"Is My Relationship Broken?" Is Usually the Wrong Question to Be Asking At All
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
"Is my relationship broken?" is one of the most common questions people bring to friends, therapists, and late-night searches, and it's built on a hidden assumption that rarely survives scrutiny: that relationships exist in two states, broken and not-broken, and that the job is to determine which one applies. Almost nothing about how relationships actually function supports that framing.
Relationships run on continuous variables — the frequency of a pattern, the reliability of repair, the ratio of recognized to unrecognized recurrence — none of which resolve into a binary verdict. Asking "is it broken" forces a spectrum into a yes/no question, and the answer that comes back, whatever it is, ends up either falsely reassuring (not broken, so nothing to examine) or falsely catastrophic (broken, so why bother).
The more useful question is almost always more specific and less dramatic: what pattern is running, how often, and is it being recognized when it does? That question has an actual answer, one that can be tracked and changed. "Is it broken" has no actual answer, only a verdict that feels resolved without providing anything to act on.
Most relationships that survive long-term don't do so because they were never broken. They do so because someone eventually stopped asking the binary question and started asking the specific one.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai