Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker walked their first red carpet together in over two years this past weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, and they did it the only way they know how. Fingers laced. Bodies turned in. Whispering like nobody else was in the room.
Cue the internet.
Within hours, the comments rolled in. Obsessed. Cringe. Enmeshed. And the favorite buzzword of every armchair therapist with a TikTok account: codependent.
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. They stepped away. Now they’re back. Still glued together.
I want to make a case for what you’re actually looking at.
What Your Nervous System Is Doing on a Red Carpet
In my office on a Tuesday afternoon, I watch couples diagnose themselves with whatever pop-psychology term went viral that week. They sit down on my couch, convinced they’re broken because they miss their partner when she’s at a work dinner, or because he gets quiet when she doesn’t text back for three hours.
Here’s what’s actually happening underneath every interaction you have with the person you love. Your nervous system is running a quiet background program, and it’s asking only two questions. Are you there for me? Am I enough for you?
That program doesn’t switch off when you grow up. It doesn’t switch off when you become a CEO, a rockstar drummer, or a reality TV icon. Attachment is the best theory we have of what love actually is, and the core of it is simple. We need to be emotionally bonded from the cradle to the grave.
When a baby’s caregiver disappears, the baby isn’t mildly inconvenienced. The baby’s limbic system reads it as an existential threat. Fast forward forty years and you’re still that baby when it comes to the person you love most. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
So when Kourtney and Travis stand on a chaotic carpet in New York City, with every move watched, judged, screenshot, archived, they are answering those two ancient questions for each other in real time. Yes, I’m here. Yes, you’re enough.
That’s not cringe. That’s co-regulation in front of a thousand cameras. If you want a clearer read on your own version of those signals, you can get your free relationship assessment and see what your nervous system is asking for.
The Word Codependent Is Doing a Lot of Damage
The cultural script right now says you should never need your partner too much. You should be a sovereign island. Two whole people who occasionally dock at the same port. Anything more than that gets the label.
Codependent, my arse.
I mean it. When two people who love each other admit they rely on each other for emotional safety, calling that codependent is a mean-spirited way to describe what’s actually happening between them. It’s a way of pathologizing love.
I had a couple sit in my office recently, fully convinced they had failed some modern test of independence. He couldn’t enjoy a guys’ night without checking in. She couldn’t fall asleep without him in the bed. They told me, almost in unison, “We can’t live in the world without each other. We’re codependent.”
I stopped them mid-sentence. No. Stop. I won’t hear it. You’re two people who love each other, because love is primary.
This is the cultural confusion I see all the time, and it sits right next to the buzzier diagnosis people throw around for famous couples. If you want a sharper look at where the line actually is, I’ve written about enmeshment in relationships and how it differs from healthy interdependence.
What Kourtney and Travis Got Right By Disappearing
Here’s the part the gossip cycle missed entirely.
When Kourtney and Travis pulled back from the public eye for two years, they weren’t being weird. They were doing exactly what a secure couple does under threat. They closed ranks. They turned toward each other. They protected the bond.
In my opinion, we are an interdependent species. When you accept that and you actually feel your person is there for you and you’re good enough for them, something happens. That emotional security becomes a resource. It funds your ability to step back out into a world that wants a piece of you.
A red carpet return is the exploration phase. It’s the moment 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 solid enough now to handle the noise.
You don’t survive the paparazzi by pretending you don’t need your partner. You survive it by squeezing their hand so tight the rest of the world goes quiet for a second. For a deeper read on the actual research here, this is the science behind enmeshment and why interdependence isn’t the same animal.
In your primary partnership today, that person is going to be the most important person in the entire world to you. I wouldn’t fight that. I’d accept it. And you should probably be the most important person in the entire world to them, too.
The Sentence I’d Say in Session
If a couple came into my office ashamed because they’d hidden away for two years, or because their friends called them too enmeshed, I wouldn’t hand them a worksheet on boundaries. I wouldn’t lecture them on creating more space.
I’d tell them the truth. Two people who really, really need each other are doing something beautiful, not something pathological. I really need to know I’m important to you. I really need to know you’re not disappointed in me. Laying those needs on each other isn’t a failure. That’s the whole point of the bond.
The internet wants to call Kourtney and Travis obsessed. I’d call them resourced. Two grown adults who figured out that the cure for a loud world isn’t more independence. It’s a hand to hold on the way back into it.
Screenshot that one if you need to.
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Figs O’Sullivan and his wife, Teale, are couples therapists in San Francisco, relationship experts to the Stars and Silicon Valley, founders of Empathi, and built Figlet, our AI relationship coach, an AI relationship coach trained on their clinical work.
