In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell offers a tender, devastating portrait of grief—not as a shared experience that naturally brings people closer, but as something deeply personal that can quietly pull partners apart. The novel (and now movie) shows how two people can love one another profoundly and still misunderstand each other at the very moment they most need connection.
After the death of their son, Agnes and her husband grieve in ways that could not be more different. Agnes remains physically and emotionally close to her loss. Her grief is embodied, intuitive, ever-present. She feels it in nature, in memory, in the spaces her child once occupied. She stays with the pain, allowing it to move through her in waves.
Her husband, by contrast, turns away from the loss. He leaves home, immerses himself in work, words, and distance. His grief is not absent—but it is redirected, contained, and deferred. Where Agnes feels, he escapes. Where she remembers, he tries to outrun.
Neither response is wrong. And yet, this is where the rupture begins.
Each partner silently interprets the other’s grief through their own lens. Agnes experiences his absence as abandonment, as if he is choosing distance over family. He experiences her intensity as something he cannot fix or face, and so he retreats further. They do not lack love—they lack understanding of difference.
O’Farrell shows us something essential: grief does not look the same in two people, even when they are grieving the same loss. Couples often assume that shared pain should be processed in shared ways. When it isn’t, they can feel rejected, unseen, or alone—without realising that their partner is suffering just as deeply, simply in another language.
This dynamic extends far beyond bereavement. In relationships, one person may need to talk, cry, and revisit feelings again and again. The other may need silence, movement, distraction, or time. One may process outwardly, the other inwardly. Trouble arises when difference is mistaken for indifference.
As a Coupleworks therapist, this plays out with our couples struggling with their wounds and narratives. They feel hurt and alone and can become stuck in the belief their experience is the only way to see things. This disconnect between couples is a breach of an unconscious belief/hope that they are the same.
Hamnet gently but powerfully reminds us that intimacy does not come from grieving the same way—it comes from appreciating that we do not.
For couples, the invitation is this:
- To grow curious rather than critical about how your partner processes pain
- To resist measuring love by sameness
- To understand that withdrawal can be self-protection, not rejection
- To see expression and silence as equally valid forms of coping
When we honour difference, we make room for compassion. When we stop insisting that our partner feel what we feel, in the way we feel it, we open a path back to one another. Hamnet is not just a story about loss. It is a quiet, aching lesson in emotional humility—asking us to recognise that love does not mean walking the same path, but staying willing to witness each other’s journey, even when it looks nothing like our own.
Shirlee Kay