After coaching one-on-one clients for years, I’ve discovered the answer to a burning question for many of my midlife clients: It’s how couples drift apart in long term marriages.
It’s not that they have a lack of respect or love for their spouse, but rather a loss in a deep connective way.
They become stale.
Not horrible. Not divorce ready. Just stale.
Are they great roommates? Yes. Household responsibilities are under control and on auto-pilot. Dinner consists of the same predictable meals sprinkled with polite, yet meaningless conversation.
The distance that grows between two people rarely happens all at once. There is no single moment, no big blow-up, no dramatic turning point you can point to later and say, “That is when things changed.”
It happens gradually and in the small, unremarkable moments that pile up over years. Missed conversations that never quite happen. Phones at the dinner table. Roles that harden into routines. Two people who love each other, living mostly parallel lives, wondering somewhere in the back of their minds how they got here.
Why We Stop Seeing Our Partner Clearly
There is a fascinating part of your brain called the reticular activating system, and it acts as a filter for everything you pay attention to. It is why when you buy a new car, you suddenly start seeing that exact car everywhere. Your brain has been told to notice it, so it does.
The same thing happens when couples begin to drift apart in long-term marriages.
When you start focusing on what frustrates you about your partner, your brain will find more of it. Every little habit, every shortcoming, every thing that gets on your last nerve becomes easier and easier to see. Not because there is more of it, but because your brain has been trained to look for it.
The flip side of that is equally true and far more powerful.
When you intentionally shift your focus toward what you genuinely admire about your partner, your brain starts filtering for that instead. And the research backs this up.
Psychologist, John Gottman, spent decades studying couples and found that healthy, lasting relationships have roughly five positive interactions for every one negative one. That ratio matters more than most people realize. It is not about being unrealistically positive. It is about where your attention is spending most of its time.
Your brain finds what you train it to look for. The question is whether you are scanning for what is wrong or what is still worth fighting for.
The Assumption That Causes Drift
One of the most common things I hear from people in long-term marriages is some version of this: “We just grew apart.“ And when I ask what they mean, it almost always comes down to the same thing.
They stopped asking questions. They assumed they already knew the answers.
Here is the problem with that.
You are not the same person you were ten years ago. Neither is your partner. Your priorities have shifted. Your fears have changed. What you need from the relationship today is probably different from what you needed when you first started building it. And if you have not been asking, you genuinely may not know who your partner is becoming.
Gottman calls this building your partner’s love map, which is essentially a detailed, current understanding of your partner’s inner world. Their worries, their dreams, their stressors, what they are proud of, what they are carrying.
Couples who consistently update that knowledge of each other are far more resilient when hard seasons hit. Couples who assume they already know tend to get blindsided.
A simple place to start: ask your partner one question this week that you do not already know the answer to.
- What are you most proud of right now?
- What has been weighing on you lately?
- What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
Those questions open doors that assumptions keep closed.
The Phone Is Not as Harmless as It Feels
I want to spend a minute on something that sounds super small but is doing a lot of damage in a lot of long-term relationships right now.
Every time you pick up your phone mid-conversation, mid-dinner, mid-whatever moment you are in together, you are sending a signal to the person across from you. Not intentionally. But clearly. The signal is: something else has my attention right now. And that signal lands louder than most people think.
Researcher, Sherry Turkle at MIT, has studied the effects of phones on conversation and connection extensively. One of her findings was that the mere presence of a phone on the table, even if no one touches it, reduces the depth of connection in a conversation.
People share less. They go shallower. Because somewhere in the back of their minds they know an interruption is possible, and they protect themselves accordingly.
Putting the phone away completely, not just face down on the table, is one of the simplest and most underrated things you can do for your relationship. It costs nothing. And it says everything about where your attention actually is.
A Few Things Worth Trying This Week to Bridge the Gap
Write down what you admire.
Not what your partner does, like taking care of the house or being a good provider. Who they are. Their character, their humor, their resilience, the things about them that you would miss if they were gone. Then read it. And if you feel comfortable, share it.
Ask instead of assume.
Pick one question this week that you genuinely do not know the answer to. Sit with the answer. Follow up. Be curious about the person sitting across from you like you would be curious about someone you were just getting to know.
Do something neither of you would normally suggest.
Not dinner at the usual spot. Something a little unexpected. A cooking class, a hike somewhere new, a concert, a drive with no destination. Novelty matters in relationships. And when you’ve been married for years, this is essential.
Research from psychologist Arthur Aron shows that couples who regularly try new activities together experience measurable increases in relationship satisfaction. The brain associates the excitement of something new with the person you are experiencing it with. Use that.
Protect some phone-free time together.
Even one hour. Dinner, a walk, coffee in the morning. The quality of attention you give someone is one of the most honest expressions of how much they matter to you.
This Week on Beyond the Gray
Rob is back with me on Tuesday’s episode of Beyond the Gray (Episode #8), and we are getting into all of this in a way that I think is going to resonate with a lot of people.
We talk about what the disconnect actually looked like in our own marriage, a couple of tools we have used that made a real difference, and some honest questions worth bringing to your own relationship.
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I want to leave you with a quote that stuck with me recently.
“Your spouse is not a finished book. They are chapters you have not read yet.”
And maybe the most important thing you can do right now is get curious again about who they are becoming, not who they were when you met.
Sometimes the path out of the gray leads you right back to the person who has been beside you the whole time. I know this to be true for me and Rob. And for that, I’m grateful beyond measure.
If you and your spouse find yourself in a place of silent disconnect, check out the His/Hers/Ours series HERE. It’s the one thing that drastically helped our marriage, and it can help yours too.
Here’s to living beyond the gray,
Kari
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