What It’s Like To Have A Partner With No Empathy

Jennifer Standing
4 min readMar 4, 2021

He’s struggled with this since we met 6 years ago.

The other night my partner and I were settling in, and he squeezed me in close. He let out a big sigh, and it seemed like he had something on his mind. “How do I learn to have empathy?” he asked me.

I really thought for a moment. I told him that I didn’t know. I also said that I think empathy is something you learn in your childhood, usually. Silence fell over us until I interrupted it — “I think no one showed you empathy when you were young, so you never really learned

Jennifer Standing

Writer, Blogger, Dog Mom. BA Psych, Certified Holistic Nutrition Consultant. Real talk about Mental Health and Holistic Wellness.