Married Folk Get Lonely, too.

I met with someone this week and she piqued my interest when she said she learned a lot about how to enrich her marriage when she joined a few divorce groups on Facebook. She said the openness & sharing in those groups as to why their relationships ended was transparent. Given my passion & purpose to help wives thrive, I was intrigued to see what I could learn, too. So I joined a few and the first post to hit my FB news feed. It was on how to deal with loneliness. I chuckled to myself because the reality is many married folk are “married & lonely.” It doesn’t take divorce or separation to feel lonely. Not at all.

While no two happy marriages are identical, every lonely marriage has one thing in common: at least one spouse feels abandoned emotionally. Emotional abandonment can be confusing, vague and hard to pinpoint because the person is, quite often, lying next to you in bed every night. They might even be the person with whom you’re still having sex. But it’s also the person with whom - when you get honest with yourself - you know something is off. Something is missing.

Being in a lonely marriage doesn’t mean you’re physically excluding your partner from your life, but you’re emotionally excluding them from your thoughts. While you two may talk, you’re not communicating your hopes, fears and dreams. You might not be arguing or yelling or showing any obvious signs of disharmony; quite often, you’re not fighting at all, because you’ve found it’s just easier not to. Being in a lonely marriage also doesn’t mean you’re not being an attentive, loving parent. Many couples who feel disconnected from each other actually respond by throwing the majority of their energies toward their kids.

Let me be clear: Being in a lonely marriage doesn’t mean you don’t love your spouse. However, the emotional distance between you has increased to the point that your love is lacking an essential intimacy - a tenderness of words, actions and thoughts. A type of gentleness you know is possible between you two because it was that gentleness which attracted you to each other in the first place.

Most relationships in which loneliness has taken up residence can be shifted to a better reality. With a little work and a few tweaks in your behavior, you can come back to a better daily reality.

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