A typical couple just walked into my office for the first time. They’ve never done this before, but I’ve played my part in this scene for almost 30 years. They’re nervous, usually him more than her. They don’t know where to sit, so I steer them away from my big ergonomic chair toward their seats and close the door behind me.

I can feel them assessing me. They’re gathering information, trying to decide what kind of person I am before they open their lives up to me. They scan the books on my shelf. Am I smart enough to handle them and their problems? Am I one of those therapists? (Which kind is “those” depends on who’s asking: too liberal, too conservative, too woo-woo, too by-the-book.)

A lot happens in these first seconds, before anyone says a word. And I almost always have to be the one to break the silence. As a rookie, I made the mistake more than once of opening with, “How are you doing today?” Big mistake. Huge. People don’t show up in a therapist’s office on their best day. They can’t even fake it with the standard “Fine. And you?” the way they could if I’d bumped into them as strangers in the aisle at Wal-Mart. It’s the middle of the week. They’d normally be at work, or doing almost anything more fun than this.

I gave that question up a long time ago. Now I ask, “What can I do for you today?” or “Tell me what brings you here.” It’s a better on-ramp, but it leads straight to the next predictable beat. The couple stares at each other. Who’s going to go first? This part usually happens without words. He crosses his arms. She gives him the big eyes and the head tilt. He waves a hand: the floor is yours. She huffs a little, and then she gives me the opener.

Hit pause.

Remember those choose-your-own-adventure books? The hero faces a big decision, and you pick: turn to page 71 or page 87. As a kid I could read the same book over and over and get a different ending every time.

So, here’s your chance. What do you think she’s going to say?

Option one: “He’s a jerk and I need you to fix him.” Option two: “We have a problem with communication.”

It’s a trick question. There is only option two. Almost every couple who walks into my office opens with some version of “We just don’t communicate.” They don’t know I’m sitting there with an internal timer, taking bets on how long it takes them to say it.

(Yes, your therapist is having a conversation with themselves while you talk. It’s supposed to happen. Consider this the magician revealing the trick. Please don’t tell the other magicians.)

Up until this point, the plot of this drama is almost always the same, at least from my vantage point. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” right?

That’s what I thought for almost the first twenty years of doing this.

Then something shifted. Without any of us noticing it, or even consenting to it, the couple in my office today is different from the typical couple of the early 2000s. They’re still saying the same things. They’re still playing out the same patterns.

This couple came to therapy armed and ready. (Before you get nervous: that’s a metaphor.)

Their weapon of choice is labels, and they think they know how to use them. Pretty soon the labels come out in an attempt to paint a picture for me, but they end up making a mess, like a four-year-old who discovered the Sharpies in the drawer and decided to “make art” for Mom on the living room wall.

The idea that a couple would use labels to describe one another’s behavior isn’t a new one. That part has always been done. The change is where the labels come from and the function they serve in the couple’s relationship. Here’s a sample of the labels that I’m talking about:

“He’s constantly gaslighting me!”

“She’s an anxious-avoidant due to her childhood trauma!”

“I’m just an Enneagram 8 so you’ll have to deal with it.”

“My Love Language is Acts of Service and she knows it.”

“Once I told him I was thinking about divorce, he started love bombing me all over the place.”

“I’m not one of those beta males, but she’s still not attracted to me.”

Yep, every one of those has shown up in my office in the last ten years or so. Do you know why? Because these people now have access to an overwhelming amount of information every day, far more than their grandparents ever had.

The problem isn’t the information. The problem is that the hardware they’re using to filter it (the human brain) hasn’t meaningfully changed in a very long time, and now it’s being flooded every day by a smartphone that has access to ALL of the information, which is where this couple “does their research.”

But they don’t know that.

All they know is that they’ve watched enough TikToks or listened to enough podcasts or taken enough online Myers-Briggs tests to know exactly what the problem is in their relationship. And now they’re sitting in my office telling me what their diagnostic findings have led them to understand about themselves and their partners. Mostly their partners.

Here’s what I want them (and you) to know about these labels: they’re too small. No label is big enough to hold a whole person, and when it gets used as a verdict, it keeps both partners stuck.

Somewhere along the way, someone noticed a pattern and gave it a name so people could talk about it. That’s useful. But once the thing has a name, it’s easy to treat the name as the whole story. The person they chose to marry is one of those things now. And the label does a quiet job in the relationship: it lowers one partner’s anxiety by making the other one different from them.

Once he’s a “narcissist,” or she’s an “anxious-avoidant” or an “Enneagram 2” or a “Sagittarius, with a Fire Something or a full Mercury or whatever,” I don’t have to be curious about them anymore.

So I listen as the couple tells me their story. I hear the labels they use. A part of me still cringes when they tell me about their Love Language, but I’m interested in their experience of one another. I’m seeing the pattern, the dance they’re playing out right in front of me. When they’re done sharing their assessment, I start helping them see the pattern that exists beyond the labels.

And at some point along the way, I give some version of the speech.

“You can speak in labels, but don’t allow yourselves to be defined by them. Your partner’s MBTI, or their attachment style, or their neurotype, explains a little something about them at a given point in time from a given perspective. Attachment styles aren’t terminal any more than being an asshole is genetic. We’re all just trying to figure out this life, and at times we hit a roadblock or the friction gets to be too much for us. We want an answer. And it’s easy to get stuck believing you’ve found the problem, and that it lives in your partner. But that’s not your job. Your job is to be curious and compassionate while they figure this life out for themselves.

“The bigger part of your job is to look inward at the part of you that wants to label them. Thank it. It’s trying to protect you. But it doesn’t have to work so hard.”

You don’t have to ignore the labels, just don’t hold onto them so tightly. And every once in a while remind yourself that the algorithm is not your friend…or your therapist.