Loneliness in a relationship: alone beside someone

It is evening. You are sitting on the same sofa, each with your own screen. The television is on so that it isn’t quiet. One of you says, “Today was a strange day.” The other, without looking up: “Mm.” And that is all. Nobody said anything unkind, nobody slammed a door. Still, you go to bed feeling that you spent the whole evening alone, only with someone breathing next to you.

This kind of loneliness is rarely talked about because it seems illogical. A lonely person is supposed to be someone who has nobody. Anyone with a partner, a shared flat, perhaps children and a shared calendar on the fridge is supposed to be safe. So people often take a long time to admit the feeling to themselves. When they do, they quickly add an apology: “I’ve really got no reason to complain.”

In this post I would like to show that loneliness in a relationship is neither a contradiction nor a sign of being spoilt. It is a fairly precise signal that something between you has gone quiet. Let’s look at how it happens, what the research knows about it, and what can be done before the silence sets hard.

Alone beside someone is not a contradiction

First, three words we tend to mix up. Solitude is a state: you are on your own, and that can be pleasant, sometimes even necessary. Social isolation is a fact that can be counted: few people, few contacts, rare meetings. Loneliness is a feeling. Researchers usually describe it as the painful gap between the connection you have and the connection you need.

Something follows from this that is surprising at first glance. You can be alone a great deal and not be lonely. And you can be in the same kitchen with someone every day and be lonely. The number of people around you says remarkably little about loneliness. What says more is whether any of them truly reaches you. I explain this difference in more detail in Loneliness is not solitude: the difference that changes everything.

In 1973 the American sociologist Robert Weiss distinguished two kinds of loneliness. Social loneliness arises when you have no circle to belong to: friends, colleagues, neighbours. Emotional loneliness arises when one close bond is missing, a person with whom you can be entirely who you are. Weiss pointed out that one cannot stand in for the other. A full diary does not fill the space left by a close person, and one close person does not replace a circle.

That is exactly why loneliness in a relationship is so confusing. The person who is meant to be that one close bond is here. They sit beside you, sleep beside you, know how you take your coffee. You just cannot reach them. Emotional loneliness next to a partner often hurts more than the loneliness of a single person, because it comes without an explanation. A single person can say: I have no one. You say: I have someone, and still.

What the research shows: small moments decide

The American psychologist John Gottman spent decades observing couples doing perfectly ordinary things: eating dinner, talking about their day, tidying up. He noticed that partners constantly send each other small invitations to connect. He called them bids for connection. There is nothing ceremonial about them. “Look at that snow.” A sigh at the computer. A hand on a shoulder. A question about whether there is any milk left.

Each bid can be met in three ways: you turn towards your partner, you turn away, or you turn against them. In a study of newlyweds whom Gottman’s team followed for six years, the couples who stayed together had responded to bids 86 per cent of the time. The couples who had divorced in the meantime, 33 per cent.

It would be unwise to read that figure as a recipe. It comes from one research group and from observation in a specially arranged setting. It does not prove that unresponsiveness causes a break-up; it may equally be a sign that the relationship was already in trouble. But it does say something useful: closeness does not live on big conversations and anniversaries. It lives on whether someone looks up when you say “look”.

Harry Reis and Phillip Shaver described closeness in a similar way. In their model it comes about in two steps. First, one person shares something about themselves that matters to them. Then they receive a response that leaves them feeling understood, accepted and cared for. Jean-Philippe Laurenceau and colleagues tested this with diaries of everyday conversations: the sense of closeness was predicted by disclosure and by the impression that the other person had responded. So talking alone is not enough. Closeness appears only when what has been said lands somewhere.

Emotional absence: the body is home, the attention is not

An emotionally absent partner is not necessarily a cold or indifferent person. Often it is someone who works hard, looks after the family, fixes the tap and takes the car to the garage. They do everything. They are just not there with you. When you speak, they wait for you to finish. When you cry, they offer a solution. When you ask how they are, they answer: “Fine.”

Emotional absence has several faces, and they are worth telling apart because they do not mean the same thing:

• Exhaustion. Someone who has been available to others all day has nothing left to listen with in the evening. It is not a decision against you, but the effect on you is the same.
• Learned withdrawal. Someone who grew up in a family where feelings were not discussed pulls back from them because they do not know what to do with them. I write about this in Avoidant attachment: why closeness tires and retreat calms.
• Protection from blame. If conversations regularly end in criticism, silence becomes the safest choice.
• Something else. Depression, a worry they cannot put into words, trouble at work, shame. Absence is sometimes the only visible part of something your partner cannot bring themselves to talk about.

The difference matters because a lonely person almost always reads absence the same way: they don’t care about me. That may be true. More often something more complicated is true, and until you know what, you are responding to an explanation you put together yourself.

Parallel lives: when conversation turns into logistics

The other route into loneliness is quieter. Neither of you is absent; both are very present, only each in a life of their own. One has work, running and their own friends. The other has work, the children and their own friends. You meet in the hallway and at Sunday lunch. The household runs flawlessly. You are an excellent team and a poor couple.

This tends to happen at the times when life is fullest: small children, building a house, a promotion, caring for parents. Conversation then shrinks to coordination. Who is driving, who is collecting, what is missing from the fridge. All of that has to be said and none of it is wrong. The trouble starts when another kind of conversation disappears alongside it, the kind in which you arrange nothing and simply say how you are. How this begins after a baby arrives is the subject of The couple after the baby: keeping your partnership alive through parenthood.

Parallel lives are insidious because for a long time they look like maturity. “We never argue.” “We each have our own space.” Both can be signs of a healthy relationship. They can also be a sign that you have stopped touching anything that might hurt, and with it anything that might bring you closer. I explain the difference between independence and distance in Fused or cut off: two ways a relationship loses its balance.

Why it is so hard to talk about

Loneliness in a relationship comes with shame. Admitting it means admitting that a relationship everyone sees as settled from the outside is not like that from the inside. It also means risking the answer, “I’m at home all the time, what more do you want?” So people often say it sideways, as a reproach: “You never listen to me.” “You don’t care.” “All you’re interested in is your phone.”

The reproach is understandable, but it does the exact opposite of what you want. Your partner hears an attack and defends themselves or withdraws. You read the withdrawal as confirmation that they don’t care, and you push harder. In couples research this loop is well described as the demand–withdraw pattern; Andrew Christensen and Christopher Heavey were studying it back in the 1980s and 1990s. How it tangles with different attachment patterns is the subject of The anxious and the avoidant partner: why these two find each other, and how to leave the loop.

Let’s look at how the same evening can turn once what is true comes out from under the reproach (the conversation is composed; this is not a real person):

“Why are you quiet again?”
“I’m not quiet. I’m tired.”
“You’re always tired when I want to talk.”
“What am I supposed to say? Whatever I say is wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong. I miss you. You’re right here and I miss you.”
“… You’ve never said it to me like that before.”

The first three lines are accusation and defence. The fifth is vulnerability: it does not say what the other person is doing wrong, but what is going on in you. That does not guarantee a good response. It does greatly increase the chance that your partner will hear what this is actually about. How to get from the first line to the fifth is explained in more detail in From blame to needs: how a couple learns a new language.

What loneliness does to the way you see

Loneliness is not only an emotion; it also changes how you read other people. In their review of the research, Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo described how lonely people become more alert to signs of rejection. They are quicker to read ambiguous responses as negative, they remember unpleasant moments more, and they protect themselves before anything has even happened.

In a relationship this means that after a long stretch of loneliness you are no longer a neutral observer. Your partner’s “mm” is no longer just “mm”; it is evidence. Their lateness is a message. When they do, for once, ask how you are, you give a short answer because you don’t believe they really want to know. In doing so you turn down a bid for connection yourself, without noticing.

I am not writing this to shift the blame on to you. I am writing it because this is the part of the loop you can influence. Loneliness for two is almost never the work of one person alone. Both of you keep it going, each with your own way of protecting yourself.

What can be done: start smaller than you think

When someone finally admits that they are lonely in their relationship, they often imagine one big conversation in which they will say everything. Sometimes that conversation is needed. But if it is true that loneliness grows out of small moments without a response, that is also where it is repaired. A few starting points:

• Watch for bids, including your partner’s. For a week, simply notice when your partner offers you something: shows you a photo, grumbles about a colleague, asks whether you’d like tea. Many people find that the bids are there, only different from the ones they were waiting for.
• State a need, not a verdict. “I’d like us to sit for ten minutes in the evening without our phones” is something a person can answer. “You’re always on your phone” is not.
• Choose the moment. Not at eleven at night and not in the middle of a row. How to begin so the conversation doesn’t collapse in the first few minutes is covered in How to start a difficult conversation with your partner: the first three minutes decide.
• Ask how it is for them. Surprisingly often it turns out that the other person is lonely too, only for them it looks like working until ten or like silence.
• Don’t bring everything to the relationship. A partner cannot be the only person who knows you. Friendships take weight off a relationship; they do not threaten it.

If the silence has spread to physical closeness as well, that is a subject in its own right; I write about it in A sexless relationship: when sex has gone and nobody raises the subject, so I won’t repeat it here.

Exercise: ten minutes without logistics

You can try this exercise tonight. Its purpose is to bring back into the day a conversation that arranges nothing. If your partner doesn’t want to take part, never mind: you can take the first step yourself by truly listening the next time they say something.

1. Agree on a time. Ten minutes, at the same hour every day if you can. Leave your phones in another room and turn the television off.
2. The first person speaks for five minutes. About anything that occupied them today, just not the schedule, money, the children’s commitments or your relationship.
3. The other only listens and asks. No advice, no solutions, no “yes, well, I…”. It is enough to say: “And how was that for you?”
4. Swap roles. The same five minutes, the same rules.
5. Finish with one sentence. Each of you names one thing you heard about the other today that was new. Then don’t evaluate the exercise; just repeat it tomorrow.

The first few evenings will probably be awkward. It may feel artificial; one of you may not know what to say. That is not a sign that the exercise isn’t working. It is a sign of how long it has been since you did this.

Where this explanation does not apply

Everything I have written assumes two people who have drifted apart and who, with some effort, could find each other again. That is not always the case, so here are some limits.

When there is violence or control in the relationship. If your partner humiliates you, restricts your contacts, monitors you, or you are afraid of them, your loneliness is not a communication problem. Isolation can be part of abuse. Exercises for closeness are not the first step here; safety is. In Slovenia you can call the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence on 080 11 55, and the police on 113 if you are in immediate danger.

When it is depression. Feeling cut off from everyone, including the people you love, can be a sign of depression, in you or in your partner. In that case the relationship is not the cause but the place where it shows. More in Depression in a relationship: what happens to the couple, and what you can do. If the distress persists, talking to your GP is a sensible first step.

When you brought the loneliness with you. Some people have carried the feeling that nobody really knows them since childhood. A partner can ease it but cannot erase it. If you have felt the same in every relationship so far, the answer may lie in your own story rather than in this relationship.

When you expect everything from one person. A partner who is meant to be lover, best friend, confidant, co-parent and company for every weekend will fall short somewhere. If you have no one else, every bout of tiredness on their part will feel like emptiness to you. Sometimes part of the loneliness in a relationship is really social loneliness, which the relationship cannot solve. More on that in Loneliness in the middle of a full life: alone among people.

When the relationship really is ending. Sometimes loneliness is not a fault in the relationship but accurate information about it. That is a possible answer too, and it is not a defeat.

When it makes sense to look for help

A couple finds it hard to climb out of a loop in which one pushes and the other retreats, because each sees only their own half. An outside view is useful when the same conversation keeps repeating and always ends the same way, when you have tried on your own and after a few days everything is back as it was, or when one of you can no longer bear to talk about it at all.

As a marriage and family therapist in training under supervision, I am being trained in relational family therapy. With a couple, this approach does not look for a culprit. It is interested in what keeps repeating between two people and where each of them first learned this particular way of being close and of protecting themselves. Sue Johnson, who developed emotionally focused therapy for couples, condensed the question that sits beneath most arguments into a simple form: are you there for me when I need you? Loneliness in a relationship is the feeling that the answer has been no for a long time.

Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. You can read more about how work with a couple unfolds on the Couples therapy page. You can also come on your own if your partner does not want to for now; a change in one person shifts the loop as well.

What to remember

• Loneliness is a feeling, not the number of people around you. You can be lonely in a relationship without ever being alone.
• Most often it builds gradually, from small invitations to connect that go unanswered and from conversation that shrinks to logistics.
• A partner’s absence can have several explanations: exhaustion, learned withdrawal, fear of blame, depression. “They don’t care” is only one of them.
• A reproach triggers defence. A sentence about what you miss has a better chance of being heard.
• If there is fear, control or violence in the relationship, the question is not closeness but safety: in Slovenia, the SOS helpline is 080 11 55.