Married and Lonely: Addressing Emotional Distance
More married couples are lonely than ever before.
And many couples feel hopeless on how to better connect with their spouse after many years of distance growing between them. While you used to be able to tell your spouse anything. Over time, you learned what upsets your partner and you started avoiding those topics. Now you aren’t as open as when you first started dating. And some of you are shutting down positive feelings that used to come naturally.
Many of you are even wondering if having an affair or divorce is the answer to deal with your loneliness and intimacy problems in the marriage. But before you throw in the towel, let’s explore what contributes to this distance and how to address it.
While you may not return to the spark you had at the beginning of your relationship, you can develop a new, deeper level of emotional intimacy with your spouse. You do this by working on your own reactions and behaviors that are distancing, so you are more emotionally present, open, and playful with your spouse.
Understand Emotional Distance
Before we address emotional distance, we must first understand it. Many couples get emotional distance confused with marriage differences. Having a different goal or interest than your spouse doesn’t mean you have emotional distance. People can have different interests and ideas, yet still have a great connection and intimacy.
Emotional distance is a pattern of interactions. It is an emotional response to a perceived emotional threat and doesn’t occur without conflict either internally or externally. In other words, emotional distance is co-created in an attempt to avoid conflict or feelings of hurt and rejection.
Every couple develops some emotional distance the longer they are together. Most people try to work on their spouse’s distancing behaviors instead of their own. Typically, the more you try to get your spouse to understand your point, the more you end up pushing them away.
Almost everyone enjoys a little distance from time to time. It only becomes a problem when it erodes the marriage friendship between a couple. To this extreme, you may feel little or no positive feelings for your partner. But once you realize you play a part in creating your own loneliness, you can begin doing something about your own distancing.
Address Your Own Emotional Distance
Next, think about what thoughts or feelings contribute to you distancing when talking, interacting, or disagreeing with your spouse. It’s so much easier to observe what your spouse does or doesn’t do that triggers you to pull away, and it’s much harder to observe our own distance. But becoming a good observer of ourselves is the key to addressing our own distancing tendencies and finding new choices.
Grab something to write with and record which of the following ways you distance, whether it’s pulling away internally or behaviorally. Some examples of emotional distance are:
- Accommodating your spouse to keep the peace
- Using work, hobbies, substances, or an affair to avoid conflict with your spouse
- Turning to your kids for emotional or social needs more than your spouse
- Pretending to agree but doing what you want behind your spouse’s back
- Avoiding topics that upset your spouse
- Being present physically but tuning your spouse out
Also, record the reactions and behaviors you have that trigger emotional distance between you and/or your spouse. Here are some ideas to stir your reflections:
- Taking differences and others’ moods personally
- Being critical or thinking you’re the better spouse
- Giving advice or diagnosing your spouse
- Trying to prove your point and be heard
- Complaining in an attempt to get your spouse closer to you
- Being urgent and pressuring the other to talk
- Being self-critical and think no one wants to be with you
If you record any of these ways of distancing, then you are probably having a hard time staying calm in your spouse’s presence. Kathleen Cauley, licensed marriage and family therapist, emphasizes that communication is less about getting your point heard, and more about calming down to hear. In this way, openness is “staying interested in your spouse without assuming: 1) it has something to do with you, 2) it hurts your feelings, or 3) it will get in your way.” ( from the video: Myths about Communication.)
Challenge Your Negative Assumptions
So how do you get yourself calm enough to not pull away physically or emotionally? Find a new way to think when you interact with your spouse that makes you feel less emotionally threatened. Challenge your assumptions about your spouse, because your spouse’s behavior and/or response does not have to define your value or importance!
For example, if your spouse is emotionally unavailable to you on occasion, it doesn’t mean that you can’t be happy without his/her response. Nor does it mean that your spouse doesn’t care about you or you aren’t important to him/her. But when you make these assumptions, you probably start pulling away to protect yourself.
Our assumptions fuel our distance, and emotional separateness creates intimacy and openness. Meaning his emotions are separate from how he feels about you. If you don’t take your spouse’s busyness, tension, or unavailability as a threat to your own emotional well being, then you are free to be emotionally available and upbeat. You don’t have to distance too. So when your spouse is available, you will be too.
Developing a new level of emotional intimacy is developing a new way of thinking, so you can create a new way of being with your spouse. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the “Married and Lonely Series” where I explore steps to “Being Emotionally Intimate.”
What are you doing or thinking that contributes to your distancing with your spouse?
Marci Payne, MA, LPC offers individual counseling for anxious and stressed men and women at her practice in Lee’s Summit MO. She helps adults who are struggling in their relationships find better ways to connect even if there is only one spouse in the therapy room. To dig deeper into what is contributing to your emotional distance, Subscribe to Liberating Choices and receive the “Journal for Self-Reflection: 15 Questions to Increase Emotional Intimacy” FREE.
Photo Credit: “Come Together” by Hartwig HKD
Hello and thank you for having this article as there are some ideas I can try to use.
My husband overall, is very good to us and for that, I am grateful. He does provide financial stability and he is very intelligent and independent and while these qualities I do admire, sometimes they do get on my nerves. More often then not, my son (7) has had some developmental delays and has needed some extra help. At first, my husband did not want to hear it (background–he was raised by a single mother and two older brothers, Sicilian descent, and she did a VERY good job; none of them turned out wrong but they hardly ask for help–as if it’s beneath them) but eventually, he came around to it and accepts the idea.
I have tried to be tactful and not point out the mistakes he made earlier feeling there was no need to. He is a good listener at times but there are days when his arrogance gets the better of him. What do I do as I do not want for this to continue? I know I cannot change him directly but how to help him see asking for help is not an idea to be dismissed?
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for the feedback on the article.
As to your question, I think it’s less about getting him to see that asking for help is ok and more about respecting each other’s differences. I assume you can reach out to consult with others about your son even if your husband isn’t thinking it’s necessary. If it’s helpful for you, then does he need to agree that it’s helpful too?
I know it’s hard to deal with differences especially on issues that we really value like our kids. I imagine you both care about your son and just have different ideas about how to help or raise him. Get curious about the differences and see if you two agree on some part of it, even if have different ways to get there.
Thanks for writing this. I know it was a few years ago, but it is helpful for me right now. My hubby is quite critical of me and thinks that any time I ask for something that I’m being ungrateful and disrespectful. At the moment, he’s the sole provider for our family, which I’m very grateful for, but he barely helps out with our child and when I ask him to he thinks that either I can’t handle it (nor homeschooling in the pandemic) or that I’m ungrateful. He is also super neat and tidy, where as I am not as stringent on that end….because I concentrate on parenting vs cleaning!!! Our son is 8 and it has been like this since he was born. I do all the child care and nurturing and my hubby mostly works and cleans….I want us to work together but whenever I try it ends up in a big fight and my son ends up losing out. My hubby extrapolates things I say or do to mean that I’m ungrateful or disrespectful which is totally not true, but I don’t know how to convince him of this. A simple request to ask him to pick up something while he’s out, shouldn’t end in a fight because he thinks I’m ungrateful?!!! This article and the one about the critical spouse have been very helpful.
Thank you
Gillian, I’m so glad these articles were helpful to you. And it sounds like you are looking for support in your marriage. It is very common for parts of ourselves to be triggered by our spouse. And the more we understand ourselves, what triggers it, etc, the more choices on how we respond. Have you considered marriage counseling to help find another way to deal with the differences and stressors you are experiencing? Often it opens up new ways of communicating.