“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin
We love to imagine that our relationships are private territories — small, contained, and untouched by the chaos of the outside world. As if love happens in a vacuum, sealed off like a museum exhibit: “Do Not Disturb. Important Emotional Work in Progress.”
But let’s be honest. Nothing about relationships is immune to the outside. In fact, half the time the outside world waltzes in, kicks its shoes off, eats the last biscuit, and influences our entire emotional landscape without even introducing itself.
It’s strange how confidently we say, “This is how I feel,” without asking the more uncomfortable follow-up: Do I feel this because of the moment I’m in… or because of what’s been poured into me all day?
A song. A headline. A friend’s complaint. A quote you didn’t need on Instagram telling you, “If they wanted to, they would.” Suddenly you’re auditing your partner’s last three months of behaviour like an underpaid accountant.
We don’t realise how porous we are.
Emotions, reason, influence — they’re not neatly separated. They bleed into each other. One affects the next, and before you know it, you’re reacting to something that didn’t actually happen… but felt like it did because your mind was already primed for impact.
And that leads to the messy truth: relationships aren’t just about the people involved. They’re about the worlds those people come from, the worlds they live in, and the worlds they consume every day. We are influenced constantly — and thinking we’re not is the funniest delusion of all.
We scroll through other people’s love stories, arguments, reconciliations, opinions, expectations, “green flags,” “red flags,” “burn the relationship down and rebuild yourself” essays, and whether we realise it or not, they all become little reference points. Little rulers we measure our own lives against. We might not copy them, but they change the angle of our thinking.
And then the emotional domino effect begins.
You see something tender → you soften.
You see something dramatic → you prepare for war.
You see something confusing → you start wondering whether you’re accidentally in the same situation.
It’s remarkable how quickly the mind jumps from “This is interesting” to “Am I safe? Am I loved? Am I making a mistake?” The human brain is talented, yes — but it’s also dramatic. If overthinking were an Olympic sport, we’d all be sponsored.
This is where the whole battle between emotion and reason comes in.
We desperately want to believe that reason has some kind of authority in our decisions. That we can say, “Let me think clearly,” and actually mean it. But emotions don’t wait for permission. They’re impatient. They burst through the door, dripping with interpretations we never asked for.
The question we ought to ask more often is: Can I step back and separate what I feel from what I know?
And sometimes, yes — with enough time and oxygen, we can. Once the immediate emotional thunderstorm fades, reason tiptoes back in with its glasses on, brushing off the chaos:
“Right, let’s clean this up. What actually happened here?”
But emotions and reason aren’t enemies. They just have very different work ethics. Reason is slow and steady; emotion sprints like it’s being chased. And some days, if we’re honest, we need the sprint. We need the heart-led, slightly reckless honesty that emotion pulls out of us. Following your heart isn’t a cliché — it’s a human instinct. The real challenge is knowing when your heart is telling the truth… and when it’s simply panicking.
And oh, the panic.
Why do we let overwhelming emotions take over until we start harming ourselves with overthinking? Because we care. Because we’re afraid. Because uncertainty pushes every insecurity we’ve ever had to the surface. Overthinking becomes a coping mechanism — a terrible one, but a familiar one. It gives us the illusion of control: “If I anticipate every scenario, I won’t get blindsided.”
Except we always get blindsided. Life guarantees it.
That’s why one of the hardest, most mature things we can learn is the ability to take a moment — literally one moment — before reacting. To ask ourselves:
Is this feeling really mine?
Or did it come from something I watched, read, heard, or assumed?
Most of the emotional chaos we generate is not actually about what happened… but about what we fear might happen. Influence doesn’t just shape emotions — it shapes the storylines we build in our heads. If we fed our minds with a steady diet of catastrophe, we start expecting catastrophe. If we consume tenderness, we begin to hope for tenderness. What we let inside becomes the lens we use to see everything else.
And when things finally do go wrong — because life is life — we face the final, strangely comforting prompt:
Is it possible to strip away the noise and understand the situation from reason?
Yes. It’s not instant. You can’t do it while you’re hurt or confused. But once emotions settle, reason offers a kind of relief that emotion never could. It clarifies. It separates fact from feeling, impact from intention. And that clarity is what helps us move on — not because we forget, but because we understand.
Moving on doesn’t always mean walking away. Sometimes it simply means closing the gap between what we imagined and what actually happened. Other times it means seeing things as they are, not as the outside noise painted them. And sometimes it means admitting that we reacted from old wounds, old fears, old influences — not from the truth in front of us.
Relationships become healthier the moment we become honest about the influences surrounding them. Because it’s not just two people communicating — it’s two emotional histories, two daily lives, two minds absorbing a thousand tiny signals from the outside world.
The outside will always try to get in. But we get to decide how much of it we carry into the heart. And how much of it we’re finally ready to leave outside the door.