My partner and I have built this whole life where I handle all their emotional breakdowns and they handle all the practical stuff, and we both know it's not healthy but we're terrified that if we stop rescuing each other we'll discover we don't actually know how to love each other. We keep saying we'll work on our codependency but then one of us has a crisis and we fall right back into the same patterns.
More people experience this than they realize.
You've confused emotional enmeshment with intimacy and now neither of you knows where one person ends and the other begins.
“Where Are You with Codependency?”
If this sounds familiar, the Library can help you find the bigger picture.