kourtney kardashian And travis barker They walked the red carpet together at the Tribeca Film Festival last weekend for the first time in over two years, and they did it the only way they know how. Fingers tied. The dead bodies came inside. Whispering as if there was no one else in the room.
Give hints on the Internet.
Comments started coming in within a few hours. passionate. Flattery. complicated. And the favorite buzzword of every armchair therapist with a TikTok account: codependent.
Two years is an eternity in celebrity time. They had a high-risk pregnancy, a terrifying fetal surgery, a new baby, a small school-sized blended family, and a public goldfish bowl they couldn’t empty. They moved away. Now they are back. Still stuck together.
I want to make a case for what you’re actually seeing.
What’s your nervous system doing on the red carpet
In my office on Tuesday afternoons, I watch couples diagnose themselves with the pop-psychology term that went viral that week. They sit on my couch, convinced they’ve broken up because they miss their partner while she’s at dinner at work, or because he goes silent when she doesn’t respond for three hours.
Here’s what’s really happening underneath every conversation you have with the person you love. Your nervous system is running a quiet background program, and it’s only asking two questions. Are you there for me? Am I enough for you?
That program doesn’t stop when you grow up. It doesn’t stop when you become a CEO, rockstar drummer or reality TV icon. Attachment is the best theory we have about what love really is, and its origins are simple. We need to remain emotionally connected from cradle to grave.
When the child’s caregiver disappears, the child does not feel the slightest discomfort. The infant’s limbic system reads this as an existential threat. Fast forward forty years and you’re still a child when it comes to the person you love most. Basically nothing has changed.
So when Courtney and Travis stand on a chaotic carpet in New York City, watching every movement, decision made, screenshot taken, archived, they are answering those two ancient questions for each other in real time. Yes, I am here. Yes, you are enough.
That’s not something to be arrogant about. It’s co-regulation in front of a thousand cameras. If you want to read your own version of those signals explicitly, you can do so Get Your Free Relationship Assessment And see what your nervous system is asking for.
The word codependent is hurting a lot
The current cultural script says that you should never need your partner too much. You must be a sovereign island. Two whole people who sometimes land at the same port. Anything more than that gets the label.
Codependent, my ass.
Really. When two people who love each other admit that they rely on each other for emotional security, saying codependent is a mean way of describing what’s really going on between them. This is a way of distorting love.
Recently there were some people sitting in my office who were completely convinced that they had failed some modern test of freedom. He couldn’t enjoy a boys’ night out without checking in. She couldn’t sleep without him in the bed. They told me, almost in unison, “We cannot live in a world without each other. We depend on each other.”
I stopped him mid-sentence. no stop. I won’t listen to it. You are two people who love each other, because love is primary.
This is a cultural confusion I see all the time, and it sits right next to the buzzworthy diagnoses people make for famous couples. If you want to see clearly where the line actually is, I wrote about Complications in relationships And how is this different from healthy interdependence?
What Courtney and Travis did right by disappearing
Here’s the part that was completely missed by the gossip circle.
When Kourtney and Travis went out of the public eye for two years, they weren’t awkward. They were doing exactly what a safe couple would do in times of danger. They closed ranks. They turned towards each other. He protected the bond.
In my opinion, we are an interdependent species. When you accept this and truly realize that your person is there for you and that you are good enough for them, something happens. That emotional security becomes a resource. It finances your ability to step back into a world that wants a piece of you.
The red carpet return is the exploration phase. This is the moment when two people walk out of the safe room and back toward the noise, holding hands not because they have broken up, but because the bond is now strong enough to handle the noise.
You can’t avoid the paparazzi by pretending you don’t need your partner. You escape this by squeezing their hand so tightly that the rest of the world goes silent for a second. For an in-depth read on the actual research, here it is The science behind hypnosis And why interdependence is not the same creature.
In your primary partnership today, that person is going to be the most important person in the entire world to you. I will not fight him. I will accept it. And you should probably be the most important person in the entire world to them.
The sentence that I will say in the session
If a couple came into my office feeling ashamed because they hid for two years, or because their friends called them too clingy, I wouldn’t hand them a worksheet on boundaries. I won’t lecture them on making more space.
I will tell them the truth. Two people who really need each other are doing something beautiful, not pathological. I really need you to know that I’m important to you. I really need to know that you’re not disappointed in me. Imposing those needs on one another is not failure. That’s the whole point of the bond.
The internet wants to call Kourtney and Travis obsessed. I would call them resourceful. Two adults who discovered that the cure to a harsh world isn’t more freedom. It’s got a hand to hold on the way back.
Take a screenshot if you need to.
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Figs O’Sullivan and his wife, mounds, is a couples therapist in San Francisco, relationship expert to the stars and Silicon Valley, the founder of Empathy, and created Figlet, our AI Relationship Coach, an AI relationship coach trained on his clinical work.
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