Feeling Distant in a Relationship? Love Comes from Within

Feeling distant in a relationship can make you question your love and whether you and your partner can last.

Many times when I work with couples I hear them wishing they felt better. I feel their discomfort when they tell me about their partner and how they don’t feel loved. I empathize with the individuals who tell me how unhappy they are about feeling distant in their relationship.

These feelings are pretty common. And there are reasons why. When we fall in love with our special person everything feels better than it’s ever felt. We fall in love with that feeling and we hunger for it when it goes away.

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Does My Boyfriend Love Me? How Can I Tell?

Does My Boyfriend Love Me? What does the flower say? He loves me, he loves me not...

All of us carry around a lot of feelings all the time. That’s just a characteristic of being human. Many of us carry around some deep love for our partners yet we don’t tell them about it. I am sometimes amazed during counseling sessions, when I will ask a man if he loves his girlfriend or wife and he’ll say, “Of course I do,” and then look over at her and say, “She knows that.”

He doesn’t tell her he loves her. He tells me he does and that she knows it. He accepts the fact that she already got his love declarations and assumes that’s all she needs. He already told her this and so it will always exist.

Well…

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My Husband Ignores Me. What Do I Do?

My Husband Ignores Me. What Do I Do About It?

All of us in relationships want to feel accepted and received by the person we love. It’s a longing we all share and impossible not to feel. We crave our person to see us and to remind us that we matter. We need to feel valued by the one we love and we hunger for these reassuring moments.

So the idea that we may NOT feel loved, necessary, or that we matter to our mate is, in my opinion, one of the worst things we can feel.

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Feeling Unloved? Here’s How to Doubt Less and Love More

Feeling Unloved

I was thinking about a birthday in the family the other day. I remembered to wish that family member a happy birthday, and it felt good to do so. Then I remembered that even though I always remember this person’s special day, they never remember mine. And when I thought about being forgotten, I felt sad.

Then I thought more about it and realized that my family member loves me no matter what. This family member didn’t stop loving me when they didn’t wish me a “Happy Birthday.” There was no withholding of love from me. There was no deliberate act of unloving anywhere. So why would I have a thought about this person who just didn’t know something?

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Open Communication for Getting Your Needs Met

Open Communication Helping This Couple Get Their Needs Met

It happens to all of us. We hold on to our thoughts and don’t say them because we are afraid of hurting the other person’s feelings. We stuff them down inside and just stay silent. We may grouse about them later with someone else, but most of the time a lot of us don’t speak up.

If this sounds like you, you are not alone. This is one of the most common themes I come across while helping people in counseling. Most people are aware they do this, and they are not sure how to change it because it’s something they have always done…put their feelings aside and take care of the other person first.

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Why We End Up Feeling Lonely in a Relationship

Man Feeling Alone in a Relationship Broods on a Jetty

I was listening to someone talk about feeling lonely in their relationship the other day and I realized that sometimes I feel the same thing. It isn’t as often as it used to be, but sometimes it’s there; that wonder if my partner really loves me, or loves me in this moment or if my mate is thinking about me even though I can’t feel it.

I think it’s common for people who are close to another to sometimes feel this. I know over the years the wonder or worry has decreased. But earlier in my relationship I often wondered if my beloved loved me when I couldn’t feel it.

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I Am Sad and My Partner Doesn’t Even Notice

Sometimes couples can stand even the hardest things. Take two people who love each other and who have been together for a while. He is oblivious about his wife’s feelings and she is a mess. Make no mistake, they love each other and they long to be happy, but the truth is they haven’t a clue how to get there.

Being in a relationship with the person we love is one of life’s greatest joys. Many of us long for that special person who we can just feel safe and happy and at home with. Most of us don’t need a lot. Love is really simple, a good connection, care, compassion, understanding. That’s really what people want from their beloved.

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Sometimes I Just Don’t Feel Loved by my Mate

One of the most common problems faced by couples who feel distant from each other is not knowing if they are loved by their mate. This sounds so simple yet can be the source of enormous pain and misunderstandings. Everyone wants to feel loved, so why is it sometimes so hard for people in a relationship to feel like they belong?

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When Our Partners Can’t Listen

Most of the time when two people in a relationship feel unhappy part of the problem is that they don’t feel heard by their partner.  When we feel heard and understood we often feel validated and our problems seem to dissolve and we feel better.  If our partner can’t hear what’s troubling us or what we need we feel alone and isolated.

So if it’s that simple, why is it so hard for couples to do it?  Most of the couples I work with want to have a better relationship.  They come to counseling because they want to feel close and connected again.  Both people are usually pretty earnest about their intent.  They see what they want to have, but they are usually stumped on how to achieve it.

Sometimes they blame the other person because they think if their partner really loved them they would know how to make them happy.  Unfortunately many couples aren’t talking about what they want and need from their partner and that makes it difficult for the partner to know what to do.

Here’s what I see when couples can’t hear each other.  One person says how they feel about something, or some incident.  The person talking feels bad about what happened.  What they want is for their partner to understand their pain.  They want an audience from the person who knows them the best.  They want to feel like their partner gets what happened to them.  They might even want the partner to apologize. This means that the listener is not thinking about how guilty they feel for causing the pain.  This means that the listener is also not thinking of ways the partner has hurt them and waiting to respond.  But that’s usually what happens.  One person talks, and the other person waits to retort and sometimes retaliate.  No one is listening.

In order to feel heard, validated and get some resolution, the teller of the pain needs to just tell it to the person that may have caused it.  That’s it, nothing more.  This is part of the healing process that couples need to repair.  One pained person talks about what happened to them.  The other person listens without going into their pain.  Unfortunately that’s the dance that most couples fall into.  One person talks and the other person tops them.  This starts a back and forth with no winner and no end.  Both parties end up feeling exasperated, frustrated, drained and alone.

I help couples learn a new way to communicate.  Both people get their say, but they have to take turns.  It really doesn’t matter who goes first, but it does matter that the listener just do the job of listening so the talker gets heard.  This does not come naturally.  Most of us aren’t taught that sharing our pain actually helps us heal.  Many of us learn that we must fight to be heard, that we have to express our pain in order to get relief.  But that style usually leaves people feeling unhappy and alone.

Once couples learn these tools of being the talker and the listener they never feel alone in the relationship again.  They might even feel terrific, realizing that their mate really cares.

 

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