By Marie Vakakis, Accredited Mental Health Social Worker and Couples Therapist
A question came into my Ask Marie column recently that I suspect will resonate with a lot of people reading this. The writer had been with their partner for several years; they were deep in the parenting years, and they wrote: ‘’I still really like him. We get along well. There’s no big fight, no crisis. I just don’t feel in love the way I used to, and I don’t know how to get back there. Is that even possible?’’
In short, yes. It absolutely is. What this person is describing isn’t a failing relationship. It’s a drifted one. Those are different things, and the way you find your way back to each other is different.
You can like your partner, care about them and feel distant and lonely. There’s a version of intimacy that has nothing to do with action between the sheets and everything to do with feeling seen and known. Feeling like your partner genuinely sees you, knows what you’re carrying right now, knows how your week really was rather than the surface answer you give while they’re unloading the dishwasher. When that sense of being known slips away, the warmth can still be there, and the love can still be real, but something important is missing.
It almost always happens slowly. Parenting has a way of taking everything, and the relationship tends to get pushed down the list because it seems more stable than everything else. The kids need you urgently. The relationship seems fine, or you simply run out of time. So you pour your energy into the urgent thing, and fine doesn’t stay fine on its own.
Most couples don’t notice it happening. By the time someone recognises it, the drift has usually been building for a year or more. Conversations became mostly logistics and errands. The small physical gestures, the hug at the door, the goodnight kiss, stopped being automatic. The little moments when one person reached out, and the other responded with genuine curiosity became fewer and fewer. Any of those things on their own isn’t a crisis. All of them together, over months, create real distance.
I sometimes use the analogy of a plant. A plant doesn’t die because it wasn’t resilient enough. It dies because it didn’t get what it needed. Everyone’s relationship is different in terms of how much it needs, but all of them need something, and if you stop providing it because things seem okay, okay doesn’t hold indefinitely.
The good news is that the fix for this is rarely the grand gesture.
A couple came to me for a marathon session, which is two to three days of intensive couples therapy. Weeks later, I got an email from one of them that I still think about. She wrote that she had fallen in love with her husband again. What changed everything wasn’t anything dramatic. It was a handful of small but meaningful conversations. Things they hadn’t said out loud to each other in years. Their hopes for their next chapters as a couple and individuals. Their excitement and their fears about their children growing up and leaving home. When they finally got to hear that the other person had been carrying similar things, something shifted; they felt closer and less alone. All of that information was already there. It just needed the conditions to come out.
You don’t need a marathon session or therapy to start. You need curiosity and consistency.
A hug when you come home. An actual response when your partner makes an observation rather than half-listening and scrolling. A text that says I appreciated you making the kids’ lunches this morning, or I noticed how patient you were with them last night. These are deposits into what the Gottmans call the emotional bank account. You need enough in there to draw on when things inevitably get hard.
The other thing worth starting is a conversation, and the way you open it matters. There’s a version that starts a fight and a version that opens something real. The difference is usually whether you describe your own feelings, or your partner’s behaviour. ‘’I miss us‘’ is a completely different sentence to ‘’you’ve been absent’’. One invites and the other accuses.
Pick a time when neither of you is depleted. Not a Friday night when you’ve both used up every last thing you had. Not right before bed when you’re half gone. Find a window when you both have something left to give to it.
If you’ve been sitting with this quietly, wondering how you got here, know that you’re in very good company. This comes across my desk constantly, from people who love their partners and have just lost something along the way.
You chose each other once. You can choose each other again.
