Difficult Emotions
Do you feel disconnected from your partner? Understand the real reasons behind the distance and discover small steps to rebuild your bond.
Do you feel disconnected from your partner? Understand the real reasons behind the distance and discover small steps to rebuild your bond.
You know that feeling when you are sitting on the couch and they are right there. Three feet away. But it feels like there is a glass wall between you. You can see them. You can hear them. But you cannot feel them.
It is the worst feeling, isnt it.
You start to wonder if you are going crazy. You wonder if they are going to leave. You wonder if you should leave. You wonder if you ever really knew them at all. That is the part that stings the most. When you look at them and think, "why do i feel emotionally disconnected from my partner?"
Let me tell you something. I had this happen. We were together for five years. One night we were eating dinner and I looked at him and I realized I had nothing to say. Nothing. I used to tell him everything. My head was just quiet. And not a peaceful quiet. An empty quiet.
It scared me to death.
Here is the thing people do not tell you about emotional disconnect. It does not show up with a loud bang. It does not show up with a fight. It shows up like a thief in the night. You do not notice it leaving. You only notice when it is already gone.
So why does it actually happen? Forget the textbook reasons. Let me tell you the emotionally disconnected from my partner.
Comfortable sounds nice right. It sounds safe. But comfortable is dangerous. When you get too comfortable you stop trying. You stop putting on the nice shirt. You stop asking them questions. You stop leaning in when they talk. You just exist next to them.
You know how you treat your favorite old chair. You sit in it. You do not think about it. You do not look at it and appreciate it. It is just there.
That is what we do to our partners. We turn them into furniture. And furniture does not make us feel anything. So we feel nothing.
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Remember when you first started dating. You wanted to know everything. What was their favorite song when they were twelve. What did they want to be when they grew up. What scared them at night.
You were curious. You leaned forward when they talked. You watched their mouth move when they spoke. You were hungry for them.
When was the last time you were hungry for them.
Now you already know their story. Or you think you do. So you stopped asking. You stopped looking at them like a mystery. You look at them like a book you already read. And you are bored. So you feel disconnected because they are not interesting to you anymore. But that is not on them. That is on you for stopping your curiosity.
Wait. Let me explain.
Couples who never fight are not happy couples. They are lying couples. Or they are scared couples. When you do not fight, you do not say the hard thing. You swallow it. You swallow the thing that hurt you. You swallow the thing that made you angry.
Every time you swallow a hard thing it turns into a stone. You put it in your pocket. You get another stone. You put it in your pocket. After a year your pockets are full. You are carrying around all these heavy stones. You cannot walk toward your partner. You are weighed down.
You are not disconnected because you are angry. You are disconnected because you are full of stones. And you never told them you were putting stones in your pocket.
This one is hard to hear. But listen.
You gave up your friends. You gave up your hobbies. You gave up that thing you used to do on Tuesday nights that made you feel alive. You gave it all up because you wanted to be with them all the time.
That was your first mistake.
When you have nothing else going on, you put all your pressure on them. They have to be your friend. They have to be your lover. They have to be your therapist. They have to be your source of fun. They have to be everything.
No one can be everything. It is too much. So they pull away. Not because they do not love you. Because they are suffocating. And when they pull away, you feel disconnected. But you are the one who pushed them away by asking for too much.
I am not talking about sex. I am talking about the hand on the back. The foot touching the foot. The kiss on the forehead when you are making coffee. The arm around the shoulder when you are watching TV.
These things stopped. You did not even notice.
Your body knows when touch stops. Your body sends a signal to your brain. The signal says, "We are not safe with this person anymore." That is biology. That is how we are built.
You do not feel connected to them because your body is literally telling you that you are not close. And you cannot reason with your body. You cannot tell your body, "No we are fine." Your body does not care about your logic. It only cares about touch.
Maybe they hurt you two years ago. Maybe they said something mean. Maybe they did not show up when you needed them. Maybe they looked at someone else. Maybe they chose their friends over you.
You told them you forgave them. But you did not. You just buried it.
Now every time they do something small, it brings up the old thing. You get annoyed over nothing. You get angry over nothing. They look at you confused. They say "What did I do." You say "Nothing." But it is not nothing.
You are holding onto a rock from two years ago. And it is heavy. You cannot feel close to them while holding that rock. You have to put it down. But putting it down means talking about it again. And you are too tired to talk about it again. So you stay disconnected.
Look at your life. Really look at it.
You have bills. You have a boss. You have parents who need things. You have kids who need things. You have a car that needs fixing. You have a house that needs cleaning. You have a phone that never stops buzzing.
You are exhausted. You are exhausted in your bones.
When you are that tired, you do not have energy for romance. You do not have energy for talking. You just have energy to survive. You are both surviving. And when you are surviving, you are not connecting. You are just getting through the day.
That disconnect is not about love. It is about burnout. Pure and emotionally disconnected from my partner.
People change. You know this. You are not the same person you were five years ago. They are not the same person either.
Maybe they used to be fun. Now they are serious. Maybe they used to be adventurous. Now they want to stay home. Maybe you used to love their ambition. Now you think they work too much.
You are looking at a different person. And you are a different person. The two people who fell in love do not exist anymore. You are two strangers living together. And you do not know how to love these new versions of each other..
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I can tell you what I did.
I sat him down. I did not make a big speech. I just said, "I feel weird between us. I do not like it. Do you feel it too." He said yes. That was the first time we said it out loud.
Then I touched him. Not in a sexual way. I just held his hand. We sat there holding hands for a few minutes. We did not even talk. We just held hands. That was it.
Then the next day I told him one thing about my day. Just one. I said, "My boss was annoying today." He asked me why. I told him. He listened. We talked for five minutes.
We did that every day. Just one thing.
Then we started doing things together again. We went to the grocery store together. We walked around the block. We cooked a meal. We did not talk about our relationship. We just did things.
Little by little, the glass wall got thinner. It did not disappear all at once. It is still there sometimes. But it is not as thick. I can see him now. I can reach him now.
Sometimes you do all of this and nothing changes. You talk. You touch. You try. And you still feel empty.
That is when you have to ask yourself a hard question. Do you want to be with this person. Or do you just want to want to be with this person.
If you feel relief when they are not around, that is a sign. If you think about being alone and it feels like freedom, that is a sign. If you cannot imagine a future with them, that is a sign.
It is okay to let go. It really is. You are not a failure if you let go. You are just being honest. And being honest is better than pretending for the next twenty years.
You are not crazy. You are not broken. You are just disconnected. And disconnection is not a death sentence. It is a signal. It is a signal that something is off. Something needs attention. The question is not, "How do I fix this instantly." The question is, "why do i feel emotionally disconnected from my partner."
If you want to try, start small. Forget the big conversations for now. Just sit next to them tonight. Put your hand on their knee. Say something random. Tell them about the weird dream you had. Ask them about their favorite song from when they were a kid. Just start. Because connection does not happen in one big moment. It happens in a thousand tiny moments. And you can start a new tiny moment right now. So there you go. That is the truth of it. Messy and hard and not very pretty. But it is real. And real is what you need right now. Not advice. Not tips. Just someone telling you that you are not alone in this feeling.