry, both with his father and with the therapist for introducing uncertainty where certainty would have been easier. He returned the following week still thinking about Nicola on the carpet and Nicos’s hands remaining in his own lap while she completed the house.

The Week Between

With Olivia beside him, Vasilis rarely doubted the relationship. Her expressions, voice and touch were available to him; he did not have to decide whether a full stop meant irritation or whether the absence of a kiss at the end of a message had been deliberate. They could spend an evening in Crouch End, wake late the following morning and continue talking while Olivia made coffee, and the fears that had occupied him during the week would seem briefly difficult to understand.

The difficulty usually began after they separated.

During the first weeks, Olivia had messaged whenever she thought of him. As the relationship became more established, her attention returned naturally to the rest of her life. Work became busy. Friends she had neglected during the excitement of meeting somebody new began expecting to see her again. There were evenings when she went home, ate with her flatmate and left her phone in another room without imagining that the silence required explanation.

Vasilis understood all of this. What he struggled with was the difference between understanding it generally and experiencing it when Olivia had not replied.

One Wednesday, he sent her a message shortly after leaving work. By the time he reached the gym, it remained unanswered. He trained for the first half-hour without checking, then looked during a rest period and saw that she had been online. The information changed nothing and altered his evening completely.

He put the phone away and completed the next set too quickly. When Andreas told him to slow the movement down, Vasilis corrected his form but continued thinking about the small word beneath Olivia’s name. Online. She had opened WhatsApp. Whether she had seen his message no longer seemed important. She had been available to the world and unavailable to him.

Olivia replied later that evening. She apologised for the delay and explained that she had been dealing with a difficult author before leaving the office, then called her sister on the way home. Her message was warm and ended by asking how his session had gone.

Vasilis waited before replying. He told himself he did not want to appear as though he had been watching the phone, but part of him also wanted the delay to register. When Olivia rang half an hour later, she asked whether something was wrong.

He initially said no. After she asked again, he told her she had seemed distant. Olivia reminded him that they had spent the previous weekend together and had already arranged to meet on Friday. She was not angry, though Vasilis heard tiredness in the care with which she answered him. He said he was not asking to know where she was every minute. Olivia agreed that he had not asked that. By the end of the call, she had explained the evening in greater detail than either of them would once have considered necessary.

Vasilis slept easily afterwards.

The next time her replies slowed, the reassurance from the previous conversation did not carry across as securely as he expected. He knew Olivia had been busy before and might be busy again, but knowledge of one reasonable explanation did not protect him from imagining another. The relationship could feel entirely safe on Saturday and uncertain by Tuesday without anything between them having visibly changed.

Olivia began noticing the sequence. If Vasilis became quieter during a call, she asked whether he was alright. Sometimes he told her what had happened; at other times he insisted there was nothing wrong and became hurt when she accepted the answer. The more carefully Olivia tried to distinguish his moods, the more consequential her response became. Asking could lead to a long conversation. Not asking could be experienced as indifference.

At first, she reassured him because reassurance seemed both honest and kind. She did like him. She was not planning to leave. If saying so helped, she saw no reason to withhold it. Vasilis would settle, the evening would recover and they would return to the version of themselves that worked so well together.

Over time, Olivia began giving explanations before he requested them. She might tell him that her phone would be away during a meeting or that she was having dinner with her sister and would reply later. If she fell asleep early, her morning message included an apology. Vasilis noticed the change but did not experience it as evidence that she felt under pressure. To him, the additional information looked like closeness. Olivia was thinking about him even while occupied elsewhere.

Once, after she had explained why she might be slow to reply during an evening with friends, Vasilis told her she did not need to account for everything she did. Olivia said she knew that, but sometimes found herself preparing for the conversation they might otherwise have afterwards.

The remark embarrassed him. He reminded her that he had never told her not to see anybody or demanded access to her phone. Olivia agreed. That was not what she had said. For several minutes, they became caught in a disagreement about an accusation Olivia had not quite made. Vasilis defended himself against being controlling; Olivia tried to describe the less visible burden of anticipating how an ordinary absence might be received. Eventually she withdrew from the conversation, saying she did not want the evening to become another discussion about whether the relationship was alright.

They met the following Saturday and had a good time. Olivia was affectionate, and Vasilis felt ashamed of having worried. The argument seemed less important once she was in front of him. They ate, drove through North London without deciding where they were going and ended the night at her flat. By Sunday morning, the relationship again felt obvious.

Olivia’s explanations helped him feel close to her, but they also made an unexplained silence increasingly difficult to tolerate. What began as kindness was gradually becoming part of the structure of the relationship.

A few weeks later, Olivia told him she was going out in Shoreditch with friends from university. She expected to be home late and would probably not be looking at her phone much. Vasilis told her to enjoy herself. When he said it, he meant it.

For several hours, that was enough.

Saturday Night

At half past ten, after finishing at the gym, Vasilis sent Olivia a photograph. It was the sort of message they exchanged regularly and did not require an immediate reply. He put his phone away, drove home and ate the meal Despina had left for him. When he checked again shortly after eleven, the message remained unanswered.

A few minutes later, Olivia appeared in an Instagram story posted by one of her friends. She was standing outside a bar, laughing at somebody beyond the edge of the frame. Vasilis watched the short clip twice before closing the app. There was nothing in it he had not already known. Olivia was in Shoreditch with the people she had said she would be with, enjoying the evening she had told him she planned to enjoy.

He went upstairs, showered and got into bed. The phone lay face down beside him, close enough that he could reach it without moving properly. At first, he resisted. Then he checked WhatsApp and found the same grey ticks beneath the photograph.

Shortly after midnight, he sent a second message wishing her a good night. The wording was light, followed by a kiss, and did not reveal that he had already begun wondering whether her silence was deliberate. He placed the phone down again and turned off the lamp, but sleep did not come.

At one fifteen, another story appeared. Olivia was visible in the background, holding a drink in one hand and her phone in the other. The image lasted only a few seconds, but Vasilis paused it before it disappeared. She had access to her phone. Whatever uncertainty had existed before now felt resolved in the least reassuring direction.

He told himself there were countless reasons she might not have answered. She could have opened her phone to take a photograph, reply to somebody in the group or check where they were going next. She might not have seen his messages. She might have seen them and decided there was nothing requiring an answer while she was out.

Vasilis could produce the alternatives easily. None carried the emotional authority of the conclusion already forming: Olivia had seen enough to know he had contacted her and had chosen not to respond.

At one forty-eight, he sent another message asking whether she was alright. The concern in the wording gave him a reason for sending it, although he knew he was not frightened that anything had happened to her. He wanted contact. More precisely, he wanted Olivia to end the uncertainty that had begun replacing the evening she was actually having.

By half past two, Vasilis had moved from the bed to the kitchen and back again. He opened their conversation and scrolled upwards. The week before, Olivia had called him handsome. Nine days earlier, she had said she missed him. There were photographs from work, private jokes and a message sent from bed telling him she wished he were there. Vasilis read them as evidence from a case that had somehow reopened.

At 3.12 a.m., WhatsApp showed that Olivia had been online. Neither of his messages changed.

The anger that followed was easier to inhabit than the fear. She was communicating with somebody. She was holding the same device through which Vasilis had tried to reach her, yet he remained outside whatever had her attention. By then, he was no longer trying to understand whether anything had changed. He was collecting proof that it had.

He drafted a message telling her that it was strange not to reply all night and deleted it. Another wished her enjoyment in a tone that made clear he meant the opposite. He deleted that too. Sending either would expose how closely he had been watching, and some part of him remained aware that the morning might make the entire night look different.

Downstairs, the kitchen was dark apart from the light above the cooker. Despina had covered a second plate of food in case he was hungry after training. Vasilis opened the fridge, stared at it and closed the door again. For several minutes he stood at the counter with the phone in his hand, moving between explanations he could think and the one he believed.

Olivia might simply be having fun. Her phone might have spent most of the evening in her bag. She might assume Vasilis was asleep. She might be irritated that he had sent two messages after she had already told him she would not be checking her phone. Each possibility remained available. None felt real enough to compete.

By dawn, Vasilis had slept only briefly. He reached the gym early and began training before Andreas arrived. During his first working set, he moved the weight too quickly and added more for the next despite missing the target repetitions.

Andreas watched him for several minutes before telling him to remove a plate. When Vasilis insisted that he was training, Andreas said he was having an argument with the machine and using the session to decide who had won. Vasilis came close to telling him to mind his own business, then took the weight off. The rest of the session remained poor. His concentration broke between sets, and each time it did he reached for his phone. Normally, a failed lift would have followed him home. That morning, it barely registered.

Olivia replied at 2.17 that afternoon.

Sorryyy, only just properly alive LOL! Was such a late one. Hope you’ve had a good Sunday xx

Vasilis read the message several times. She did not mention either of his unanswered texts or explain why she had not replied. There was no acknowledgement of the hours he had spent awake, because Olivia had no reason to know those hours had become significant. She had woken into an ordinary Sunday after a late night with friends. Vasilis had spent the same night inside a relationship crisis that existed almost entirely on his side.

The difference produced an anger he did not express. He drafted a cold reply, deleted it and eventually told her the night sounded heavy, adding that he had been to the gym and was now relaxing at home. The tone gave away nothing. Olivia answered later with a photograph of the takeaway she had ordered. Relief came before Vasilis could object to it. His shoulders lowered. The day became manageable again.

In therapy two days later, Vasilis said Olivia had ignored him. The therapist did not correct him or tell him that he had overreacted. He asked what her silence had come to mean during the night. Vasilis resisted the wording. This was not merely a meaning he had attached to an innocent event; Olivia had been online and had not answered. She had held her phone. She had posted. The therapist agreed that she had not replied and asked whether that fact could establish why.

This distinction angered Vasilis. It felt as though Olivia was being allowed every possible explanation while he was being asked to distrust the only one that made sense of the night. He did not say that. Accusing the therapist of defending her would make him sound unreasonable, and he had become increasingly alert to the possibility that the therapist already saw him that way. He looked away and said, “Maybe.”

The therapist noticed the change and asked what had happened in the last few moments. Vasilis said nothing had happened; he was listening. When the therapist observed that he seemed to have moved further away, Vasilis returned to the facts. Olivia had been online. She had been holding her phone. Earlier in the relationship, she would have replied.

The therapist agreed that the change mattered to him, but said they still could not know what had been happening in Olivia’s mind. Vasilis was quiet. What he wanted was not simply for the therapist to agree that Olivia had failed to reply. He wanted him to understand that the failure meant something. Without that meaning, the distress of the night seemed to lose its cause and settle back inside Vasilis.

“So if she didn’t do anything wrong,” he said eventually, “what does that make me?”

The therapist asked whether one of them had to be wrong for Vasilis’s hurt to be real.

Vasilis did not answer. The question left him with an arrangement he found harder to tolerate than blame: Olivia might have been living an ordinary night, and he might still have suffered. Neither fact cancelled the other, but there was no clear side on which he could place himself.

Later, he compared the night with his father’s jokes. Nicos could say something humiliating, continue eating and be genuinely surprised that Vasilis was still carrying it hours later. The event belonged differently to each of them. For Nicos, a remark had been made and the meal continued. For Vasilis, the remark altered the room.

The therapist wondered whether Olivia’s message on Sunday afternoon had touched the same place. Not because she had intended to wound him, but because she resumed contact without knowing there had been anything between them requiring repair.

“She didn’t even know,” Vasilis said.

The absence of intention did not comfort him. In some ways, it made the night more painful. He had been frightened, angry and unable to sleep while Olivia remained unaware that anything had happened. His experience had been enormous and invisible at the same time.

By Friday, they had arranged to meet again. Olivia’s messages during the week had been affectionate enough to reassure him, but not enough to undo the case he had constructed on Saturday night. Vasilis went to see her carrying both possibilities: that the relationship remained exactly as it had been, and that he had already witnessed the beginning of its end.

One More Evening

They met in Crouch End at a restaurant Olivia had mentioned several weeks earlier. She kissed Vasilis when she arrived and slipped her hand through his arm as they walked inside. Nothing in the greeting suggested that he had spent the week trying to decide whether their relationship had already begun to end.

Olivia talked about work, an author who had ignored three months of emails and then demanded an answer within the hour, and an argument with her sister that had resolved itself before either of them properly understood what it had been about. Vasilis listened, made her laugh and gradually stopped examining the evening for signs that something had changed. Her attention was available again. Across the table, the silence of the previous Saturday became harder to reconcile with the woman asking whether he wanted to share dessert.

When Olivia asked about his presentation, Vasilis told her that Alexandra had praised it in front of senior management. He then added that she had probably done so because other people were present.

Olivia put down her spoon. “Why can’t she just have meant it?”

Vasilis said that she might have, though his tone made clear that he did not think so. Olivia reminded him that he had worked hard on the presentation and knew it had gone well. There did not always have to be another reason. “You do that a lot,” she said.

He asked what she meant. Olivia thought before answering, careful not to turn the observation into an accusation. When somebody said something positive about him, he often found a reason it did not fully count. When somebody disappointed him, he rarely gave the same consideration to what else might have been happening.

Vasilis joked that she had been speaking to his therapist. Olivia smiled and returned to the dessert. The conversation moved elsewhere without becoming an argument, but her words remained with him because they sounded uncomfortably close to what had been happening in the therapy room. He could already hear the distinction he disliked: what somebody had done was not necessarily the same as what it meant.

The evening continued easily. They stayed longer than intended, walked back towards the car and stopped once because Olivia had not finished telling him a story. During the drive to her flat, she rested one hand lightly on his thigh while looking through the window at the restaurants and late-night shops along Green Lanes. Vasilis began feeling embarrassed by the certainty with which he had treated the previous weekend as the beginning of an ending.

Outside Olivia’s building, he pulled into the same place where he had dropped her after their first date. She kissed him, then reached for the door handle. Vasilis had assumed he would be staying. He had brought a change of clothes in the boot without mentioning it. Olivia said she was exhausted and needed to be up early. She wanted to go straight to sleep. The explanation was reasonable. Vasilis heard it change the evening.

He asked whether everything was alright, taking care to make the question sound casual. Olivia looked at him before answering that she was simply tired. When he asked whether she was sure, her expression altered slightly.

“Vas.” She did not say it angrily. That made it no easier to hear.

Vasilis told her he was only asking and immediately moved back towards the version of himself who had been good company all evening. Olivia leaned across and kissed him again. She thanked him for dinner, said she had enjoyed herself and stepped out of the car. At the entrance to the building, she turned and waved before going inside.

Vasilis remained parked until the hallway light disappeared. He tried to recover the evening as it had felt twenty minutes earlier: Olivia laughing at the restaurant, her hand resting on his leg, the kiss outside the car. Instead, his attention returned to the small resistance in her face when he asked the second time whether everything was alright. On the drive home, he replayed her final words.

Thank you for dinner.

They had sounded ordinary when she said them. Removed from her voice and expression, they began to feel formal. He wondered why she had thanked him rather than said she would speak to him tomorrow. He remembered that she had waved. Then he wondered whether people waved when they knew they would not be seeing somebody again.

Shortly before midnight, from the bedroom he had occupied since school, Vasilis sent her a message.

Home safe. Had a really nice night. Sleep well xx

It delivered immediately.

He placed the phone beside him and checked again ten minutes later. The message remained unread. Olivia had said she was going straight to sleep, and Vasilis tried to let the fact support rather than frighten him.

By morning, there was still no reply. He knew she had needed to be up early. He told himself that she was occupied, that she might answer when her day became less rushed and that expecting contact before then would turn her perfectly reasonable explanation into another test. He went downstairs, ate breakfast and left for the gym without mentioning the silence to anybody.

During training, he kept the phone inside his bag rather than beside the bench. He lasted until the end of the first exercise before checking it. The message had been read. There was no reply.

Vasilis returned the phone to his bag and completed the session. The work was adequate, neither good enough to lift him nor poor enough to provide another explanation for his mood. Andreas noticed that he was quieter than usual but did not ask in front of the other people training nearby.

By early afternoon, each hour had begun adding weight to the silence. Vasilis resisted looking at Olivia’s social media. He did not want another photograph to become evidence, but avoiding it did not quieten the conclusion already developing. At four, he sent another message asking whether her day was going alright. He kept it brief and added a kiss. Nothing in the wording referred to the previous night or suggested that he had been monitoring the absence of a reply.

The message was read later that evening.

Olivia did not answer.

On Sunday morning, Vasilis wrote again. This time he allowed the concern to show. He said he hoped she was alright and that he had the feeling something had changed. If she no longer wanted to continue seeing him, he would rather she tell him directly. He promised he would respect whatever she decided.

He read the message several times before sending it. It was calm, fair and contained no accusation he might later regret. For several hours, the fact that he had said what needed saying gave him a degree of relief. Olivia now had an uncomplicated opportunity to answer.

She did not take it.

That evening, Vasilis called once. The phone rang until the call ended. He did not leave a voicemail and did not call again.

By Monday morning, he had stopped composing further messages, though unfinished versions continued forming in his mind. He could ask whether he had done something wrong. He could apologise for asking twice if everything was alright. He could tell her that disappearing was unfair. He could pretend he was only checking that she was safe. Each message offered a different way of remaining in contact with somebody who was no longer participating in the exchange.

He opened their conversation once before work. Olivia’s last message was still from Friday afternoon, asking what time he had booked the restaurant. Everything beneath it belonged to Vasilis alone.

Another One

For the first two days after Olivia stopped replying, Vasilis moved through his routine without properly entering it. He worked, answered messages and attended meetings, though the concentration required for anything beyond the immediate task seemed unavailable. At the gym, he completed less than Andreas had programmed and left before the final exercise, telling himself that two poor sessions did not amount to a collapse.

Despina noticed before anybody else. Olivia’s name had disappeared from conversation, and Vasilis no longer carried his phone from room to room with the alertness she had grown accustomed to seeing. At dinner on Monday, she asked whether everything was alright between them. Vasilis said he did not know. His mother reached towards his arm, but he moved to collect his plate before she touched him and began asking what she had put in the rice. Nicos continued eating. He did not ask about Olivia.

The omission irritated Vasilis throughout the evening. His father had been willing to lecture him publicly about finding a wife, yet appeared not to notice when a woman vanished from his life. It was only later, lying awake, that Vasilis acknowledged how little he had told Nicos about the relationship. His father knew that Olivia existed and had stayed at the house once. He did not know about Shoreditch, the unanswered messages or the final evening outside her flat. Vasilis had offered him almost nothing and still felt injured that he had failed to recognise what was missing.

By Wednesday, Vasilis was training properly again. Andreas did not ask for an account of the previous sessions. He adjusted the weight on one exercise, watched Vasilis complete it and told him his control was better. The correction remained exactly what it was: information about the movement rather than a judgement on why Vasilis had struggled two days earlier. By the end of the session, the familiar effort had returned, and with it the temporary sense that his life could still be organised.

That evening, he reinstalled two dating apps. He did not experience this as replacing Olivia. There had been no conversation in which the relationship had formally ended, but her silence had become conclusive enough that waiting began to feel humiliating. Opening the apps gave him somewhere else to direct the part of himself still looking towards his phone. There were profiles, photographs and beginnings that had not yet acquired the power to hurt him.

When he told the therapist, he noticed a pause and immediately asked what it meant. The therapist said he was wondering what the week had been like.

Vasilis replied that it had been unpleasant, though not as difficult as the night Olivia went out. That Saturday, the relationship had still existed, and every hour without contact had contained the possibility that it was changing. Now Olivia’s continued silence left less to interpret.

“At least I know,” he said.

The therapist asked what he knew.

“That it’s finished.”

Neither of them questioned whether five days without a reply justified the conclusion. Vasilis was no longer trying to decide what Olivia intended. Whatever she had felt, she had chosen not to speak to him again.

The certainty brought pain, but it also brought an end to the particular strain of waiting. There was no longer any need to compare the warmth of one message with another or decide whether a late reply meant more than tiredness. Olivia had removed herself from the exchange. Vasilis could be angry with what she had done without spending the night imagining what she might do next.

The therapist asked whether he missed her. Vasilis began with the expected answer and then found himself trying to be more precise. He missed the ease of their first few weeks, the way she laughed when he became overly serious about the gym and the certainty he felt when she was sitting beside him. He missed the restaurant they had planned to try and the possibility that she might eventually become known to his family rather than merely introduced to them. Yet when he pictured Olivia herself, she was already difficult to separate from the weeks he had spent waiting for signs that she was leaving.

“I think I’d already done some of this,” he said.

The therapist asked what he meant.

Vasilis considered the question before answering. Each time Olivia had replied differently, declined a plan or seemed less available, he had allowed himself to imagine the relationship ending. Sometimes the fear lasted an hour. Sometimes it occupied most of a week. Then Olivia would become affectionate again and the relationship returned, only for Vasilis to begin watching for its next disappearance. The relationship had ended repeatedly in his mind before Olivia finally stopped replying. The actual loss was painful, but it arrived in a form he had practised.

“What bothers me,” Vasilis said, “is that I was right.”

The therapist asked what being right established.

“That it was going to happen.”

“Was that all it established?”

Vasilis heard the question as an invitation to complicate a conclusion he had already earned. Olivia had pulled away. He had noticed. However much the therapist valued uncertainty, there was now an answer. Then Vasilis thought about the dating apps, already active again on his phone, and about how quickly the woman he had imagined introducing properly to his family had become somebody whose profile photographs he avoided seeing. “It’s another one,” he said.

The therapist did not immediately ask him to explain. Vasilis continued because the words had opened onto more than Olivia. Another relationship had begun well, become difficult and ended before it had become part of an established life. The details changed, but the result remained available for comparison with Petros and Marina, both of whom had found partners and built families without appearing to turn every uncertain week into a crisis.

At twenty-seven, Petros had already been married. Marina had been living with the man she would later marry. Vasilis was still returning each evening to the bedroom he had occupied as a teenager, now crowded with work clothes, gym bags and the evidence of an adult life that had developed without taking him out of the family home. He knew these comparisons were selective. He did not know what his siblings had feared privately or what had been difficult inside their relationships. From the outside, their lives still appeared to have moved in the direction Nicos understood: they had met somebody, made a decision and built something. Vasilis felt he kept reaching the same unfinished stage.

The therapist asked what each ending seemed to confirm.

Vasilis looked towards the floor. For a while, he returned to Olivia: her silence, the unfairness of not answering, the impossibility of knowing what had changed after a pleasant evening. When he eventually moved beyond her, his voice became quieter. If each woman was different and the relationships still ended in broadly the same way, then chance became harder to blame. Vasilis did not need the therapist to identify the one element present in all of them. He had already done so.

The apps offered relief from that conclusion. Every new match suggested that the story might yet belong to the women who had been wrong for him rather than to something fixed within him. A conversation could begin before he had fully understood the previous ending, allowing hope to return before the failure had settled into proof.

By the end of the week, Vasilis had arranged to meet somebody for a drink. He was not particularly excited, but neither was he indifferent. He wanted to see what might happen. More urgently, he wanted another beginning before Olivia’s disappearance became the last available account of who he was in a relationship.

The therapist did not tell him to cancel the date or delete the apps. He asked what Vasilis imagined he would feel if the new woman liked him. The answer was immediate enough that Vasilis nearly laughed.

“Better.”

What He Heard

Olivia’s absence did not alter the way Despina cared for Vasilis; it made the care more difficult to ignore. After asking once whether something had happened between them, she did not press him for an explanation. Instead, food appeared beneath a plate in the fridge when he came home late, and the shirts he left near the washing machine returned to his room clean and folded. This was the form of closeness he accepted most easily: care that could be used without requiring him to acknowledge that he needed it.

Affection offered more directly unsettled him. One evening, as he prepared to meet a woman from one of the dating apps, Despina stood in the hallway and adjusted the collar of his shirt. She told him he looked handsome and reached towards his face. Vasilis moved back before her hand arrived.

“Mum, I’m twenty-seven.”

“I know how old you are.”

She smiled and went back towards the kitchen, apparently unhurt. Vasilis remained by the mirror, irritated by the exchange and ashamed of the irritation. He could spend an entire week wondering whether a woman wanted to touch him, then recoil when his mother did. He did not bring the incident into therapy. He suspected the therapist would make more of it than Vasilis believed it deserved.

Work provided material he found harder to dismiss. Several weeks after Olivia disappeared, Alexandra asked him into a meeting room to discuss another campaign he had recently completed. She praised the outcome and said the client had responded particularly well to the central idea. Then she told Vasilis that he had held too much of the process himself. Katerina should have been involved earlier, and other members of the team needed more opportunity to contribute before decisions had already been made.

Vasilis listened without interrupting. Alexandra ended by saying that she trusted his judgement; what she wanted to see next was whether he could allow other people’s judgement to influence the work before everything had been settled in his own mind.

By the time he returned to his desk, the praise had receded. What remained was Katerina’s name and the suggestion that Vasilis did not know how to work with people. He watched Alexandra speak to another colleague across the office and became convinced that she had already decided he was not ready for the next promotion. In therapy, he said she was holding him back. The therapist asked what had happened in the meeting. Vasilis repeated Alexandra’s comments, and before the therapist could respond, added that he knew what was coming.

“What am I going to say?”

“That she didn’t actually say she was holding me back.”

The therapist asked whether she had.

“No.”

Vasilis did not sound persuaded by his own answer. The words Alexandra had used and the conclusion he had drawn from them were different, but the conclusion felt closer to what he believed she had meant. “She said she trusted my judgement, then spent twenty minutes telling me not to use it.”

The therapist observed that Alexandra might have been asking whether he could trust other people’s judgement as well. Vasilis looked away. This was precisely what frustrated him about the work. Other people could speak carelessly, retreat into ambiguity and leave him responsible for distinguishing what they had said from what they had intended. The therapist would then preserve every possible explanation except the one Vasilis had heard most clearly. He did not say this. Instead, he nodded and told the therapist that perhaps he was right.

The therapist noticed the speed of the agreement and asked whether Vasilis believed it.

“I said you might be right.”

It was not quite an answer, and both of them knew it. The disagreement remained in the room without becoming an argument.

By then, the therapist’s silences had also begun acquiring meaning for Vasilis. A pause before answering could feel like doubt. A question could suggest that the therapist had already formed a judgement and was waiting for Vasilis to arrive at it himself. Vasilis rarely asked whether this was true. He watched, listened and tried to determine what the therapist thought of him from whatever the therapist allowed to show.

A few weeks later, the therapist told him that he would be away for three weeks.

The Therapist’s Holiday

The dates had been given to Vasilis at the beginning of the work, but he had not retained them. Three weeks sounded different when they were no longer printed on a sheet among information about fees, cancellations and confidentiality.

The therapist confirmed the dates and said they would meet again on the usual day when he returned. Vasilis nodded, then joked that therapists appeared to take better holidays than everybody else. The remark allowed him to move the conversation on without having to explain why the length of the break had unsettled him.

That evening, he checked his calendar. The gap looked larger when marked out between two appointments. Vasilis knew the therapist was entitled to leave, that the break had been arranged in advance and that three weeks did not threaten anything they had agreed. None of this stopped him wondering how easily the work might lose its importance while they were apart.

At the following session, Vasilis waited until they had been talking for some time before asking how long people normally remained in therapy. The therapist said there was no standard answer. Some people came for a relatively short period, while others stayed considerably longer; the length itself did not necessarily establish whether the work was useful. Vasilis nodded but did not move on. “How do you know when it’s actually working?”

The therapist asked what Vasilis had expected to be different by now.

“I thought I’d stop doing the same things.” He returned to the night Olivia had gone out. He understood more clearly that the evening had belonged very differently to each of them, but he was not convinced that understanding this would prevent the same fear if another woman failed to reply. He could also see more of Nicos’s history without feeling any less wounded by the man his father had become. “I understand it while I’m sitting here. Then somebody takes three hours to answer, or Dad says one thing at dinner, and I’m back in it.”

The therapist asked whether being back in it was quite the same now that Vasilis could sometimes notice what was happening.

“Sometimes I know I might be wrong and still feel exactly the same,” Vasilis said. “That just means I can watch myself doing it.”

The therapist wondered what Vasilis would recognise as change if the feelings did not disappear immediately. Vasilis thought about this. He wanted the hours between messages to stop deciding the shape of his day, and a remark from Nicos to remain at the table where it was made instead of following him around on his shoulders. More than that, he wanted evidence of progress that did not depend upon deciphering somebody else’s expression.

“Do you think I’m getting anywhere?” he asked.

The therapist wondered whether Vasilis was asking for his assessment of the work or reassurance that the relationship would continue after the break. Vasilis smiled without amusement and said this was exactly what frustrated him: a straightforward question could never remain straightforward in the room.

He did not deny the second possibility.

The break began after their next session. Vasilis left with the return date entered in his phone and resisted checking it again until that evening.

During the first week, he thought less about therapy than he had expected. Work was busy, and Andreas had changed part of his training programme. Vasilis also met a woman called Chloe through one of the apps. Their first date was pleasant enough to arrange a second, though he returned home without the certainty he had felt after meeting Olivia.

Chloe replied consistently during the days that followed. At first, Vasilis barely noticed. By the middle of the second week, he had begun noticing precisely because the replies were consistent. A message came before work on Monday, later on Tuesday and not until the afternoon on Wednesday. Nothing had happened, but variation had entered the pattern, and Vasilis found himself measuring it.

There was no session in which to describe this. He considered writing it down, then imagined how it would sound when read aloud three weeks later. The concern seemed too small to preserve and too familiar to ignore. He left it in the notes on his phone beneath a list of exercises Andreas had sent him.

By the final week of the break, Vasilis had begun wondering whether the therapist would remember the details of their last conversation. The thought embarrassed him. The therapist saw other clients, took holidays and returned to a working life that did not depend upon keeping Vasilis continuously in mind. Vasilis understood this, but understanding it did not prevent him imagining the room continuing without him.

The therapist returned on the date agreed, and Vasilis arrived twelve minutes early and waited in his car until there were only two minutes left. When he entered, the room looked exactly as it had before the break. The chairs had not moved. The box of tissues remained on the same table. The therapist greeted him and asked how the three weeks had been.

Vasilis began with Chloe. He described the two dates, the changing response times and the moment he had noticed himself monitoring them. He did not say that seeing the therapist in the chair had relieved him, or that some part of him had expected the return to feel less certain until it happened.

Near the end of the session, the therapist asked what it had been like to come back.

Vasilis looked around the room before answering. “Normal.”

The therapist waited, and Vasilis almost added something. Instead, he said that normal was good and began talking about work again.

How Do You See Me?

By the time Vasilis had been in therapy for almost a year, he had become familiar with the therapist’s pauses. He knew the difference between the silence that followed a difficult memory and the shorter hesitation before a question. He had also learned that knowing the difference did not prevent him from wondering what else might be happening in the therapist’s mind.

The question arose during a session that had begun with another woman. Vasilis had seen her four times. The dates had gone well, though he had already begun noticing changes in the way she messaged. One evening she replied quickly and warmly; the next day, several hours passed. He described this to the therapist and then interrupted himself before the familiar questions could be asked. “I know. I don’t know what she’s thinking.”

The therapist said nothing immediately. Vasilis watched him. “That is what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

“I was wondering what it has been like to notice yourself reaching that conclusion again.”

It was close enough to what Vasilis had expected that he felt both irritated and vindicated. He understood that recognition was meant to represent progress. He could now hear the thought forming and sometimes identify the fear beneath it. None of this appeared to change the fact that, when somebody mattered, their absence could still reorganise his day. He told the therapist that understanding the pattern had begun to feel like another way of watching himself fail. Before therapy, he had believed the woman was withdrawing. Now he could also observe himself believing it, question the evidence and remain anxious anyway.

The therapist asked whether Vasilis thought he expected the understanding to remove the feeling.

“I expected it to do something.”

The answer carried more frustration than he intended. He was conscious that the same dissatisfaction had entered the room before. Therapy had lasted longer than any romantic relationship he had brought into it, yet he remained unsure what the therapist made of him after all that time.

The question arrived without preparation.

“How do you see me?”

The therapist did not answer immediately.

Vasilis watched the pause become longer than he could tolerate comfortably. He noticed the therapist’s expression, the slight movement of his hands and the fact that he had looked down briefly before looking back. Each detail entered the silence and acquired meaning.

“I’m serious,” Vasilis said.

The therapist said he understood that. He asked what Vasilis most wanted to know.

The question felt like an avoidance. Vasilis had not asked what he wanted to know; he had asked how the therapist saw him. He wanted an ordinary answer, one that belonged to the therapist rather than to a theory about why the answer was needed. He wanted to know whether, after almost a year, he was experienced as thoughtful or self-absorbed, likeable or exhausting. More than any particular word, he wanted the therapist to choose one and accept that it was his.

“Exactly what I asked,” Vasilis said. “You must have an opinion.”

The therapist acknowledged that he had thoughts and feelings about Vasilis, as he would about anybody with whom he had been meeting regularly. He then wondered whether a description from him would remain reassuring, or whether Vasilis might begin testing it against the next silence, disagreement or disappointing response.

Vasilis felt exposed by the question he had asked and foolish for having asked it. The therapist had taken something personal and returned it as evidence of the same pattern they had been discussing for months. Even here, Vasilis seemed unable to ask another person what he meant to them without the question itself becoming the problem. He looked towards the window. “Forget it.”

The therapist asked what had happened.

“Nothing.”

Vasilis heard the familiar answer as he gave it. He knew what the therapist might make of the withdrawal and disliked him for knowing. When the therapist observed that Vasilis appeared further away than he had a few moments earlier, Vasilis said he was simply listening.

The therapist attempted to return to the question, explaining that he had not meant to dismiss it. He was trying to understand what Vasilis hoped an answer might settle. Vasilis nodded, though the agreement contained no movement towards him. He no longer wanted the answer. Wanting it had become humiliating.

For the remainder of the session, he spoke carefully. He answered what was asked and offered little beyond it. The therapist noticed the change but seemed uncertain whether drawing further attention to it would deepen the rupture. Vasilis experienced this caution as confirmation that the room had become uncomfortable because of him. When the therapist said they would need to stop, the timing felt almost absurd. Of course they did.

Vasilis stood, collected his coat and left without the usual goodbye. He walked down the street replaying the exchange, not only the therapist’s words but the pause before them. By the time he reached his car, he had become convinced that the answer had been present in the hesitation and that the interpretation was simply a more professional way of not saying it.

The therapist found him difficult.

Perhaps not impossible. Therapists were trained to tolerate difficult people. They could remain calm, ask questions and call the difficulty material. That did not mean they wanted the person in the room.

For two days, Vasilis decided he would not return.

He had been in therapy for nearly a year and was still checking messages, still imagining endings and still trying to establish what other people thought of him. Now the same uncertainty had entered the one relationship supposedly designed to help him understand it. The therapist had listened to him describe women, Nicos, Alexandra and Katerina, yet when Vasilis finally asked where he existed in the therapist’s own mind, he had been given another question.

On Wednesday evening, Vasilis opened his email and began writing. He thanked the therapist for the work they had done and said he had decided to stop. He wrote that he did not think continuing would be useful and that he wanted to focus on managing things independently. The message was reasonable, almost appreciative. Nothing in it revealed the anger of the previous session or asked the therapist to persuade him to stay.

Vasilis read it several times, imagining the therapist receiving it and recognising that the decision had followed their last conversation. He then imagined the opposite: the therapist replying politely, accepting the ending and moving on to the next client.

Both possibilities angered him, and he saved the email as a draft. The appointment remained in his calendar.

Over the weekend, he thought less about whether to attend than about how little he wanted the therapist to know the decision had become difficult. Cancelling would reveal that the session had affected him. Returning might look as though it had not.

On Tuesday, Vasilis arrived early and remained in his car until only a few minutes were left. The termination email was still in his drafts. He had read it again that morning and found nothing unreasonable in it. That made the decision no easier. He considered driving away even after the appointment time appeared on the dashboard. Instead, he locked the car and went inside.

The therapist greeted him in the usual way. Vasilis sat down without removing his coat. The room had not changed during the week in which he had nearly decided never to enter it again.

“I nearly cancelled.”

The therapist observed that he had come despite wanting to cancel. Vasilis waited to see whether anything more would follow, then told him about the email. “I wrote the whole thing. I just didn’t send it.”

The therapist asked what had stopped him. Vasilis said he did not know. Sending it would have ended the work, which was what he had wanted when he wrote it. Later, the same ending began to feel too easy and too final. He had imagined the therapist receiving the message and understanding immediately that it belonged to their previous session. He had also imagined a polite reply that accepted his decision without asking him to reconsider.

“Both made me angry,” Vasilis said. In one version, the therapist understood him too well. In the other, he did not care enough to try.

Vasilis explained what had happened after asking how the therapist saw him. He had felt exposed before the therapist spoke and humiliated afterwards. The question had been difficult enough to ask without being returned as evidence of the same pattern they had spent months discussing. “Maybe it was reassurance,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I wasn’t actually asking.”

The therapist agreed that these were not mutually exclusive. Looking back, he thought he had moved too quickly towards what the question might mean and had not stayed long enough with what it had cost Vasilis to ask it. He had responded to the pattern before fully recognising the moment.

The acknowledgment did not tell him what the therapist thought of him. It did, however, make the previous session feel less like proof that he had been foolish to ask. “You still didn’t answer.”

“No.” The therapist did not defend the decision or replace it immediately with another interpretation. The answer remained between them.

After a while, he asked what Vasilis had imagined the silence meant. Vasilis initially said he did not know, then admitted that he had supplied an answer almost immediately. The therapist found him repetitive. Needy. Exhausting. He saw Vasilis’s name in the diary and already knew what kind of session they would have: another woman, another unanswered message, another certainty that somebody was leaving. “That I’m hard work,” he said.

The therapist asked what he imagined happened to people when Vasilis became hard work.

“They get tired.”

When the therapist asked what happened then, the answer came immediately. “They leave.”

Vasilis heard how quickly the answer arrived. The therapist’s pause had become tiredness; tiredness had become rejection; rejection had become the email waiting in his drafts. None of this had required the therapist to say that he wanted the work to end. The therapist wondered whether Vasilis had already decided what he thought.

Vasilis felt the familiar impulse to defend the conclusion. The therapist had hesitated. He had avoided the question. The session had become uncomfortable. Those things had happened. “I knew I might be doing that,” Vasilis said. “It didn’t stop me.”

The therapist asked whether recognising the pattern had made the week easier.

“No. I still wrote the email.”

The answer mattered. Understanding had not removed the fear or prevented Vasilis from preparing the ending. He had recognised parts of the sequence while still being carried through it. He could easily have sent the email. For two days, he had expected to. Returning did not mean the impulse had disappeared or that he would choose differently the next time.

The therapist did not try to turn the unsent email into evidence that Vasilis had changed. He asked what Vasilis made of recognising the sequence and still feeling unable to interrupt it.

“That knowing isn’t enough,” Vasilis said. “I can see it happening and still end up in exactly the same place.”

The therapist asked what it would mean about him if understanding did not immediately produce change.

After a pause, Vasilis said, “That maybe this is just me.”

The therapist wondered what Vasilis wanted from him at that moment. The question brought them back to the one he had asked the previous week. He wanted the therapist to tell him that the pattern was not fixed, that the year had altered something and that he was not condemned to repeat every ending he anticipated. More quietly, there was another wish beneath it: he wanted to know that the therapist had not spent nearly a year watching him fail.

“I want to know whether you think I’m changing,” Vasilis said.

“What would my answer mean to you?”

“That this hasn’t been pointless.” He paused before continuing. “That you don’t sit here every week thinking we’re having the same conversation because I’m incapable of doing anything differently.”

The therapist asked what Vasilis imagined it would mean if he did think that.

“That you’re tired of it.” He paused. “That maybe you’ve spent nearly a year watching me fail and I’m the only one still pretending something’s happening.”

The therapist did not reassure him. He asked whether Vasilis could hear how quickly a question about change had become a question about whether the therapist had grown tired of him. Vasilis could hear it. That did not make the fear feel any less true.

They returned to the week between sessions. Vasilis had recognised the familiar movement from hurt into certainty and, from there, towards withdrawal and a private decision to leave. Recognising it had not prevented him from writing the email. The therapist asked what had allowed the message to remain unsent.

Vasilis could not identify one reason. Part of him had wanted to end the therapy before the therapist could confirm what he already feared. Another part had wanted the therapist to understand why he was leaving, which meant remaining in the relationship long enough to be understood. Neither part had disappeared. They had existed alongside one another until Tuesday came.

“So I still did it,” Vasilis said. “I still wrote the email.”

The therapist asked whether writing it and sending it felt like the same act.

Vasilis’s first impulse was to say yes. Both had grown from the same conviction that the therapist found him difficult and would eventually be relieved to see him go. Yet one remained in his drafts. The difference felt too small to call change and too important to dismiss entirely.

The therapist did not name it for him.

After a while, Vasilis returned to the original question. “So you’re still not going to tell me how you see me.”

The therapist said he did not think a final description would settle what Vasilis hoped it would settle. That did not make the question unimportant, nor did it mean they should avoid examining why the answer carried so much weight. Vasilis still wanted to know what he occupied in the therapist’s mind, but he was beginning to see that he also wanted the answer to establish whether the work had mattered and whether he himself remained worth working with.

He was not satisfied. Part of him still believed the therapist’s refusal concealed the judgement he was unwilling to say aloud. Vasilis could recognise that belief without ceasing to feel it.

When the session ended, he put on his coat and said goodbye. Back in the car, the email remained in his drafts. Vasilis opened it and read the reasonable, appreciative explanation he had written for leaving without once saying that he had felt hurt.

He closed the screen without deleting the message, started the engine and drove home.

Psychodynamic Reflections

Vasilis’s story can be understood as a story about fear of rejection, but that description does not reach far enough. He is highly alert to changes in other people, experiences uncertainty as threatening and often anticipates the end of a relationship before the other person has ended it. Beneath this, however, lies a more fundamental difficulty: Vasilis repeatedly looks to another person’s mind for a stable answer about who he is.

A romantic relationship does more for him than offer companionship, intimacy or love. When a woman chooses him, several uncertainties quieten at once. He feels desirable, adult and closer to the future he believes he should already have reached. Living with his parents becomes temporary rather than evidence of delay. The lives Petros and Marina have built become less painful to compare with his own. Marriage and children no longer represent what has not happened; they become possibilities moving towards him. The woman therefore carries a significance larger than the relationship itself. Her interest can feel like confirmation that Vasilis is becoming the man he believes he ought to be.

This helps explain why relatively ordinary changes in contact acquire such force. A delayed reply does not remain a delayed reply. When Olivia responds warmly, Vasilis’s place in the relationship feels restored; when she does not, more than the conversation becomes uncertain. The same movement appears elsewhere. Alexandra’s qualified praise becomes evidence that she does not rate him. Katerina’s friendship cannot be experienced simply as affection with a boundary; it also becomes another instance of being valued but not chosen. Nicos’s pride reaches him indirectly through men at the factory, leaving Vasilis to decide whether the recognition counts when his father has not given it to him directly.

Jessica Benjamin’s theory of recognition offers a useful way of understanding this. Recognition is not simply approval, mirroring or reassurance. It depends upon encountering another person as a separate subject, with feelings, wishes and intentions that exist independently of our own. That separateness is what gives recognition its meaning: an answer matters because it comes from somebody who is not merely reflecting back what we wish to hear. Mutual recognition therefore involves more than being seen by another. It also requires the capacity to experience the other person as a subject in their own right, whose feelings, intentions and desires cannot be reduced to their function for us. (Benjamin, 1990)

Vasilis wants deeply to be recognised, yet the separateness of the person whose recognition he needs can become difficult to tolerate. This is clearest during Olivia’s night out. He knows she is with friends and can produce several reasonable explanations for her silence. He is not incapable of imagining her perspective. What he cannot do in those hours is inhabit those possibilities emotionally. Olivia’s independent evening gradually becomes organised around what it means about him. The photograph of her laughing no longer belongs principally to her enjoyment; it becomes evidence that she has access to her phone but is not answering him. Her silence becomes intentional, intention becomes withdrawal, and withdrawal begins to feel like a verdict.

This does not mean that Vasilis’s fears are imaginary. Olivia eventually ghosts him. Katerina genuinely does not want the relationship he hoped for. Other relationships have ended. A psychodynamic formulation that told Vasilis he had invented every rejection would replace his subjective experience with a theory and repeat the very failure of recognition the therapy is trying to understand. Olivia’s silence after their final evening is painful and her refusal to answer leaves him without the direct ending he had requested. Understanding Vasilis does not require absolving Olivia or treating her behaviour as inconsequential.

What must also be considered is the way Vasilis’s fear participates in the relationships he experiences. Benjamin uses the term ‘complementarity’ for relationships that become organised around opposing positions, later describing this as the structure of ‘doer and done-to.’ Within this arrangement, each person is increasingly experienced through what they appear to be doing to the other. Both may feel acted upon, while their own participation in the developing pattern becomes harder to recognise. (Benjamin, 2004)

Vasilis initially experiences himself as the done-to party. Women become interested, then change. They make him wait, draw away and leave him trying to understand what happened. From inside his experience, this is persuasive because there are real disappointments. Yet his attempts to protect himself also shape what becomes possible between them. When he is hurt, he often says that nothing is wrong and waits to see whether the other person notices. If Olivia asks, she may become responsible for reassuring him; if she accepts his answer, her failure to persist can feel like further evidence of indifference. Over time, she begins explaining ordinary absences before he asks. What she initially offers as kindness becomes something the relationship increasingly depends upon.

Some of the withdrawal Vasilis fears is produced within the attempts to prevent withdrawal. This does not mean he causes Olivia to ghost him or that her eventual decision is his responsibility alone. It means that fear has relational consequences. The more closely Vasilis monitors whether Olivia remains present, the more she begins anticipating how her ordinary separateness will be received. Vasilis notices the resulting caution and experiences it as proof that the relationship has changed. Both people become restricted by a pattern neither deliberately created.

His family history helps us understand why uncertain recognition carries such weight without reducing the present to the past. Nicos provides, attends important events and supports the choices he does not fully understand. He goes to the bodybuilding competition, contributes towards university and speaks proudly about Vasilis to other people. His love is not absent. Yet much of the recognition Vasilis wants reaches him elsewhere or in another form. Nicos’s pride is reported by a man from the factory. His care is communicated through carrying boxes, repairing things and taking over tasks. Jokes that wound are followed by Despina helping Vasilis absorb the injury rather than by father and son speaking directly about what occurred.

Despina’s mediation protects Vasilis, but it can also preserve the arrangement. When she tells him that he knows what his father is like, the immediate hurt becomes more manageable while Nicos remains largely unaware that anything requires repair. Vasilis learns to study indirect evidence of what another person feels: what they do, what somebody else reports and what can be inferred from what they do not say. The same vigilance later appears in his attention to response times, punctuation, online status and the therapist’s pauses.

The scene between Nicos and Nicola adds necessary complexity. Vasilis witnesses his father waiting while Nicola corrects the Lego house herself. He loves seeing them together and resents the patience being offered to her. Neither feeling cancels the other. The scene does not prove that Nicos deliberately withheld tenderness from his son, nor does his history in Manolis’s home erase the effect of the father he became. Psychodynamic understanding does not require Vasilis to forgive Nicos or replace anger with sympathy. It allows him to see the twelve-year-old boy and the adult father without forcing one to excuse the other.

Vasilis’s tendency to mourn relationships before they end also becomes more understandable. Imagining the ending is painful, but it changes uncertainty into something that appears knowable. During the relationship with Olivia, he loses her repeatedly in his mind: through a changed message, an unavailable evening or a goodbye that feels less secure than the previous one. When she finally disappears, the loss is real, but its shape is familiar. Certainty brings its own relief because the work of deciding whether the relationship is ending is over. He can return to the dating apps quickly, not because Olivia meant nothing, but because another beginning prevents the latest ending from becoming the final account of who he is.

The therapeutic relationship eventually becomes central because the pattern is no longer being discussed only in relation to other people. Vasilis begins reading meaning into the therapist’s pauses, questions and holidays. He wonders whether repetition has made him tiresome and whether the therapist has already formed an unfavourable judgement. When he asks, “How do you see me?”, the question is not merely a request for praise. It is an exposed attempt to discover what he occupies in another person’s mind after almost a year of being known.

Joseph Sandler’s concept of role-responsiveness helps illuminate the pressure this can create. Sandler proposed that a therapist may find themselves drawn towards particular roles within the relationship, not only through conscious requests but through the expectations and interpersonal pressures developing between therapist and client. With Vasilis, there is a strong invitation to become the person who supplies certainty: to confirm that Olivia liked him, that Nicos is proud, that Alexandra values him and that the therapist does not find him difficult. The therapist’s response to that pressure can provide useful clinical information, but automatically gratifying or automatically refusing the request would each risk repeating the pattern in a different form. (Sandler, 1976)

The therapist initially responds too quickly to what Vasilis’s question might represent. He sees the request for a verdict and wonders what such an answer would settle, but does not remain long enough with the vulnerability required to ask it. Vasilis experiences this as another failure to be seen. He withdraws, says that nothing has happened and later drafts an email ending the therapy without stating that he feels hurt. The familiar sequence takes place inside the treatment: uncertainty becomes conclusion, conclusion becomes withdrawal and withdrawal prepares the relationship’s ending.

Benjamin’s idea of thirdness is relevant here. Thirdness is not a compromise in which each person agrees to meet halfway, nor does it require the therapist to disclose whether he likes Vasilis or provide the personal verdict being requested. It refers to the possibility of moving beyond a closed struggle in which one person must be right and the other wrong, one must act and the other submit. In a shared third, different experiences can be recognised without either being allowed to erase the other. (Benjamin, 2004)

When Vasilis returns, the therapist acknowledges that he responded to the pattern before sufficiently recognising the exposure in the question. This does not mean that Vasilis’s interpretation of the pause becomes objectively correct, or that the therapist abandons the boundary and tells him exactly what he wants to hear. The acknowledgment concerns what happened between them: the therapist’s timing contributed to Vasilis feeling unseen. Vasilis can retain his experience of the injury without requiring the therapist to become entirely at fault, and the therapist can maintain his clinical position without treating Vasilis’s response as simply mistaken.

This is the movement towards thirdness in the story. The rupture is not avoided, explained away or repaired through reassurance. Instead, it becomes available for both of them to think about. Vasilis still wants a definitive answer. The therapist still does not give one. Yet the relationship no longer has to be organised solely around Vasilis being refused or the therapist being required to submit to the demand.

The distinction between recognition and change is crucial. By the final session, Vasilis can see more of the sequence through which the therapist’s hesitation became evidence that he was hard work, imagined tiredness became anticipated rejection and anticipated rejection became an email preparing to leave. Seeing the sequence does not prevent him from writing the email. When the pattern is emotionally active, it still carries more force than the understanding he has developed.

Psychodynamic insight is therefore not presented as immediate control. Vasilis cannot simply recognise the pattern and decide not to repeat it. The fear, shame and certainty arrive too quickly and are rooted too deeply in the way he experiences relationships. Recognition may precede change by a considerable distance. At times, it may do little more than allow Vasilis to notice where he has gone after he has already arrived there.

The unsent email should not be treated as proof that therapy has cured him. He could have sent it, and may prepare another ending when a future rupture occurs. Its significance lies in the fact that Vasilis has not relinquished the possibility of ending the relationship, and the therapist does not remove it for him. On this occasion, however, the private ending does not become the actual ending. He closes the screen and drives home with the pattern recognised but not resolved. The work remains in the difficult distance between seeing what happens and becoming able to do something different.

Psychodynamic therapy cannot promise Vasilis marriage, protect him from future rejection or eliminate his need to be recognised. Nor would independence mean no longer needing another person. The developing task is more complex. Vasilis has to find a way of remaining connected to his own needs while allowing the other person to possess a mind that cannot be permanently known or controlled. That may gradually make it possible for disappointment to exist without immediately becoming a verdict, and for a relationship to survive moments in which he does not receive the answer he wants.

For Vasilis, the first significant change may not be that he stops anticipating endings. It may be that an anticipated ending can become thinkable before it is enacted.

If This Story Resonated

Some people arrive in therapy because relationships repeatedly seem to become overwhelming at precisely the point they begin to matter. A delayed message, a change in somebody’s tone or uncertainty about another person’s feelings can take on a significance that feels impossible to ignore. We may find ourselves seeking reassurance, anticipating rejection or ending relationships internally before anything has actually been decided.

These patterns do not necessarily mean that our fears are irrational. People do disappoint us. Relationships do end. Sometimes we are rejected, misunderstood or left without the explanation we hoped for. Psychodynamic therapy is interested not only in whether a fear is objectively justified, but in why particular experiences acquire the emotional force they do, how our histories become active within present relationships, and what happens between us and other people when we try to protect ourselves from being hurt.

In my work as a psychodynamic counsellor, I offer individual therapy to adults who want to understand themselves and their relationships at greater depth. The work is collaborative and pays attention to experiences from the past, difficulties in the present and the therapeutic relationship itself. This can include noticing the expectations, fears, disappointments and relational patterns that may gradually emerge between client and therapist rather than only discussing them at a distance.

The aim is not to provide a judgement about who somebody is, tell them what their relationships should look like or remove the ordinary human need to be loved and recognised. It is to create a regular and confidential space in which experiences that feel repetitive, confusing or difficult to bear can become more thinkable. Change may not arrive as a single insight or a clean ending. Sometimes it begins with the possibility that a relationship can contain uncertainty, difference and disappointment without either person having to disappear.

Contact

References and Further Reading

Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books.

Benjamin, J. (1990). ‘An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition’. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7(Suppl.), pp. 33–46.

Benjamin, J. (2004). ‘Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness’. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), pp. 5–46.

Benjamin, J. (2018). Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. London: Routledge.

Sandler, J. (1976). ‘Countertransference and Role-Responsiveness’. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 3, pp. 43–47.