You are lying next to someone. You can hear them breathing. Twenty minutes ago you talked about who is collecting the kids and whether the car needs a service, and it was perfectly pleasant, and you have never felt more alone in your life.
That is the thing nobody warns you about. Lonely and single is one kind of pain. Lonely and married is another, and it is worse, and I want to tell you why, because once you understand why, you will stop thinking there is something wrong with you.
Why it hurts more than being alone
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When you are single, your nervous system expects to navigate the world on its own. It is on normal alert. It copes.
When you are married, you have appointed one person as your safe harbour. That is what marriage is to a mammal. And so when you are sitting six inches from that person on the sofa and they are somewhere else, behind a screen or behind their eyes, your body does not register a quiet evening. It registers an emergency. On the savanna, if the person you depended on was right beside you and stopped attuning to you, your organism read that as being about to be abandoned. That is why loneliness in marriage feels like drowning while standing next to a lifeguard. The lifeguard is right there. And he is not looking.
So no, you are not needy. You are a mammal whose person is present and absent at the same time, which is the one thing a mammal cannot make sense of.
How you got here
Nobody sets out to become roommates. What happens is that life gets big. Careers, mortgages, children, the kitchen remodel. And the two of you stop showing up as yourselves and start sending in your representatives, the competent versions, the ones who manage the household. You talk about who is picking up the kids and what is for dinner and you never once touch each other’s hearts.
I call this emotional fiat. You keep printing polite check-ins and domestic coordination that are not backed by anything. The peace feels fine. But the debt piles up under the surface, every small missed reach, every time one of you moved on rather than have the hard conversation, and one morning you wake up as two business partners co-managing a house.
The dance you are both in
Here is what I see in the room. You feel alone, so you reach, and because you are hurt the reach comes out as a complaint. You are always on your phone. We never talk any more. You treat your friends better than me. And to your partner’s nervous system that is not an invitation. It is a performance review they just failed. So they do what a mammal does with shame. They go to the basement. Logic, excuses, the phone, the shed. Which leaves you more alone, so you reach harder, so they go deeper.
Two people in the same bed, each certain they are the only one hurting. I call it two separate suffering bubbles. I feel terrible and you did it to me. I feel terrible and you did it to me. Neither of you is the villain. The dance is.
The dangerous version
Some of you reading this have stopped reaching. You stopped complaining months ago. The fights stopped. Your partner probably thinks things are better.
I want to say this plainly. That is the most dangerous stage there is. A pursuer who has gone quiet has not found peace. They have burnt out. They have put down the protest and started keeping a silent score, grieving the marriage inside their own heart while still making dinner in the same kitchen. I see these couples after one of them has already packed the bags emotionally, and the other one is still oblivious. If that is you, this article is more urgent than you think.
I know this from the inside
When I get overwhelmed and low, I do not reach. I retreat into what I call my private chasm of suffering. I go quiet, I look angry, my wife gets what she calls the belligerent Irish farmer. And underneath all of that I am feeling completely alone, like nobody is there.
I learned it early. My sister and I, small, sitting in the back of a dark garage at a childminder’s in Tallaght, forgotten while the family ate dinner in the light. I could hear the forks on the plates. I learned to swallow what I needed so I would not be a burden. Most lonely people in marriages learned some version of that somewhere, and it is why the reach comes out sideways or not at all.
What to say tonight
Not a plan. One thing.
Put down the case. Not tonight the phone, not the friends, not the list of everything they have not done. You are going to turn the flashlight off them and onto yourself, and say the thing that is actually true.
Sit beside them and say something like: I am not bringing this up to complain or to tell you that you have done anything wrong. I am just feeling really lonely in my own heart tonight. I miss you. I miss us. I love you and I am scared of how far apart we feel.
Then stop. No but. No so can we. There is nothing in that for anyone to defend against. There is just someone they love, telling them the truth from the inside. That is the one thing the complaints could never do, and it is the only thing that has ever pulled a couple out of the roommate stage.
What I tell the person in that chair
You are not too much and your partner is not cold. You are two people who both learned to swallow what they needed, married each other, and are now starving politely in the same house. The way back is not a date night. It is going from two bubbles into one. Would you look at what we are doing. We are both lonely because we are so important to each other.
If you want help with the words for tonight, that is what I built Figlet for. Tell it what your evenings look like and what you have tried. It will show you the cycle you are both in and give you the one line that is not a complaint.
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
