Oh, that one lands hard. When the person who is supposed to be your safe harbor laughs at your concerns, that’s not just rude. That’s a rupture at the deepest level of what love is supposed to feel like.
Let me sit with you in that for a second before I say anything else.
Here’s what I know about what’s happening inside you right now. When your partner laughs at what you bring to them, your nervous system isn’t hearing “that was a funny concern.” Your nervous system is hearing “you are not enough, and what matters to you doesn’t matter to me.” That’s attachment terror. That’s your whole biological alarm system going off, the one that’s been wired into us since we were mammals who needed each other to survive.
So first, your pain makes complete sense. Every bit of it.
Now, here’s the harder part, and I want you to stay with me because this isn’t me excusing what your partner is doing. It’s not okay. But I want to give you the full picture.
When someone laughs at their partner’s concerns, there’s almost always something happening underneath that laughter. Laughter can be a deflection. It can be a way of saying “I don’t know how to hold this, and it scares me, so I’m going to minimize it.” Sometimes people laugh because being with their partner’s pain feels too exposing, too close, too much responsibility.
That doesn’t make it hurt less. But it tells me this might not be cruelty. It might be someone who genuinely doesn’t know how to be present with vulnerability, yours or their own.
What I want to ask you is this: When you bring your concerns to your partner, what do you think they’re actually hearing? Because sometimes what we bring as “I’m worried about this” lands on the other side as “you’re failing me.” And if your partner is already someone who’s scared of disappointing you, that laughter might be a very clumsy, very hurtful way of trying to escape that feeling.
None of that is your fault. You deserve to be witnessed, not dismissed. Full stop.
But if you want this to change, the work isn’t just “stop laughing at me.” The work is getting underneath why the laughter is happening in the first place, and creating enough safety between you two that your partner can actually show up for what you’re bringing instead of flinching away from it.
The fact that it hurts you this much tells me how much this relationship matters to you. You wouldn’t be sitting with this question if you didn’t care deeply. That matters. That’s actually the raw material we work with to build something better.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Emotional Safety in Relationships: What It Means and How to Build It
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