Marie

[0:00]

“I’m in a long-term relationship with someone I love. We’re not fighting, nothing dramatic is wrong, but I’m feeling lonely most of the time. I don’t know how to talk about it without making them feel bad. Is this normal? Am I the problem?”

If you’ve ever felt this way, this episode is for you. I’m Marie Vakakis, accredited mental health social worker and couples therapist, and welcome to this week’s episode of This Complex Life.

That’s the question I’m answering today. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, I’d love to hear from you. This is something that comes to me in a number of ways in my consulting room. Sometimes it’s an individual working through these feelings in their own therapy, looking at how their past experiences or their attachment style might be contributing. Sometimes it’s a couple coming in together, both recognising that somewhere along the way they’ve drifted apart. In previous episodes I’ve talked about drifting apart in a relationship, and there’s some overlap with this question.

What I will say is that working with both individuals and couples gives you a particular view of these patterns, and the way I’d have approached this before training as a couples therapist is quite different from what I’m going to share today.

[2:30]

The first thing I want to say is that it’s hard to point to one person as the problem. Often it’s not one big thing. These moments build slowly over time, and I want to talk about that in more detail shortly. What I want to normalise first is that it’s okay to feel this way. It’s okay to name that loneliness. That’s the first step in figuring out what you need and what you want more of.

When we look at a feelings wheel, which I use with all kinds of clients, we can say sad and that might feel sufficient. But if we really want to understand what’s underneath, is it lonely? Is it resentful? Is it a sense of being unappreciated? The more specific we can be about the emotion, the more it tells us about what might be missing. And that might be missing in the relationship, or it might be missing in our lives more broadly. Sometimes we can feel lonely in a crowd. It’s not just about the physical presence of people, it’s a deeper thing.

I’ve worked with people who have children at home and a loving, caring partner, and they say they feel lonely. That loneliness isn’t about company. It’s about being seen and understood, and having a level of connection and conversation that might be missing, particularly after a transition to parenthood when someone is struggling to recognise who they are now and wanting that to be updated with their partner.

[4:00]

The Gottmans talk about love maps: knowing your partner’s inner world, what’s new for them, what’s preoccupying them right now. You can be together for twenty, thirty, fifty years and still find something new to learn about each other. When that curiosity is missing, or when attempts to connect get received as criticism rather than care, something starts to erode.

You’re not ungrateful for feeling lonely. You’re allowed to feel this. The feeling of being lonely in the presence of someone is real. It’s genuinely painful. I know I’ve felt that way at times, sitting with someone and thinking: I know you’ve got my back, I know you’ll show up for me, but I don’t feel like you know me at all. That’s what some people are really missing. Feeling known and feeling seen in a way that goes beyond other relationships.

[6:00]

What is loneliness? There’s more conversation than ever about a loneliness epidemic, and on some level I think that’s true. There are people with many acquaintances and online connections who still have nobody to water their plants when they go away. And there are people who’ve lost the central gathering places that used to provide community: a faith community, a sports club, the natural proximity of school or a workplace. When those structures fall away and you don’t have that sense of belonging, loneliness can follow. And we do bring that into our relationships. We might place extra expectation on a partner to provide a level of connection we might once have gotten from other sources. That’s worth being curious about.

The way I’m understanding this question is about feeling unseen by someone who’s physically present. That causes real anguish, particularly when someone says: my partner is great, they show up, they care, they love me, they do all of these things, and I feel lonely. What that tells me is that an emotional need, a psychological need, a connection need, isn’t being met. And often when people tell me this, they’re hesitant to even say it out loud because it feels like they’re making their partner seem like the bad one. They don’t want to seem ungrateful. But they can’t help naming the emotion.

[8:30]

One way I think about loneliness in a relationship is like a headache. Sometimes the headache itself isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom of something else. Maybe you’re dehydrated, maybe you’ve been at your screen too long. Something else is happening and the headache is what you notice. Loneliness can be a bit like that in a relationship. It can be the symptom that tells you something else needs attention. Something that might be missing, something that might need tending to. And often when someone comes in, we’re unpacking it together, and they don’t quite know how to articulate what it means. That’s some of the work we get to do together. It’s a privilege to sit alongside someone as they grapple with this.

[10:00]

How I see this usually develop is through the small things. And sometimes it’s in how people handle conflict.

One of the ways loneliness emerges is when we feel like we can’t get our point across or be truly heard. We start to avoid anything that might create conflict. Maybe you walk in after a difficult day and try to tell your partner about it, and they jump in to fix it or offer advice. Most of the time we don’t want our problems fixed. We want to be empathised with and validated. When someone jumps in to solve it, what we hear is: you can’t handle me feeling this way. I can’t come to you with my concerns.

With teenagers this is often said out loud in very clear terms: you’re just not listening, you don’t understand. In a couple, it’s quieter. People slowly start sharing less. They weigh up, consciously or not, whether it’s worth mentioning something, because the last time they tried the response wasn’t what they needed. They might say stop trying to fix it, I just want you to listen. Their partner gets defensive. Then there’s a fight. If that becomes the pattern, it makes complete sense that we stop bringing things up.

[12:30]

We become a little smaller. A little more withdrawn. We keep things to ourselves. And that contributes to the loneliness, because carrying everything alone is heavy. And sometimes one partner is completely blindsided. They have no idea that their solutions were unhelpful. They thought the problem was being dealt with. They might have different needs, need different things to feel nourished in the relationship.

It’s the small unmet needs accumulating. The small missed moments of connection. Those bids that didn’t land. You can start to see how slowly, slowly that ice is melting.

[16:00]

Part of why this is so hard for people to name is that they don’t feel they have the right to feel it. You look at your partner and think: I like you, you’re a really good human, we’ve been through so much, and yet I don’t feel known by you. That can be very hard to say. It can seem ungrateful. It can feel indulgent. And for some people, depending on their history or their attachment style, they might not feel worthy of being truly seen. The desire is there, but they don’t feel they deserve it, so they don’t know how to ask for it.

There’s also the fear of hurting someone who’s trying. If your partner is under pressure, working hard, dealing with their own things, it can be hard to add this. But I want to name something important here: circumstances can be completely valid and the impact can still be real. You can have a lot going on, your partner can understand that, be fully supportive, and still feel lonely. Both things can be true at once. We don’t have to choose.

[19:00]

I’ve been in a long-distance relationship, and that’s where this became very real for me. It was a choice we made together. There were things we both understood. There was a time difference, work, study, a lot going on. And it was still really lonely. Being so connected to someone and not being able to access them: all that understanding doesn’t take away from the feeling. We can sit with lots of things being true at once.

Naming it, and then having your partner sit with it and empathise and validate it, creates more opportunity to figure out what you might be able to do differently. But that understanding piece has to come first.

[22:00]

Here’s where I want to go with you, because this conversation is worth having and there is a way to have it without everything blowing up.

First, name it for yourself. Understand it clearly. What does it mean for you? Is it lonely, disconnected, unappreciated, unseen, rejected? Maybe it’s one of those, maybe it’s a combination. Sitting with and understanding your own emotional experience is the most important starting point.

Then, when you have the conversation with your partner, describe your own experience, not their behaviour. This is not: you’re failing me, you’re ignoring me, you don’t care. Describe only what you’ve been feeling. You might say: there’s something difficult I’d like to share with you. Can we find some time this weekend? Giving them a chance to prepare to listen.

Don’t do this when you’re both exhausted. If you get to bed and that’s the only moment of the day where you’ve connected, it can be tempting, but if you’re both depleted after a full day, it’s not the best setting for a conversation that deserves space and attention.

When you choose the moment, be specific. You could say: I’m still figuring out the best way to say this. Bear with me. I need you to listen and keep an open mind. Then: I’ve been feeling really disconnected and lonely. Start there.

If you’re the partner listening, don’t jump in to fix it. Don’t get defensive. Don’t say: well, you agreed to this, or I’m doing everything I can. Tame the instinct to defend and attack back. Be open-minded and curious. Things like: tell me more. How long have you been feeling this way? What was different when we first got together? And thank them for telling you. This must have been hard to share. I don’t know what the solution is yet, but thank you for trusting me.

[26:00]

If you’re having a great conversation and you don’t know where to start, my Relationship Reset course has some really great questions across topics like love, finances, intimacy, and what you want from the next year together. I’ll put the link in the show notes.

[28:00]

If every time you try to raise this it gets shut down, that exacerbates the loneliness. And if this pattern has been going on for a long time with nothing shifting, or if you feel unsafe bringing your real self into the relationship, those are signals to get outside support rather than push harder on your own. That might be couples therapy, or individual therapy where you work on how to navigate these conversations more effectively. Or as a couple, finding that working with someone trained to help you out of these loops is far more useful than continuing to get stuck in them.

My free Conflict Workbook is a good starting point if cost or access is a barrier right now. The Relationship Reset is a deeper resource. And if you need more than that, there is no shame in seeing a couples therapist. You deserve to have the relationship you want.

[30:00]

Loneliness in a relationship is information, not a verdict. It doesn’t mean the relationship is toxic or that things are irreparable. It means something needs attention. All our emotions signal something, and this one is signalling that there’s something you need, or a conversation that’s been missing, or something to rearrange. It’s not a death sentence. It’s the beginning of something.

It’s telling you something needs tending to, not that the relationship is over.

To the person who asked this question, and to anyone else sitting quietly or not so quietly with the same one: you’re not the problem. You’re not alone in this. You’re paying attention to the health of your relationship, and that matters.

The Relationship Reset is built for exactly this kind of moment. It’s an on-demand course with modules on communication, connection, intimacy, finances, and more. You can work through it with your partner or on your own. I can guarantee that if you did it every year you’d still learn something new about each other. Find it at marievakakis.com.au.

If you’ve got a question you’d like answered on This Complex Life through the Ask Marie segment, get in touch. All questions remain anonymous. Thanks for listening.