10 Quiet Signs You May Not Be In Love With Your Partner Anymore — Even After A Long Marriage
Phoenixns | ShutterstockYou can try to hold on to the love you felt at the beginning of your relationship, but you might be ignoring signs you’re not in love with your partner anymore. This can happen even after years of a mostly good marriage.
We can fall in love with how someone makes us feel at the beginning, but the real test of a healthy relationship comes in time with issues and healing after hurt. A study has supported that when the relationship kicks in, you see each other's flaws, and the spark disappears. If you don’t actively address issues and resolve them along the way, the relationship slowly falls apart.
Here are 10 quiet signs you may not be in love with your partner anymore — even after a long marriage:
Quiet sign #1: You know in your gut it's over
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When a couple is at the point of no return, you can deny that the relationship is ending for the sake of the children or for fear of being alone and starting over again. Maybe it's just because you don’t want this to have been a 'failed' relationship.
Sometimes the love just dies. When you can’t get the love you want, you slowly build walls to protect yourself from getting hurt and end up becoming distant without actually breaking things off. Research from The Gottman Institute described the impact of stonewalling, which is basically shutting down or refusing to communicate, as a key predictor of relationship deterioration.
Quiet sign #2: You feel as though the grass is greener
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When your heart is not in the relationship anymore, you can find yourself craving the love you’re not getting. Research has suggested this can lead you to unintentionally become interested in other people as a source of companionship. You might latch onto someone else to escape the feelings in your marriage without realizing you need to just cut things off.
Quiet sign #3: You hold onto false hope
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You might hold onto false hope or want your partner to change because you cannot accept the way they are. People can only change if they want to. Holding onto hope is not enough to keep the love alive without being attentive to one another’s needs in the relationship.
The problem occurs when you’re stuck in your negative feelings and end up protecting yourself by pushing each other away. A study suggested that when relationship commitment and stability are driven by constraints rather than personal desire, people may feel stuck, leading to negative outcomes.
Quiet sign #4: You feel as though you've lost yourself
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You give so much of yourself that you end up abandoning who you are to the point of feeling diminished. After a while, you can no longer pour from an empty cup and end up shutting down as a means of coping.
Sometimes it’s too late to fix the marriage. Other times, it’s the perfect wake-up call to do something to save your relationship. If we reject ourselves by not honoring how we feel, then we can set our partner up to reject our needs when we allow things we don’t want in the relationship.
In one study, self-silencing behavior was shown to set up conditions for rejection in a relationship, which then led to depressive symptoms occurring in the person silencing themselves. This created a condition where the rejection of themselves predicted the rejection by their partner.
Quiet sign #5: You’ve swept too many things under the rug
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When the issues are too difficult to manage, it is easy to sweep them under the rug until it gets to be too much to clean up. Yet, communication is the cornerstone of any lasting relationship. A study explained how relationships are protected through good conflict management and by enriching the positive aspects of the relationship. The ability to communicate determines the longevity of the relationship. The longer the hurt is unexpressed, the more it comes out as negative behavior, such as blame or unfair criticism.
Quiet sign #6: You bottle up your emotions
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You can ignore how you feel for the sake of keeping the peace. When you fear conflict, things can fester until it leads to resistance or resentment, anger, and eventually, detachment. Research has explored the connections between psychological distress, attachment, and conflict resolution in romantic relationships. So remember, it's okay to let go if you need to. But the antidote is learning how to express our needs in a way that invites our partner to turn toward us, and vice versa.
Quiet sign #7: You look for exit routes
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When you don’t want to lose the person that you care about, you can find ways to sabotage the relationship to "act out" your unmet needs. Perhaps you’ve ignored your needs to the point that you can’t handle the feelings anymore and seek possible exit routes to get out of the relationship to alleviate your anxiety. A study cautioned that People often unknowingly commit acts of self-sabotage in their romantic relationships, which take the form of defensiveness or difficulty trusting.
Quiet sign #8: You’ve checked out
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You’re in survival mode, and you’ve stopped expressing yourself because it leads to the feeling of being rejected for who you are. You go through the motions of life, doing what is expected of you, but deep down, you are no longer there anymore. Deep down, you are no longer present in your relationship and have checked out because you get more pleasure outside of the relationship.
Research from The Gottman Institute elaborated, "The human body is wired for emotional connection, but when emotions aren’t safe to feel, the body often learns to disconnect from emotions altogether. The positive aspect of this is that people don’t feel painful emotions deeply (or at all), but the downside is that people also cannot feel pleasant emotions."
Quiet sign #9: You’ve lost the spark
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You don’t want intimacy anymore or find ways to avoid being close because you don’t feel that connection or spark anymore. Research has indicated that Emotional disconnection and loneliness significantly impact relationship quality, so the relationship ends up feeling more like a chore or obligation. Intimacy becomes something you do to make the other person happy, but it’s not what you want anymore because you’ve lost the emotional connection.
Quiet sign #10: You don’t let them in
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You've turned away from the connection to meet your own needs, to the point you don’t need them anymore, but you don’t want to give them up, or don’t want to hurt them. A study pointed out how intimate relationships are driven by shared emotional experiences, and the relationship depends on these bonds. So, when you just don’t let them in, you are no longer contributing to the relationship.
If you don’t recognize the signs that your relationship is falling apart and address the issues along the way, you can slowly lose your love for each other permanently. However, you can fix the situation if the love you used to feel for your partner is gone. If it’s not too late to repair your relationship, you can seek therapy to release the emotions that get in the way, so you don’t end up protecting yourself in a way that pushes your partner away.
Nancy Carbone is an author, relationship therapist, and psychodynamic therapist. She specializes in the treatment of personality disorders and relational trauma and is accredited as a mental health social worker.
