Growing apart in a relationship: how to close the distance

What does growing apart in a relationship mean?

It means you have lost your daily access to each other while the household goes on working perfectly well. The feeling arrives before any explanation. You are lonely in the company of the person you chose, and it is a loneliness you cannot justify to anybody, including yourself. Your body knows it before you have words for it: you stop reaching across the bed, and you hear the key in the door without anything in you lifting.

Then the explaining starts, and it is rarely kind. He has gone off me. She would rather be with her friends. What has actually thinned is the answering. Most of what keeps 2 people known to each other is made of unnecessary remarks: a sigh, a headline read out, a hand on your back on the way past the kitchen. None of it is important and all of it is an approach, and when approaches stop being met the information between you dries up until you are living with a partner who is years out of date.

Read more about feeling disconnected from your partner.

Is growing apart the same as falling out of love?

No. Falling out of love changes how you feel about your partner. Growing apart changes how much of your partner you still have. You can love somebody you no longer know much about. The feeling stays where it was while the information goes out of date, which is why couples arrive certain that something has died when what happened is that they stopped telling each other things.

• The expensive conclusion. Decide the love has gone and you start making decisions about the relationship.
• The accurate one. Decide the contact has thinned and you start making decisions about your week.
• Not proof you chose wrongly. What the 2 of you do with an ordinary Tuesday evening carries more weight than how well matched you were at the start.

The reaching is rarely shared out evenly. One of you has been making most of the approaches, and has been doing it for longer than they have said. That imbalance deserves more attention than any apportioning of blame, because it tells you who has been holding the relationship open and what it has cost them.

Read more about falling out of love.

Why does it happen to couples who are not fighting?

Because conflict and distance run on separate tracks, and only one of them makes a noise. A couple who fight are still spending attention on each other. Distance asks nothing of anybody: the evening passes, the summer holiday gets booked, and you end the year further from each other than you started it with nothing you could point at as the cause.

• A first child. Relationship quality drops sharply after the first birth, for mothers and fathers alike, and it was still measurable years afterwards¹.
• Work that expands. The best attention of your day goes to colleagues, and what comes home is the remainder.
• A move abroad. One of you arrives into an office, a commute and a reason to speak Danish, and the other into a flat and an inbox.
• Illness or caring. Looking after somebody reorganises a household around a task, and the couple becomes the part that waits.
• Phones. They take exactly the small moments that approaches live in.
• Years of being agreeable. A couple who never say the mildly awkward thing run out of true things to say.

The quiet is what makes this hard to act on. When people give their reasons for divorcing, growing apart comes up ahead of everything else, and the people who give that reason are the least interested in trying again². Those are people already at the end of it rather than you, reading this. If your partner is flat everywhere, with friends, at work and in what they used to enjoy, the relationship is where you notice it and the source sits elsewhere. In mixed-culture couples I see one partner read a quiet evening as ordinary privacy while the other reads the same evening as withdrawal, a difference in household habit and not an explanation by nationality.

What are the signs that you are growing apart?

The clearest sign is that your conversation has narrowed to logistics: schedules, money and who is collecting whom. Read what follows as aids to understanding rather than a score to add up. Each one has other explanations, and what has gradually gone missing counts as much as anything you could put a date to.

• Avoided subjects. You both steer round the charged topics, and nobody argues about them any more.
• Fewer shared things. You do less as a pair, and neither of you suggests anything new.
• Thin support. Neither of you brings the hard day home.
• Less touch. Physical affection has dropped away, and what is left feels dutiful.
• Short replies. Answers have shortened, and disagreements rise and then stop without an ending.
• A new first listener. The hard thing goes to a friend, a sibling or a colleague first, every time.

How do you close the distance?

You close it with small repeated contact, because feeling follows contact more reliably than contact follows feeling. A holiday suspends the conditions and then hands you back to them, and one long talk asks 2 people who are out of practice at the small version to begin with the largest piece of it. In a 6 year follow-up of newlyweds, the couples still together had answered each other 86 per cent of the time and the couples who had divorced 33 per cent³.

• Count before you change anything. For a week, notice each unnecessary remark your partner makes and what you did with it: answered it, let it go, or made a joke at its expense.
• Answer more of them. On purpose, including the boring ones. That is most of the work.
• Ask an out-of-date question. What are they dreading at work this month, and then stay with the answer instead of reassuring them out of it.
• Defend one dull shared thing. A walk, a Saturday errand done together, the radio off in the car.
• Say the mildly awkward true thing. The couples I see have lost each other through years of politeness more than through disagreement.
• Give phones a place rather than a time limit. Decide where they are not allowed and leave the rest alone.

If you are the only one who has noticed, 2 sentences do more than an account of everything that has been missing: I have been unhappy and I did not tell you, and I want us to do something about it. Couples leave this far longer than they need to, by an average of close to 3 years among couples arriving for therapy⁴, which says how long drift stays bearable rather than that there is a correct moment to come. In Emotion-Focused Therapy for couples, in the sense Greenberg uses it, the work is to get the softer feeling underneath the complaint into the room while the other person is still listening.

None of this is the right instrument when resentment has filled the gaps, when one of you has already half left, or when no ordinary conversation survives without becoming a fight. Individual work comes first then: one of you looking at your own part in the pattern, alone, before the 2 of you try again. What stays genuinely open in a lot of these couples is whether the distance is the difficulty itself or the symptom of something one partner has not yet been able to say, and that needs closer exploration than an article allows. A session, or the free 30-minute call, is a reasonable place to start.

Questions people ask

Do we both have to come to couples therapy?

No, useful work is possible with one partner in the room. What one of you does with the pattern changes what the other has to respond to.

What happens in a first session when there is no crisis to report?

I ask how an ordinary week runs between you, because distance shows itself in the detail of a Tuesday rather than in a dramatic event. Concrete questions get further than a general invitation to talk about the relationship.

How do I ask my partner to come without it sounding like a complaint?

Ask for what you want instead of making the case for why it is needed. I want us to see somebody together lands better than a list of what has been missing.

Does it matter which kind of couples therapy we choose?

It matters less than whether the therapist can slow the 2 of you down and keep the softer feeling in the room. My own work draws on Emotion-Focused Therapy for couples, which puts the feeling underneath the complaint at the centre.

Is it worth starting therapy while we still like each other?

Yes, and it is easier then, because there is goodwill left to work with. Rebuilding contact asks less of a couple who still enjoy each other than of one who have started keeping score.

If the gap between you has widened slowly, couples therapy is where I help you close it, step by step.

Sources

1. Doss, B. D., Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M. and Markman, H. J., The Effect of the Transition to Parenthood on Relationship Quality: An 8 Year Prospective Study, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009
2. Institute for Family Studies, Reasons People Give for Divorce
3. The Gottman Institute, Turn Towards Instead of Away
4. Doherty, W. J. and colleagues, How long do people wait before seeking couples therapy? A research note, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2021

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.