The No-Expectations Relationship Isn't Evolved. It's Empty.
Obviously, Mel Robbins didn't invent detachment, but she did give it really good marketing and viral packaging.
Let them not text back. Let them forget your birthday. Let them show you who they are. Stop chasing. Stop expecting. Stop needing. Find your peace by letting go of your grip on everyone around you.
As a somatic psychologist and as a human being in relationship to other humans, I understand the allure and appeal. There’s something in what Mel is saying that speaks to a real exhaustion; the exhaustion of unequal kindness and care.
But as a somatic psychologist and again as a human, there has always been something that troubles me about the ‘Let Them’ theory since I first heard it directly from a client’s mouth. The uncomfortable, and probably very unintended reality from Mel is that the ‘Let Them’ has become permission for something that isn’t peace and is much darker instead. It’s become a framework to release people before they can disappoint us.
A philosophy that asks us to expect nothing, so we can never be let down. And I want you to know that’s not freedom. That’s a life lived in a permanent brace.
The reality is that many of us have been sold a lie dressed up as liberation. The lie sounds like this...
The healthiest relationships are the ones with no expectations. Real love asks for nothing. Securely attached people never have needs or make requests.
Mel isn’t to blame for this lie dressed up as liberation; it didn’t start with ‘Let Them.’ But the theory has become its latest vehicle.
It shows up in therapy-speak on Instagram. In podcasts about releasing attachment to outcomes. In the careful, boundaried language of people explaining why they can’t show up for you but want you to know they still care.
I see this daily in my practice.
Women who have already diagnosed themselves using vocabulary they learned from a reel. They tell me they’re “too much” because they wanted a friend to call them back. They worry they’re “enmeshed” because they miss someone who left. They’ve been taught to see their longing for a reliable connection as evidence of psychological deficiency rather than biological necessity.
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The language of therapy, stripped from its context and commodified for content, has become a weapon turned against the very relational needs it was meant to protect.
But we are not built for this.
Bowlby, who studied infants and attachment, found something simple and devastating: infants who were fed but not held failed to thrive. Children need more than resources. They need relational presence. They need to know, in their bodies, that someone will come when they cry.
We don’t outgrow this. Adult attachment isn’t childish or regressive; it’s how our nervous systems are designed. We settle in the presence of people who are predictable, reliable, and attuned. We dysregulate when we are alone too long, or when our connections are chaotic and inconsistent.
This is not a wound to be healed. It’s a feature of being human.
Women carry the lie of no-expectations as some type of evolved personality in our bodies. This is because we are trained from girlhood to be low-maintenance. To not ask for too much. To accommodate, flex, adjust. To be ‘chill’ or ‘polite’. To be the ones who understand when someone can’t show up, and to never be the ones who can’t.
We learn that having needs makes us difficult. That expecting things from people makes us demanding. That the cool girl, the evolved woman, the securely attached queen, is the one who holds everything loosely and never grips too tight.
This is why women shrink. Why we make ourselves small in our own relationships. Why we perform independence and call it liberation. Why we let people off the hook over and over, telling ourselves we’re being generous when really we’re terrified of being seen as too much. I know I have done all of these things, and I have witnessed countless women do the same.
But while we are doing all this, our nervous systems are starving because the body doesn’t lie.
The body knows when it’s held and when it’s being dropped. The body knows when someone will come and when no one is coming. No amount of affirmations or therapy-speak can trick the body into feeling safe in relationships that offer nothing solid to hold onto.
This is why I want to encourage you to reclaim the truth that superficial pop psychology has obscured.
Expectations are not demands. They are not control. They are not pressure. They are not the hallmark of an anxious attachment style. They are not the signs of enmeshment or codependency. Expectations are the architecture of any safe relationship.
When we know someone will call us back, the body settles. When we trust that we exist in someone’s mind even when we are not in front of them, we can rest. When we expect a friend to reach out through good times and bad, we feel held in a web of care that makes the unbearable bearable again.
The ‘Let Them’ philosophy asks us to open our hands, let go and release our grip on people. But perhaps what we actually need is to reach out those hands and find someone reaching back. Maybe the most radical thing we can do in a culture that profits from our isolation is to expect things from each other again. To need out loud. To ask and offer and show up not because it’s convenient, easy, fun or perfect but because that’s what it means to be in it together.
So let them. Let them see you. Let them show up. Let them reach back.
This isn’t about Mel. It’s about what happens to a phrase once a culture that profits from our isolation gets hold of it. Let Them is one way; therapy-speak on Instagram is another; the carefully boundaried language of people explaining why they can’t show up is a third. The pattern is the point.
I reach for your writing for insight, balanced views, thoughtful critique of what's taken for granted as "wisdom". Thank you for your words. I feel like you have our backs.
I was told, “You want what YOU think honest and respectful is. I never said the expectations were unreasonable. The fact that they exist at all is the problem.”
As if either are subjective, much less unreasonable. I’m finally seeing how coercive and abusive that is, and how perfectly it captures all that was missing and blamed on me. And why it was never safe for me to have needs or exist in his life in any meaningful way.