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From Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, family rifts often appear to start with a new relationship. But according to world-renowned therapist Esther Perel, what's really happening runs much deeper.

For months, speculation has swirled around Brooklyn Beckham, Nicola Peltz and the growing distance between the couple and the rest of the Beckham family.

Depending on which version of the story you believe, it's about loyalty. Or control. Or a young man choosing his wife over his parents.

Perhaps it's about Nicola. Perhaps it's about Victoria. Perhaps it's about the impossible dynamics that emerge when a family becomes a global brand.

But according to Esther Perel, stories like these endure because they touch something much bigger than celebrity gossip.

Watch: What really happens when you cut family off. Post continues below.

Stories of estrangement force us to confront a question many families wrestle with: what happens when the person your child loves isn't the person you imagined for them?

Speaking to Kate Langbroek on this week's episode of No Filter, Perel suggests that while these stories feel distinctly modern, the tension at their centre is ancient.

Families have always struggled with change. And few changes are as profound as welcoming a new person into the fold.

"There is nothing that is more impactful on a family or on a relational system in general than the addition and subtraction of new members," she explained.

It's a simple observation, but it helps explain why these situations can become so emotionally charged.

We tend to think of marriage as something that happens between two people. But every marriage, every long-term partnership and every new relationship alters the shape of the family around it.

New loyalties emerge. New traditions are introduced. Existing relationships shift. The balance changes.

For parents, that can be surprisingly confronting.

Many parents carry an unspoken vision of the future. We imagine what our children's lives might look like, their values, their traditions. Then we paint the kind of person they might end up with in our minds.

Often those expectations sit in the background, until reality arrives in the form of an actual human being. And actual human beings rarely match the picture we had in our heads.

Perel spent years working with intercultural, interracial and interfaith couples, helping families navigate exactly these kinds of tensions. Again and again, she saw parents struggle when a child's partner represented something unfamiliar.

Sometimes the concern was framed around religion or culture. Sometimes it was about education, politics, class or lifestyle. But beneath the specifics was often a deeper anxiety.

How much will this person change us?

"When does a person become a threat to our cohesiveness?" Perel asked. "To what we think is our way of doing things? How much will we need to change for this person?"

It's easy to frame acceptance of outsiders as a moral issue: Good families accept new people. Bad families don't.

But Perel's work suggests the reality is more complicated than that. Resistance isn't always about dislike. Sometimes it's about fear. Sometimes it's about grief. Sometimes it's about the loss of an imagined future. And sometimes it's about the collision between two very different ideas about what relationships are supposed to do.

For most of human history, marriage wasn't primarily about personal fulfilment. It wasn't even necessarily about love. Marriage was about stability and community. Families had a stake in the decision because the decision affected the family.

"Relationships used to be about duty and obligation and loyalty," Perel told Langbroek. "Today they are about free choice and options and personal authenticity."

Listen: Esther Perel on No Filter. Post continues below.

That shift has transformed family life.

The modern relationship asks us to do something previous generations rarely expected. It asks us to choose. Not just a partner, but a life. And increasingly, people are willing to prioritise that choice over the expectations of the family they come from.

That's why stories like Brooklyn Beckham's resonate so powerfully. They appear to ask a question many of us hope we'll never have to answer: if your family disapproves of the person you love, who do you choose?

But Perel believes that's often the wrong question.

Most people don't want to choose between their family and their partner. They want both. They want the people they love to love one another. They want their family to recognise the person they've chosen and accept the life they're building together.

The pain comes when that acceptance doesn't arrive.

And according to Perel, that's where many families find themselves trapped.

What appears to be a conflict about a partner is often a conflict that began long before the partner entered the picture.

In her work, Perel frequently sees new partners become the visible face of much older tensions. The daughter-in-law who is blamed for creating distance. The son-in-law who is accused of changing someone. The girlfriend or boyfriend who becomes the family villain.

But often, she says, they're stepping into dynamics that already existed.

A partner notices favouritism between siblings. They see unhealthy boundaries. They identify long-standing patterns that family members have spent years trying not to acknowledge. And because they are outsiders, they are often the easiest people to blame.

It's a phenomenon that helps explain why some family conflicts seem to erupt so suddenly. From the outside, it looks as though everything was fine until a new person arrived. In reality, the new person may simply have exposed tensions that were already there.

"The last thing sits on a log," Perel explained. The final disagreement might be the visible trigger, but beneath it sits layer upon layer of accumulated hurt, resentment and unresolved conflict.

The new partner isn't always the cause.

Sometimes they're simply the catalyst.

It's also why conversations about family estrangement have become so prominent in recent years.

Online, the advice is often blunt. Cut them off. Go no-contact. Protect your peace. Perel approaches the issue differently.

Not because she believes people should remain in harmful situations, but because she has spent decades observing what happens to families after a rupture.

"A cut-off is anything but distance," she said.

It's one of the most striking observations from the entire conversation.

The assumption behind estrangement is often that distance creates freedom. But Perel argues that emotional reality is rarely so straightforward. The person you haven't spoken to in twenty years can still occupy enormous space in your inner world. The relationship may be over, but its influence remains.

In fact, she noted that when estrangement exists within a family, it almost always becomes part of the story people tell about themselves.

The absence remains present. And families are shaped not only by who is present, but by who is missing.

Perhaps that's why stories like the Beckhams continue to fascinate us.

Not because they're famous.

Not because they're wealthy.

But because they are grappling with questions that many ordinary families face behind closed doors.

How much of our lives belong to us?

How much do we owe the people who raised us?

What happens when the family we create looks different from the family we came from?

Perel doesn't offer easy answers.

In fact, one of the most reassuring things about her work is her refusal to reduce complex relationships to simple solutions. Modern culture often encourages us to think in absolutes. Choose your family. Choose your partner. Stay. Leave. Forgive. Cut contact.

Real life is rarely that neat.

"A lot of the relationship dilemmas that people are grappling with are not problems that you solve," Perel said. "They are paradoxes that you manage."

It's a perspective that feels particularly relevant in an era obsessed with certainty.

Because perhaps the goal isn't to eliminate the tension between family loyalty and personal freedom. Perhaps the goal is to learn how to live with it.

To recognise that growing up often means building a life that reflects your own values rather than your family's expectations. To accept that parents may experience that process as loss. And to understand that love, whether between partners or within families, sometimes requires people to adapt to versions of one another they never anticipated.

Families change. New people arrive. Old expectations are challenged. Relationships evolve.

The challenge isn't stopping those things from happening.

The challenge is finding a way to love one another through them.

You can listen to the full conversation on No Filter . The episode, 'Esther Perel: When You Choose Your Partner and Lose Your Family' , is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Feature Image: Instagram/@estherperelofficial