When Maren Morris sat down to describe her first relationship with a woman after finalizing her divorce from Ryan Hurd, she used language that the internet immediately seized on. In a recent Page Six piece, she called the dynamic “f-ked up” and reached for the phrase “borderline extortion.” The comments sections filled up within hours. Some people cheered her honesty. Others started diagnosing the ex. A third group pivoted to the fact that this was her first same-sex relationship, as if the gender of the partner were the variable that explained the chaos.
I want to suggest that all three of those responses miss what actually happened.
I have been a licensed marriage and family therapist for a long time, and I have sat across from a lot of people in the months and years after a marriage ended. What I see in Morris’s language is not unique to her, not unique to country music, and not unique to women dating women for the first time. It is the sound of a body that just exited a long bond, went looking for ground, and found chaos instead. Then, in the aftermath, it reached for the only story that feels survivable in that moment. The story where the other person is the problem.
Answer:
A separated couple in my office last week spent their entire session
aggressively weaponizing their divorce settlement. The husband sat rigidly on
the couch, presenting a spreadsheet of financial demands he felt were owed to
him. His former wife sat on the far armrest, coldly describing his requests as
extortion designed solely to ruin her new life. I let them fiercely litigate
their bank accounts for a few minutes before I gently intervened. I have watched
this hundreds of times in my sixteen years of clinical practice [1]. Pop
psychology blogs will constantly tell you that when a divorce turns into a
bitter financial war, you are simply dealing with a toxic, greedy ex partner. As
a clinician, I have to tell you that this common assumption is completely wrong.
When you fiercely describe your former spouse’s financial demands as borderline
extortion, you are almost never fighting about money. You are actively drowning
in a profound biological panic.
To understand why the end of a marriage devolves into brutal financial
warfare, you must understand a severe negative cycle that I clinically call the
Waltz of Pain [2]. Your nervous system does not view the end of a marriage as a
simple administrative transition. It detects a literal, life threatening
abandonment [3]. When the attachment bond shatters, the anxious partner’s
amygdala fires and their prefrontal cortex goes entirely offline [3]. They
pursue relentlessly with aggressive financial demands to forcefully secure some
tangible proof of their worth. To the avoidant partner sitting across the
mediation table, this intense pursuit feels like a suffocating wave of
engulfment. They interpret every financial request as extortion and trigger an
equally fierce defensive reaction. You are not fighting over a settlement. You
are fighting a neurobiological war where both partners use extreme legal armor
to survive a crushing attachment wound.
I know exactly how devastating these biological alarms can become because I
grew up as the child of two broken homes, carrying my own childhood wounds of
abandonment [4]. When your attachment system is pushed to its breaking point,
your biology forces you to cling to anything that resembles power. Your nervous
system operates on the framework of the Body as the First Ledger, keeping an
immutable record of every moment you felt unseen [5]. The profound tragedy of a
bitter divorce is that former partners do not drop financial bombs on each other
because they are inherently malicious. They deploy these catastrophic weapons
precisely because the threat of being permanently erased feels like a literal
death sentence. Fighting over spousal support is simply much easier than facing
the terrifying emotional emptiness inside them.
You simply cannot settle a biological panic by treating your former marriage
like a bitter corporate liquidation. If you want to understand what Maren
Morris’s comments about borderline extortion actually reveal about the human
body recovering from a massive relational rupture, we have to look entirely past
the celebrity finances to safely examine the hidden biological pattern driving
the war.
Conversation: 2d6d572e-0615-40d0-857d-57a25ae124cd (turn 1)
That story is seductive. It is also a dead end. Let me explain why.
Attachment Biology Does Not Care About Gender
The first thing I want to name, because the tabloid framing keeps obscuring it, is that the human bonding system does not care about gender. It does not care about orientation. It does not care whether your partner is your first same-sex relationship or your fifth heterosexual one. The biology is human. The wounds are human. The repairs are human.
John Bowlby established decades ago that human beings are wired to emotionally bond with a primary figure from cradle to grave. When that bond is threatened, the limbic system protests with the same intensity whether you are eighteen months old reaching for a parent or thirty-six years old reaching for a partner you just started sleeping with. Your rational brain goes offline. Your body treats disconnection as existential threat. You do things you would not do in a settled state.
So when someone exits a marriage and tumbles into a new relationship that quickly becomes volatile, the question is not “why did this new partner turn out to be toxic?” The more useful question, the one that actually leads somewhere, is “what was my body reaching for, and why did it land there?”
Why Chaos Can Feel Like Home
Here is a clinical truth that does not fit neatly into a tabloid headline. Your physiology decides who is safe before your brain even gets involved. Within milliseconds of meeting someone, your body has already made a threat assessment based on micro-signals, most of them below conscious awareness. Your autonomic system is not selecting for what is good for you. It is selecting for what is familiar.
If chaos felt like home growing up, calm will feel like boredom. If you learned early that love was unpredictable and required constant monitoring, a partner who is steady and responsive will register as flat, uninteresting, even suspicious. If you spent a long marriage in a state of low-grade bracing, your body learned that relationship equals vigilance. When that marriage ends, the body does not suddenly calibrate toward peace. It goes looking for the electricity it already knows how to metabolize.
This is not a character flaw. It is how we are built. But it means that the story most people tell themselves after a bad post-divorce relationship (“I have terrible taste,” “I attract narcissists,” “I thought this one would be different”) misses the mechanism. You did not get unlucky. Your body made a choice that your conscious mind was not yet equipped to override.
I’ve written more about how this wiring shapes adult love in Attachment Styles in Relationships: How Your Love Pattern Shapes Your Bond. The pattern is not destiny. But you cannot change what you cannot first see.
The Story of Other
Now we come to the harder part. When a relationship blows up and you are the one left bleeding, there is a path your mind wants to take. I call it the Story of Other. It is the narrative in which your ex is the problem, the whole problem, and the only problem. She extorted. He manipulated. They were a narcissist. They were borderline. They were f-ked up.
The Story of Other is incredibly seductive. It is always the easier path and it always feels justified. If your partner hurt you, you can easily assemble evidence, because the world will always offer facts to support your wound. You will locate friends who agree. You will locate articles that confirm the diagnosis. You will land with a therapist, if you are not careful about which therapist you choose, who validates the victim story so consistently that you start to mistake the validation for healing.
But the Story of Other never leads to growth. It never leads to healing. It never leads to sovereignty. It is the path the lab rat runs down again and again because it is easier than the other path, even though there is no food at the end.
This is not me saying Morris’s ex did not behave badly. I have no idea. I am not in her life. I am not her therapist, not her ex’s therapist, and I will not diagnose people I have never met. What I am saying is that whatever the ex did or did not do, the path back to herself does not run through the ex’s pathology. It runs through her own interior. Through the question of what her body was reaching for, what it got matched with, and what unclaimed material inside her own history made that matching feel like home long enough to stay.
The Cultural Epidemic of Diagnosing Your Ex
One of the newest ways the algorithm has reshaped breakups is through diagnosis. People scroll TikTok for ten minutes and walk away certain their ex is a narcissist, a borderline, a psychopath, a covert avoidant. Diagnosis gives certainty when the bond feels threatened. It turns pain into a story with a villain, which validates withdrawal, contempt, and self-protection.
I understand the appeal. The body wants a container for what just happened. A label provides one. But when we label the other person as the sole problem, the relational system becomes invisible, the story becomes fixed, and any chance of learning something about ourselves dies by certainty.
In couples work, I often say that everyone is the world-renowned expert in the problems of their partner. If I hosted a global conference tomorrow on what is wrong with your partner, you would be the keynote speaker. You would have slides. You would have receipts. You would destroy the Q&A. The problem is that the conference never ends, and you never leave the stage, and nothing in your own interior ever gets touched.
If reading this just made your chest tighten because you recognize yourself on that stage, you do not have to wait for a therapy appointment to do something with that. Try Figlet, my AI relationship coaching tool. It uses the same clinical frameworks I use in my office, and it is available the moment you notice the pull to diagnose, blame, or build your case. That moment, not next Thursday at 2 p.m., is when the work actually starts.
The Individual Therapist Problem
Here is something I do not hear many clinicians say out loud. When a person walks into individual therapy after a devastating relationship, there is a real risk that the therapist, well-intentioned, hears only one side of the story and starts to support the individual’s defended view. The victim story. The Story of Other.
This happens because attunement feels like care, and validation feels like healing. The client leaves the session feeling seen. But if the seeing only confirms the protective armor, the client never gets underneath it to the vulnerable sorrow that is the actual site of repair. You can do years of individual therapy processing how awful your ex was and come out the other side with a more sophisticated vocabulary for blame and no change in the pattern that will repeat in your next relationship.
The work is not to argue with the pain. Your pain is real. The work is to turn the flashlight. Every judgment of another is an unclaimed emotion inside. Awareness begins by recognizing the direction of attention. When you notice the flashlight is pointed at your ex, the move is to gently swing it back toward your own interior and ask what is happening in you. Not to erase boundaries. Not to excuse bad behavior. To stop losing your own life to the conference circuit.
Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
Another thing that happens in the aftermath of a volatile breakup is that the mind wants to construct a clean timeline. Who did what first. Who crossed which line. Who hurt whom more. In my experience, this question cannot be answered inside an activated system, because what actually happened between the two of you did not unfold sequentially. It happened everything, everywhere, all at once. All the old hurts, fears, and survival strategies were in the room simultaneously, firing off each other, triggering protections that triggered more protections.
The linear blame story is a retrospective fiction. It feels orderly because the body desperately needs order after disorder. But it is not true, and clinging to it keeps you from seeing the system you were both trapped inside. There is a reason I spend the first hour of couples work mapping the cycle rather than adjudicating the fight. The cycle is the truth. The cycle is also what you carry into the next relationship if you do not see it.
Independence Is Not the Same As Sovereignty
The cultural narrative after a bad breakup is usually some version of “reclaim your independence.” Do not need anyone. Be your own person. Learn to be alone. There is a version of this that is wise and a version that is a trap.
The trap is what I would call orphan sovereignty. You decide, after being hurt, that reliance itself is the enemy. You confuse not-needing with freedom. You build a life where the risk of being affected by another person is minimized. This is not strength. It is the body equating connection with loss of power and pre-emptively opting out.
We are not orphan sovereign nodes floating through space. We settle in the context of a bond. We calm each other. The goal after a painful relationship is not to need less. It is to learn what your body was doing when it picked what it picked, metabolize the grief and the shame that are under the rage at the ex, and eventually build what I have described in What Is Secure Functioning in Relationships?. Two people who agree to protect each other’s ground. Not independence. Interdependence with clear ground underneath it.
What This Means For The Reader, Not The Celebrity
I do not know Maren Morris. I do not know her ex. I am not in a position to tell you what happened in that relationship, and frankly, the answer does not matter for your life.
What matters is this. If you are on the other side of a marriage, freshly single, and you are reaching for whatever crackles, notice the reach. If you are already six months into a post-divorce relationship that is making you question your sanity, notice the familiarity. If you notice yourself rehearsing the case against your ex for the tenth time this week to another friend who is kind enough to listen, notice the stage you keep walking back onto.
None of this is evidence that you are broken. It is evidence that you have a body that learned some things a long time ago, and that those things are still running unless you turn the flashlight around and actually look.
What to Do Next
If any of this landed in your chest, here is where to go from here.
Take the free relationship quiz. In about ten minutes, you will get a clinical picture of your attachment pattern, your protector parts, and the shape of the cycle you tend to recreate. This is the same mapping I do in a first session, delivered to you without the waiting list.
Start AI Relationship Coaching today. Figlet is the tool I built so that the moment your activation spikes, at midnight, at the end of a text exchange, in the car after a hard call, you have something grounded to turn to instead of scrolling, ruminating, or pouring another drink. It runs on the same clinical frameworks I have used in my practice for years.
The ex is not the assignment. Your pattern is the assignment. The flashlight is in your hand. Point it where the actual work is.
