There’s a point in almost every long relationship when the person standing in front of you quietly disappears—not physically, but perceptually. You still see them, but what you’re really looking at is a version of them that lives inside your own mind. It happens slowly, invisibly. You don’t notice it until the distortion has already taken hold.

The caricature isn’t your partner. It’s the internalised version of them you’ve built over time—a simplified, stripped-down sketch created from the accumulation of moments, disappointments, and frustrations. It’s how our minds make sense of the familiar. We build shorthand. We create patterns that help us predict, that save us from meeting again the full complexity of the person in front of us.

The caricature, then, is a shortcut. We all do it. We do it in every relationship. But in close relationships, the cost is high. Over time, what we see becomes limited—reduced to the things that hurt, to the traits that frustrate, to the ways we feel unseen or unmet. The mind filters out what doesn’t fit the pattern.

This is the damage of the caricature: we stop being able to see our partner as anything more than a collection of hurts and disappointments. The living person becomes hidden beneath the residue of our own interpretations. And the worst part is, we don’t even notice what we’ve stopped seeing.

In working with couples, I assume each partner carries—and is engaging with—a caricature of the other. It isn’t something to fix or erase; it’s something to see. Because until the caricature is named, it acts as a silent translator—everything the other says or does passes through it. The caricature interprets, distorts, explains, and in doing so, keeps the real person out of reach.

The first task is not to improve the caricature, but to recognise it. To see that what feels like the truth about your partner is actually a compression of perception—a drawing made from the injuries of the past. The work is to stop looking at the caricature long enough to rediscover the person behind it, to allow curiosity to re-enter the field of vision.

When curiosity returns, complexity returns. And when complexity returns, connection becomes possible again. Because the moment we begin to see each other as whole, unpredictable, living people—not the sketches we’ve drawn in our minds—the relationship itself begins to breathe again.