Heathcliff is one of literature's most devastating portraits of a man destroyed not by circumstance but by himself. Emily Brontë gave him everything the world tends to reward — intensity, intelligence, an almost violent force of personality. What she withheld was more consequential: the ability to understand his own interior life without being ruled by it. He felt in extremes and acted in extremes, and everyone inside the radius of that suffered for it, including him. Wuthering Heights is not really a love story. It is a precise account of what happens when feeling everything becomes indistinguishable from understanding nothing, when the person you claim to love becomes a mirror for your own unprocessed pain rather than a human being with needs of their own.
Most of us, if we are honest, have been on both sides of this.
What we mean when we talk about connection
Ananya Agarwal is a growth analyst based in Bangalore, and she is specific about what she wants from a relationship in a way that previous generations simply were not permitted to be. "Most of the time I want my partner to understand why I'm feeling the way I am, not just jump to solutions," she says. "Fixing things on the surface might resolve the situation temporarily, but it doesn't address what's actually going on. When he takes the time to understand my emotions, it makes our companionship stronger and helps us know each other on a deeper level."
This is not a grand ask. It is one of the most fundamental things emotional intelligence offers a relationship — the ability to sit with someone else's experience before reaching for a fix. To understand rather than resolve. It sounds simple and it is, in practice, one of the hardest things to do consistently, because it requires setting aside your own discomfort long enough to be genuinely curious about someone else's.
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Emotional intelligence breaks down into five things. Self-awareness, self regulation, empathy, social skills, and internal motivation.
The generation that changed the brief
Ananya has a theory about why this matters so differently now. "Our mothers were brought up in a way where, after marriage, their role was largely to look after their husband and raise his children. They were often seen as a liability rather than an equal. If their husbands were kind, provided a home, and didn't abuse them, that was probably considered enough. Expecting emotional intelligence wasn't even on the table."
She's right. Financial dependence narrowed what women felt entitled to ask for. When survival is the baseline, emotional attunement is a luxury. But this generation — educated, earning, unwilling to perform gratitude for the bare minimum — has moved the goalposts entirely. "We don't need men for financial stability the way previous generations did," Ananya says. "What we're really looking for is a partner who shows up emotionally."
Perhaps this is what Sally Rooney was thinking when she wrote Marianne in Normal People. A woman who has every external resource and is undone not by circumstance but by her own emotional unavailability. Marianne begins the series defended to the point of brittleness — perceptive about everyone around her and almost entirely closed to her own needs.
She learns, at considerable cost, that being truly known by another person requires first being willing to know yourself. That intimacy is not something that you have to consciously choose, no matter how hard it is.
Marianne isn't magically fixed and resolved, but she is more open to Connell, and to herself.
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The big question
Can emotional intelligence be learned, or is a relationship without it simply a relationship to leave? Ananya lands somewhere in the middle. "For me personally, emotional intelligence is non-negotiable. I need a partner who can meet me as an equal, and if that's genuinely missing, I would leave." But she holds the nuance. "I do believe that when two people love each other truly and are both willing to give it their all, growth is possible. It may not always be present from the start — but if someone is open and committed to learning, they can slowly get there.
Perhaps, this is the most honest version of the answer. EQ is fairly fluid. It responds to effort, to therapy and to the pressures of a relationship as you are in it. It simply required willingness. The person who cannot see why their partner's emotional experience matters is a different problem from the person who can see it and is slowly, imperfectly learning to respond.
How you build it
It starts with self-awareness and staying close enough to your own interior life. Journaling can help in terms of honest self accounting. Sleep and boundaries matter more than they sound — when you are depleted, your capacity for another person collapses, and you become someone who takes more than they give without quite meaning to.
We must also make a conscious choice to stop avoiding conversations, stop repeating patterns and simply be more receptive to putting in the ugly work.
The difference between Ananya, Marianne and Heathcliff, in their stories is never about what they felt, but what they will learn to do with it — and whether the person across them will do the same.
