Why Relationships Are So Hard Right Now — Colton Straus, LSW
Nobody tells you how hard relationships are to build and keep in your 20s and 30s. The cultural script makes it look like connection should be natural, effortless, something that just happens if you show up in the right places and say the right things. The reality is considerably more complicated. And the gap between how relationships are supposed to feel and how they actually feel is one of the most common things people bring into therapy.
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It might be the friendships that are harder to make than they used to be. The social infrastructure of school, the proximity, the shared experience, the ease of it, is gone. Building genuine friendships as an adult in a city like Chicago takes deliberate effort in a way nobody warned you about. You like the people around you. You just don't feel known by them yet. And the loneliness of that, of being surrounded by people and still not quite connected, is real and rarely talked about.
It might be the romantic relationships that keep hitting the same wall. A pattern in how you connect, how close you let someone get, how you handle conflict or intimacy or the moment when things get real, that you can see clearly and cannot seem to change. Different person, same dynamic. The same feeling at the end of it.
It might be the family relationships that are shifting in ways you did not anticipate. Becoming more fully yourself and watching the people who raised you get to know someone they did not entirely expect. Navigating the particular complexity of a family system that has its own rules, its own roles, its own history, that follows you into every relationship you build outside of it. The love is real and so is the difficulty.
It might be the relationships that exist but do not quite reach. A partner you love but cannot fully get to. Friends you have had for years but still feel slightly unknown by. Family members you are close to in proximity and distant from in every way that matters. Connection that functions but does not nourish.
It might be the isolation that comes with building a new life in a new place. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and Logan Square and Avondale are places where people come to build something. But building something takes time and the in-between period, before the roots go down, before the friendships deepen, before the place starts to feel like home, is genuinely lonely in ways that are hard to admit when everything looks like it is going well.
Whatever form it takes the experience is the same. The relationships you want feel out of reach and the ones you have do not quite feel like enough. That gap deserves honest attention.
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Relationship therapy with me covers the full range of what relationships actually are. Romantic partnerships, friendships, family dynamics, the relationship you have with yourself that underlies all of them. We work on whatever is actually hard rather than whatever category the presenting problem fits into.
We start by understanding what is actually happening. Not just the content of the conflict or the logistics of the loneliness but the patterns underneath. Because relationship difficulties are almost never just about the specific situation. They follow a logic that was laid down earlier, in the first relationships that taught you what connection looks like, what it costs, what you have to do to be safe, what happens when you need something from another person. Those early lessons became the blueprint you brought into every relationship that came after. Understanding that blueprint is where the real work begins.
We look at the specific ways the pattern shows up across different types of relationships. The wall that goes up in romantic relationships often has a cousin in friendships. The dynamic with a parent often has echoes in how you relate to authority figures at work. The difficulty making new friends often connects to something deeper about what it means to be seen and whether that feels safe. These threads are related and following them is how the work gets genuinely useful rather than just addressing one relationship at a time.
We also work on the practical side. Building relationships as an adult is a skill that most people were never explicitly taught. How to initiate without it feeling forced. How to deepen a connection that has stayed on the surface. How to navigate conflict without it ending the relationship or leaving things permanently changed in ways you did not intend. How to ask for what you need from the people in your life without it feeling like too much to ask. These are learnable things and we work on them concretely.
The making side matters as much as the keeping side. A lot of relationship therapy focuses on what is going wrong in existing relationships. But for a lot of people in their 20s and 30s the harder problem is building the relationships in the first place. Finding people, creating the conditions for genuine connection, moving a relationship from acquaintance to something real, navigating the awkwardness of adult friendship formation in a city that moves fast and rewards busyness over depth. We work on that too.
My approach is warm, direct, and genuinely interested in the full picture of your relational life. Not just the romantic part. All of it.
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Relational isolation does not stay contained. It shapes your mental health, your physical health, your sense of meaning, your capacity for joy. The research on this is consistent and striking. Loneliness is one of the most significant health risks a person can face. And it is one of the most treatable.
When this work gets done something opens up across the whole relational landscape. The friendships get deeper. The romantic relationships get more real. The family dynamics become more navigable. The city that felt like a place you were moving through starts to feel like a place you actually live in. Connection that felt out of reach starts to feel possible in a way it hasn't before.
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Relationship difficulties bring most of the people I work with into therapy, even when they come in describing something else. Because almost everything hard in a person's life has a relational dimension. The anxiety, the career questions, the identity confusion, the existential flatness. Underneath most of it is a question about connection. Whether it is available, whether it is safe, whether you are someone who gets to have it. Those questions deserve honest engagement. Honesty over comfort — steady and warm, but not afraid to name what's actually going on.
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Ready to take the next step? Schedule a free consultation with Colton at our Logan Square and Avondale location and see if it feels like a good fit.