How does it happen that there are so many people who feel alone, lonely, or isolated around their partner in spite of being in a committed relationship? Does this resonate with you? You may be successful in your work and personal life, living the dream, maybe even have years with a spouse. You may be raising children or even have grown children, and yet the relationship with your spouse feels lifeless. Why? Why are there times when you feel something is missing, and the emptiness won’t go away; when it feels like a dull ache or a longing for something better? Or perhaps your experience is closer to a painful awareness of loneliness and isolation in spite of your best attempts to to grow in depth with your partner. Every time you reach out and are rebuffed, it feels like you’re being cut with a knife. Eventually, it seems like it might just be safer not to care. Or, as Tina Turner sings, “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?”
In very simple terms, there is an explanation.
During the most important, profound, and impactful moment of your life, you came into the world. And you did so already pre-wired with a desire for secure emotional connection. This means you have an inborn need for emotional attachment, contact, comfort, caring, acceptance, belonging, togetherness, value, and safety, first with your primary caregivers, and later in your relationship with your significant other. It’s not optional, in terms of your mental health.
The abundance (or lack thereof) of these messages of acceptance and belonging during your formative years shapes your attachment style and a host of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors related to your capacity for vulnerability and emotional intimacy, as well as your partner’s. If and when both partners are struggling with unmet needs or attachment wounds, it is easier for the body to interpret “lack of safety” in the environment, activating each person’s go-to coping mechanism. Thus begins “the dance,” a painful cycle loaded with reactivity, blame-shifting, accusing, and avoidance, which is the most common pattern in struggling relationships.
Alternatively, and even more tragic, is when both partners reach a state of resignation, a sense that authentic connection seems so impossible that it becomes (subconsciously) undesirable. This is the psyche’s way of protecting itself: a defense against further hurt. Each one has given up and resolved to be content with merely “staying married.” If substance abuse or process addictions (porn, screen time in general) haven’t already taken hold, they’re almost sure to at this point.
If you are struggling to break free of the dance, there is help. Reach out to a couples therapist. There are proven methods which have released countless numbers of people from the pain of loneliness while in a committed relationship. If your partner refuses to go, there are still innumerable resources for you. Science is revealing to us more each day about how to help our clients with wounds such as yours. Either way, in terms of your mental health, love is not optional. It is what makes you human, and you absolutely deserve to discover it. It’s there. It’s inborn. You’ll find it. Start the journey – it’s worth it. You are worth it.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” -C. S. Lewis
