April 2026
“You just don’t have empathy.”
It’s a moment I see often. One partner is upset, maybe tearful, maybe sharp in their tone. The other is quiet, or responds in a way that feels too logical, too measured or too late. And in that gap, something painful takes hold: you don’t care.
But when we slow it down, what is happening is rarely a lack of empathy. Instead, it’s a mismatch in how empathy is happening, how quickly it is happening and how it is being expressed. Cognitive empathy is a big part of this.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what someone is feeling without necessarily feeling it in your body at the same time. It is a thinking process. It involves perspective-taking, pattern recognition and making meaning out of what is happening. It is often careful and deliberate, and for many people it requires time, clarity and enough information to get it right. In neurodivergent relationships, especially where one partner is Autistic, cognitive empathy is often doing a lot of the work.
But from the outside, it doesn’t always look like empathy; it can look like analysis, problem-solving, or a pause instead of an immediate response. And that pause is often where things start to go wrong.
I often sit with couples where one partner says, “I was really upset and you didn’t respond,” and the other says, “I didn’t know what to say.” When we slow it down, the second partner is often tracking everything. They are trying to understand what happened, what it meant and how to respond in a way that won’t make things worse. But because that process is internal, it isn’t visible, so it lands as disconnection.
There is also something else happening that is less visible but just as important, a difference in timing. There are moments where one partner is visibly upset and the other understands that something important is happening, but they cannot immediately access the feeling in their body. They are tracking, thinking, trying to make sense of it but the emotional resonance comes later. It can be hours later, or even the next day, when it lands fully. They feel it deeply and sometimes with clarity and sometimes with regret that they couldn’t show it in the moment. But in the space where the connection was needed, it looked like nothing was there.
At other times, the opposite happens. The emotion comes in too quickly and with too much intensity. A partner is distressed and instead of leaning in, the Autistic individual becomes flooded. Their nervous system activates, their thoughts either speed up or disappear altogether and language becomes harder to access. They may go quiet, look away or leave the room because they are trying to manage an internal experience that feels overwhelming. From the outside, this often gets interpreted as withdrawal or avoidance. But inside, it can feel like too much, too fast, with no clear way to respond.
What makes this particularly confusing for couples is that both of these patterns can exist in the same relationship and sometimes within the same person. There can be moments of careful understanding without visible emotion, moments where the feeling arrives later and moments where the feeling is so immediate and intense that it disrupts the ability to respond at all.
Without language for this, couples begin to make meaning in ways that hurt both people. One partner starts to believe they are not cared for, while the other begins to feel that no matter how hard they try, they are getting it wrong.
This is where I often bring in a reframe; the issue is not that one person has empathy and the other does not. It is that empathy is moving through different pathways, with different timing and different expressions. What Damian Milton described as the Double Empathy Problem helps make sense of this https://www.theneuronurturecollective.com/post/understanding-the-double-empathy-problem. It is not a deficit in one person: it’s a mutual misunderstanding between two different ways of experiencing and communicating. When couples begin to see this clearly, the work shifts.
Instead of trying to force empathy to look a certain way, we start to make it more visible and more understandable. The partner who leads with cognitive empathy might learn to add a simple emotional signal before moving into understanding. Something like, “That sounds really hard,” before asking questions. The goal is not to change who they are, but to make their care easier to recognize.
The partner who is longing for emotional connection may begin to make their needs more explicit. Saying, “I don’t need you to fix this, I just need you to be with me,” can create clarity that reduces guesswork and pressure.
Instead of expecting empathy to happen in the same way and at the same time, couples begin to understand that it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes it’s immediate, sometimes it takes a moment, and sometimes it comes later. When that becomes understood, the tension in the room starts to ease.
The partner who felt unseen begins to notice effort where they hadn’t before. The partner who felt criticized begins to feel less like they are failing. And slowly, they begin to build a shared language of empathy that includes both thinking and feeling and both immediacy and delay.
Because the truth is, in most of the couples I sit with, empathy is not missing. It is just being expressed in a different language. And when that language is understood, connection becomes possible again.