By Marie Vakakis
You don’t fight. You still say I love you before you fall asleep. Somewhere along the way, you’ve stopped feeling like you actually know the person next to you.
This month’s question: “My partner and I have been together for eleven years. We don’t fight much, we still say I love you, and we still sit on the couch together most nights, but it feels like we’ve stopped actually knowing each other. Is that normal after this long, and can it come back?”
As a couples therapist, I see this constantly, and it rarely comes down to one big moment. I answered it in more depth on a recent This Complex Life episode on Westsider Radio.
Most couples who feel this way can’t point to what went wrong, because nothing did. It’s not a single dramatic rupture; it’s a slow buildup of small moments that go unnoticed or trying to share parts of your day and parts of yourself and not feeling heard.
When it comes to not feeling heard, this can surprise people. They may think their partner is talking a lot and so feel defensive or upset to find out they might not feel heard. We’re not as great at listening as we think; many people listen just to respond, or try to fix things, not to actually hear the other person. This is an important first step to build up the communication between a couple.
One thing you can try is to be a better listener. I teach couples a framework called REV: reflect, empathically attune, and validate. It sounds clinical, but it’s genuinely simple once you see it in action.
Reflect means repeating back what you’ve heard every few sentences, so your partner knows you’re actually following along, rather than just waiting for your turn to talk. It can be as simple as, ‘’so what you’re saying is’’, before you let them keep going.
Empathically attuning means responding to how they feel, not how you’d feel in their situation. Say your partner tells you they’ve had a really tough day: back-to-back clients, then the payment system went down, and the website glitched on top of it. If you jump in with, ‘’ that’s fine, it’s all sorted now’’, you’ve missed the point completely. Attuning sounds more like, ‘’that sounds like such an annoying day, no wonder you’re feeling overwhelmed.’’
Validating is the last piece, acknowledging that their reaction makes sense given what they’ve just described. Something like, ‘’I can see that would have been a really frustrating day’’, is more impactful than most people realise.
Listening but saying nothing can actually hurt your partner. There’s an old piece of research called the still face experiment, where a parent playing with a baby would suddenly switch to a completely neutral expression. The baby did everything it could to get a reaction back, reaching, vocalising, trying every trick to reconnect. We’re wired the same way as adults. A blank, neutral response from your partner can feel more unsettling than an angry one, because at least anger tells you where you stand.
Using REV is the opposite of a neutral face. It shows your partner you’re actually listening, without trying to fix the problem, interject with your own point, trying to fix it, or defend yourself. It won’t undo eleven years of drift in one conversation, but it’s something you can start tonight, the next time your partner needs to vent rather than be fixed.
