Lonely next to your partner?

You’re on the same sofa with the television on, a series neither of you really chose, each of you scrolling your own phone. Earlier you mentioned something that had bothered you at work, and the answer was “hm”. Nobody did anything wrong. Still, you feel more alone than you did back when you actually lived on your own, and that makes it harder to explain, even to yourself.

It’s more common than it looks from the outside. In a large Dutch study of married people aged 64 to 92, between 1 in 5 and 1 in 4 felt moderately or strongly lonely.¹ What seems to count is how the marriage feels from the inside. In a survey of more than 2,700 American couples over 50, the way people judged their own marriage played a big part in how lonely they were.² Most of this research is on older couples, so treat it as a strong hint for younger ones rather than proof.

Back in 1973 the American sociologist Robert Weiss split loneliness into two kinds.³ Emotional loneliness is missing one really close person. Social loneliness is missing a wider circle: friends, neighbours, people who would notice if you dropped out of sight for a week. A partner is meant to cover the first kind. No single person can cover the second.

From the inside the two feel almost the same, which makes it easy to blame the relationship for both. They lead in different directions, though, so it helps to work out which one you’re dealing with before you say anything.

Which of these sounds like you?

• You reach out and it doesn’t land
• Your talk has turned into logistics
• Your partner has become your whole social life
• You suspect you both feel it

You reach out and it doesn’t land

Closeness between partners grows less in long, serious talks than in tiny moments: “Look at this,” a hand on a shoulder, a sigh that invites a question. The American relationship researcher John Gottman calls these bids, and describes a bid as any small signal that says “I want to feel connected to you”.⁴ The other person can turn toward it by looking up and answering, turn away by missing it, or turn against it with something like “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

In Gottman’s lab, partners who later divorced had ignored far more of each other’s bids than partners who stayed together.⁴ In a later study his team filmed 49 newlywed couples, once over an ordinary meal and once while they talked through a disagreement. The couples who were playful and warm with each other over the meal also used more humour and affection when they argued.⁵ That study can only show the two go together, so it can’t say which one comes first.

If this sounds like you, keep a private tally for a few days. Note when you reach out and what happens. Then note the other direction too, the times your partner reached out and you were the one looking at a screen. Bids are small and easy to miss, so the second list counts as much as the first.

Good news is a bid as well, and how it’s answered seems to count. In a set of American studies, people whose partners usually reacted to their good news with real interest and questions felt closer and more satisfied with the relationship day to day.⁶

Your talk has turned into logistics

Who’s picking up the children, did anyone pay the energy bill, is your mother still coming on Sunday. Couples who have been together for years can talk every day and still go weeks without saying one thing about how they’re doing.

Children speed this up. A team at the University of Denver followed 218 newly married couples for eight years. Those who had a first baby saw a sudden drop in how well the relationship worked, in the good parts as well as the bad, and on average it lasted to the end of the study. Mothers and fathers changed by about the same amount.⁷ Couples without children slipped too, only more slowly.

Doing something new together seems to help against the sameness. In experiments in New York, couples who spent seven minutes on a new and slightly exciting task felt better about their relationship afterwards than couples given a dull one. In surveys, couples who said they often did exciting things together were more satisfied, and less bored with each other.⁸ A new walk, a class neither of you has tried, a city you’ve never been to: the point is that it’s new to both of you.

Did having children cause this? Less than it seems

It’s easy to blame the baby years. When researchers pooled 37 studies that followed couples from pregnancy into the first year with a child, satisfaction did drop, but only a little. Newlyweds without children dropped by a similar amount over a similar stretch of time.⁹ So part of what parents feel may simply be the wear of the first years together, which couples without children go through as well. The Denver study saw the drop come suddenly with a birth and slowly without one, so a child seems to change the timing at least.⁷

Your partner has become your whole social life

Moving in together, a move for one person’s job, a few years of small children: each can thin out friendships without anyone deciding it. Then one person is left carrying everything, from the funny thing you saw on the train to the worry about your father’s health.

This is Weiss’s second kind, social loneliness. You can have a close, loving partner and still feel it, which is why it is so easy to mistake for a problem between the two of you.³ In the Dutch study, married people with a smaller circle around them and less contact with their grown-up children felt lonelier, in both ways.¹

If this is you, the relationship may be fine, and asking your partner to fill the whole gap rarely works. Friends, colleagues and neighbours are what close it. The piece on feeling lonely even though you have friends goes into how friendships grow, and you can draw your circle of friends to see which rings have emptied.

You suspect you both feel it

Loneliness in a couple rarely belongs to one person. In the study of 2,700 American couples, each spouse’s loneliness was linked to the other’s: when one felt lonely, the other tended to as well.² The authors suggested that when one partner builds up their own social life, the other may gain from it too.

So it can help to talk about it as something you share. “I feel lonely with you” sounds like a charge. “I think we’ve both drifted, and I miss us” invites the other person in.

How to bring it up without starting a fight

How a hard talk opens shapes the rest of it. Researchers in Seattle filmed 124 newlywed couples talking about a disagreement. The mood of the first three minutes alone was enough to predict which couples would divorce within the next six years.¹⁰

• Choose a calm moment, not the middle of a row or the end of a long day.
• Start with a specific moment, not a verdict. “When I told you about my day yesterday and you kept scrolling, I felt alone” is easier to hear than “You never talk to me any more.”
• Say what you miss rather than what they do wrong. “I miss how we used to talk on walks” gives your partner something to say yes to.
• Ask how it’s been for them. They may have been feeling the same and not known how to say it.
• End with one small thing to try, such as a walk together without phones every Sunday.

What you can try on your own

Some of this doesn’t need your partner to sign up first.

• Answer their bids. Look up when they say “look at this”, even when it’s a video of a dog. It costs a few seconds, and it’s the habit you’d like back.
• Make one reach-out a day yourself: a question about something they mentioned last week, a message about a small thing you saw.
• Check how you’re reading them. Loneliness can make other people’s replies look colder than they are. In a review of trials to reduce loneliness, the ones that worked best helped people notice those gloomy guesses about others.¹¹
• Book one friend into your week. If the gap is Weiss’s second kind, more time with your partner won’t close it, and someone outside the relationship will take some of the weight off it.
• Plan one new thing together a month, something neither of you has done before.

Sources (11)

1. de Jong Gierveld, J., Broese van Groenou, M., Hoogendoorn, A. W., and Smit, J. H. (2009). Quality of marriages in later life and emotional and social loneliness. Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 64B(4), 497-506. Read the study Back to the text
2. Ayalon, L., Shiovitz-Ezra, S., and Palgi, Y. (2013). Associations of loneliness in older married men and women. Aging and Mental Health, 17(1), 33-39. Read the study Back to the text
3. Weiss, R. S. (1973). Loneliness: The experience of emotional and social isolation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The split into emotional and social loneliness. Back to the text
4. University of Washington (2001). “The Relationship Cure” is manual for emotional connection. News release on John Gottman’s research on bids. www.washington.edu Back to the text
5. Driver, J. L., and Gottman, J. M. (2004). Daily marital interactions and positive affect during marital conflict among newlywed couples. Family Process, 43(3), 301-314. Read the study Back to the text
6. Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., and Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 228-245. Read the study Back to the text
7. Doss, B. D., Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., and Markman, H. J. (2009). The effect of the transition to parenthood on relationship quality: an 8-year prospective study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(3), 601-619. Read the study Back to the text
8. Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., and Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273-284. Read the study Back to the text
9. Mitnick, D. M., Heyman, R. E., and Smith Slep, A. M. (2009). Changes in relationship satisfaction across the transition to parenthood: a meta-analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 23(6), 848-852. Read the study Back to the text
10. Carrère, S., and Gottman, J. M. (1999). Predicting divorce among newlyweds from the first three minutes of a marital conflict discussion. Family Process, 38(3), 293-301. Read the study Back to the text
11. Masi, C. M., Chen, H. Y., Hawkley, L. C., and Cacioppo, J. T. (2011). A meta-analysis of interventions to reduce loneliness. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15(3), 219-266. Read the study Back to the text

About these sources. 2026-10-27. Weiss’s book is not online, so its split of loneliness into two kinds is cited from the book itself. Numbers for the Dutch study, the American couples, the newlywed studies, the parenthood studies and the review of loneliness trials come from the published abstracts. The figures on ignored bids come from a University of Washington news release about Gottman’s work, not from a paper.