Zoe Kravitz and Harry Styles They are now permanently inked into each other. Matching tattoos. Engagement ring. All before the relationship reaches its first full year.
The Internet did what the Internet does. He half fainted. They half-rolled their eyes and began the countdown. Both reactions miss the point.
Because that’s the thing about the first months of a relationship that no one tells you. The sky really looks brighter. The flowers really bloom more vibrantly. Food tastes better. And your body, somewhere beneath all the mindless laughter and lingering looks, begins to whisper something quieter and more serious.
This is something that I hope will meet my emotional needs.
Of course you may want to apply it to your skin.
The honeymoon brain writes contracts
What people call the honeymoon phase isn’t just chemistry. It’s not just dopamine. There’s something deeper going on underneath the laughs and phone calls all night long.
You meet someone, and after a few weeks of living together in the world of bright flowers and good food, your nervous system starts doing something almost legal. It’s the wording of the contract. An unannounced one. You’ll be the one I let in. And you will be the one to answer when I feel afraid.
This is not ridiculous. This is biology.
In my opinion, we are interconnected beings. Our first need, before food, before shelter, is to be emotionally attached to someone who is good enough. This was true a hundred thousand years ago on the African savannah, and it was true for Zoe and Harry at their tattoo studio in Soho.
The problem is not the desire to perpetuate. The problem is what I call paper relationships, where people begin to print affection that they cannot yet repay with action. Promises were made faster than the relationship was earned. I love you. I’m sorry. I promise you. Forever. Beautiful words, but in the first months, they are often not supported.
Inflation teaches us that nothing has value, so consume it now. When you apply the same time preference to love, you get a tattoo before you have your first real fight. You get performance instead of attendance. You’ll feel connected without paying the cost of vulnerability.
I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here. I have no idea. I’m saying that these are the cultural waters in which we all swim, and even celebrities and the very wealthy swim in them as well.
Why do even smart people rush?
This is where I have to be honest with myself. Throughout my teens and twenties and into my thirties, and even into my early forties when I met my wife, Till, I lived exactly this pattern. Serial monogamy. Fall quickly. Try to be the perfect friend. Collapse in shame when it broke.
I wasn’t stupid. I was a child in love.
Because that’s what we don’t say out loud. It doesn’t matter how old you are when it comes to love. You’re still a little kid. Physiologically, you are just like a baby who needed someone else good enough on the other side of your birth or you would have died. Nothing has changed radically.
So when you meet someone they feel that way The one, Your body wants to seal the deal. Lock it. Make it real. Make it permanent. ring. tattoo. house. child. Anything to say Please don’t leave me, please watch me, please let me care.
This is not a need. It is the oldest program in the human animal. If you want to understand the intensity of early love and where it turns into something more obsessive, what luxury really is explains a lot of what gets confused with the certainty of a soulmate.
Do you want to know what pattern your body works in the first months of a relationship? You can get a free assessment of your relationship and see your choreography at least on the page.
What actually supports the promise
This is where I want to be careful, because I’m not here to scold anyone for falling too hard. Falling hard is great. Falling hard is the point.
But tattoos are a symbol. It’s not a fix. It’s not the moment at two in the morning when one of you says something lighthearted and the other hears it through the notebook of your entire childhood, and suddenly there’s a fight that has nothing to do with what was actually said.
Most hurt in a relationship comes from influence without intent. You say something offhand. Your partner’s body translates it into an old wound. Their reaction strikes you ashamed. Your shyness ignites your protector. Their protector wakes up to meet you. And now you are in it.
Nobody is being unreasonable. Everyone is hurt.
What actually supports the promise is not the ink. It’s the desire to stay in the room when your partner gets close and you want to pull back, or when they pull away and you want to chase. It’s learning that what made you safe as a child cannot build intimacy as an adult. Protection is not the same as communication.
Some of this seems romantic on the outside and destructive on the inside, which is why understanding the science behind red flags in a relationship is more important than the grand gestures everyone is spouting.
The couples I see doing this are not the ones who rushed the codes. They are the ones who have learned to translate each other’s protests for closeness and demands for distance as the same basic demand. Please be good enough on my side of this.
What I really hope for them
I hope Zoe and Harry are just as in love as they seem. I hope the tattoo ages into a cute little story to tell their grandchildren. I hope no one has to remove anything with a laser.
And I hope, somewhere between the engagement and matching ink, they get to have non-glamorous moments, too. Misreading tone. Small fix. On a night when one feels too much and the other feels too exposed, they find their way back without needing a symbol to prove it happened.
This is the part that no one tattoos. This is the part that holds.
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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.
