Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Parker They walked the red carpet together for the first time in more than two years last weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, and they did it the only way they knew how. Fingers tied. The bodies turned inward. She whispered as there was no one else in the room.
Cue the internet.
Within hours, the comments came in. Shrinks. entangled. And the favorite buzzword of every armchair therapist with a TikTok account: codependency.
Two years is an eternity in celebrity time. They had a high-risk pregnancy, a terrifying fetal surgery, a new baby, a blended family the size of a small school, and a public goldfish bowl they couldn’t drain. Stay away. And now they are back. Still stuck together.
I want to make a case for what you’re actually looking at.
What does your nervous system do on the red carpet?
In my office on a Tuesday afternoon, I watch couples diagnose themselves with whatever pop psychology term has gone viral that week. They sit on my couch, convinced they’re broken because they miss their partner when she’s at a business dinner, or because he goes silent when she doesn’t respond for three hours.
Here’s what’s really going on under every interaction you have with the person you love. Your nervous system is running a quiet program in the background, asking just two questions. Are you there for me? Am I enough for you?
This show doesn’t turn off when you get older. It doesn’t turn off when you become a CEO, a superstar drummer, or a reality TV icon. Attachment is the best theory we have about what love actually is, and its essence is simple. We need to be emotionally connected from cradle to grave.
When a child’s caregiver disappears, the child feels little discomfort. The child’s limbic system reads it as an existential threat. Fast forward forty years and you’re still that kid when it comes to the person you love most. Nothing has changed radically.
So when Kourtney and Travis stand on a messy carpet in New York City, with their every move watched, judged, screenshotted, and saved, they’re answering those two age-old questions to each other in real time. Yes, I’m here. Yes, you are enough.
This is not to grovel. This is the joint organization in front of thousands of cameras. If you want a clearer reading of your own version of those signals, you can get a free assessment of your relationship and find out what your nervous system is asking.
The word codependency causes a lot of damage
The cultural script now states that you should never need your partner too much. It must be a sovereign island. Two full people sometimes dock in the same port. Anything more than that gets a label.
Count on my ass.
i mean it. When two people who love each other admit that they depend on each other for emotional security, calling it codependency is a mean-spirited way of describing what’s really going on between them. It’s a way to get sick of love.
I sat in my office recently with a couple who were absolutely convinced that they had failed some modern test of independence. He couldn’t have a men’s night without checking in. She couldn’t sleep without him in bed. They told me, almost in unison, “We can’t exist in the world without each other. We depend on each other.”
I stopped them mid-sentence. No. Stop. I won’t hear it. You are two people who love each other, because love is what is essential.
This is a cultural confusion I see all the time, and it’s right next to the buzzier diagnosis people throw at famous couples. If you’d like a clearer look at where the line actually is, I’ve written about entanglement in relationships and how it differs from healthy codependency.
What did Kourtney and Travis get by disappearing?
This is the part of the gossip cycle that she completely missed.
When Kourtney and Travis retreated from the public eye for two years, it wasn’t that strange. They were doing exactly what a safe couple would do under threat. Close the classes. They turned towards each other. They protected Sindh.
In my opinion, we are interconnected beings. When you accept that and actually feel that your person is there for you and that you are good enough for them, something happens. This emotional security becomes a resource. It funds your ability to return to a world that wants a piece of you.
The return of the red carpet is the exploration stage. It’s the moment when two people walk out of the safe room and back toward the noise, holding hands not because they’re broken but because the bond is now strong enough to handle the noise.
You can’t escape the paparazzi by pretending you don’t need your partner. You can survive this by squeezing their hand so hard that the rest of the world quiets down for a moment. For a deeper read of the actual research here is the science behind entanglement and why interdependence is not the same animal.
In your primary partnership today, this person will be the most important person in the whole world to you. I won’t fight that. I will accept that. And maybe you should be the most important person in the whole world to them too.
The sentence 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 described them as too involved, I wouldn’t give them a boundaries worksheet. I’m not going to lecture them about creating more space.
I will tell them the truth. Two people who really need each other, doing something beautiful, not something pathological. I really need to know that I matter to you. I really want to know that you are not disappointed in me. Putting those needs ahead of each other is not a failure. This is the whole point of the bond.
The internet wants to call Kourtney and Travis obsessed. I like to call them resources. Two adults discover that the cure for a noisy world isn’t more independence. It’s a hand to hold on the way back to her.
Screenshot of that if you need to.
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Figs O’Sullivan and his wife, Till, are San Francisco-based couples therapists, relationship experts at Stars and Silicon Valley, and founders of Empathi, and built Figlet, our AI relationship coach, an AI relationship coach trained in their clinical work.
