Why Do We Feel Alone In Relationships?

Feeling lonely when not having a partner or other close relationships usually makes intuitive sense. But what about the experience of feeling alone while we are in a relationship, maybe even a long term one that, on the surface, is loving and caring? In those cases, the loneliness can feel more painful and harder to put in words. In fact, someone’s presence may intensify the felt absence of recognition or emotional contact. We may share affection, routines, and responsibilities, while at the same time parts of ourselves remain unseen or unknown.

It is tempting to explain this loneliness as residing in only one person, for example attributing it to our partner’s emotional unavailability, or assuming that the problem lies only within us. There might be some truth to both sides; more often than not, experiences of loneliness need to be understood systemically. Loneliness is often created between people and experienced within each one of them.

Sometimes, people seek therapy for relationship issues not because they can name their experience as loneliness, but because there is ongoing sense of dissatisfaction, disconnection, boredom, or emptiness in the relationship. In my experience, loneliness is sometimes at the root of these chronic feelings. In individual therapy for relationships, we try to understand how loneliness expresses an internal difficulty, perhaps a limited capacity to reveal, recognize, or tolerate parts of ourselves with others. We may long to be seen while having a difficult time allowing others to see us.

The Longing to Be Known

We come to this world driven to develop attachment and connection, since they are essential for our physical and psychological survival. This longing lives on with us, even if life teaches us that we need to hide it in order to avoid danger, vulnerability, or disappointment. The development of emotional intimacy depends on our ability to recognize and tolerate this longing.

Intimacy does not just happen with self-disclosure or by simply spending time together. While openness and consistency can help, there are multiple ways to intimacy, which usually involves the experience of being seen, known, and accepted by another person. Intimacy involves feeling recognized by the other, trusting that we matter to someone else and that they keep us in mind.

Yet being known requires making ourselves knowable. This often requires us to acknowledge feelings that we may have long disavowed: dependency, anger, envy, tenderness, or fear. For this reason, most people are highly ambivalent about being seen – we want it and not want it at the same time, because being seen by others involves taking a full look at ourselves.

In addition, if our emotions are likely to burden or disappoint a loved one, we may offer a self-edited version of ourselves, hold back on expressing emotions, or hope to be understood without risking vulnerability or rocking the boat. While it is true that the other person might present challenges to our ability to show up fully, often our anticipation of consequences, and how we may conceal as a result, is relational, shaped by how vulnerability was received in earlier relationships.

The Relationships We Carry Within

When we start a relationship, even from the moment we choose someone to become our partner, we never start from a blank slate. Who we are, how we feel in relationship, what we expect from them, how we navigate difference, they are all influenced by older relationships we have internalized and made part of ourselves.

These past experiences, especially those that happened during childhood, become internalized and shape what closeness evokes, permits, and threatens. If we feel, let alone express, need for the other, we might anticipate disappointment, punishment, or withdrawal. If we allow ourselves to feel any degree of dependence on the other, we may fear that our autonomy and agency would be threatened or vanished. These relational templates turn our needs into self-judgment or fear so that, even with a receptive partner, sharing about ourselves may then feel humiliating, futile, or unsafe.

Old relationships also live on through identification, a process in which we -consciously or not- adopt or adapt to aspects of our caregivers as a way to sustain a bond with them. If we felt ignored, for example, we might become ruthlessly self-sufficient. If we were raised by a parent’s emotional fragility, we may become an endlessly accommodating caretaker. It is inevitable that early relationships shape our personality, but sometimes in a way that keeps us disconnected from ourselves, providing the conditions for a chronic sense of loneliness.

When Two Worlds Fail to Meet

Every relationship brings together two worlds, each with their own history, emotional language, hopes, and fears. Each person also brings its own anxieties, protective strategies, and ways of maintaining a coherent self. This is not necessarily an issue, as long as the two people are both accepting of difference, open to understanding, and willing to be influenced by each other. Loneliness can emerge when these conditions are not met, since attempts at connection might be misunderstood or unrecognized.

For example, one partner may offer solutions out of concern and care, while the other experiences it as invalidating. Or one’s need for space for emotional self-preservation might be experienced by the other as rejection. Misattunement is inevitable, but it can lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness when the couple cannot become curious about the internal world of each person. When that happens, we are left alone inside a relationship that the other does not inhabit.

Partners may become polarized into different roles: one comes to represent dependency in the relationship, while the other represents autonomy; one expresses anger while the other appears calm; one seeks contact while the other protects distance. Rather than participating fully in the relationship, these dichotomies leave each person alone in their corner. Over time, it can be very difficult to leave those positions and find new ways of relating to each other.

How Can Therapy for Relationship Issues Help?

Therapy for relationship issues can help you uncover and recognize some of these patterns, so that their repetition has a chance to stop. By attending to both the internal factors and relationship dynamics that contribute to the experience of loneliness, therapy can help distinguish a partner as they are from the figures they represent based on our past. It can also show how each person has been recruited into a role that perhaps feels familiar, and how both people participate, consciously or not, in maintaining it.

Change requires more than better communication, because often times the patterns are so embedded that they are hard to see. In those cases, communication can only scratch the surface. Therapy for relationship issues may involve knowing what we feel, allowing disowned needs into our experience, and risking the vulnerability that makes recognition possible. Closeness needs room for misunderstanding, difference, disappointment, and repair. The opposite of loneliness is not always a smooth relationship, but a human one, with its messiness and challenges. Through can help loneliness become not an immutable state, but a signal of what remains unknown within ourselves and between us and our loved ones.

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Photo credit: Alex 張飛