Feeling lonely in marriage is a painful reality for a lot of married women, are you also struggling to seek the connection that can quell your isolation? Before taking action to cope with loneliness in your marriage, it is very necessary to gain an in-depth understanding of the causes of loneliness in marriage, because this helps you make efforts to deal with loneliness in a right direction by clarifying its dynamics.
The following talks about 6 commons causes of feeling lonely in marriage:
(1) Unhealthy communication patterns:
Lack of mutual communication is a common reason for feeling lonely in marriage. Reflect on your own whether you have already developed some unhealthy communication patterns; for example, you should think whether you still listen to him attentively while he is speaking to you, whether you are still willing to share your innermost feelings with him, and whether you still respond with interest to his words. For another example, once you feel kind of ignored, or feel like your man doesn’t care about or understand what you are saying (but your man may have no intention of acting that way, or maybe you just misinterpret what he is doing/saying), do you instantly have a desire for revenge? And hence you deliberately avoid talking to him; and as the walls start to rise gradually, the two of you become more and more emotionally separated.
In a marital relationship, women communicate differently than men. Women tend to bond over-emotional content, whereas men generally tend to bond over shared activities. A lot of wives actually wish that their husbands could communicate with them like when they were just sweetheart friends. They look forward to this type of communication, but feel rejected, lonely, and disappointed when the reality doesn’t match the expectation. And more often than not, the results are like this – when women try to share their own dreams and fears, their men don’t really get it in a deep and meaningful way and thereby have little interest in talking about it, and finally, women’s words trailed into silence; and vice versa.
Communication should be always a two-way street in a healthy marriage; otherwise, one or both spouses are apt to feel isolated and lonely.
Men are not as emotionally communicative as women are; however, not being emotionally communicative does not mean men don’t care about their women.
For more tips on how to communicate with your spouse, you might go on to read the related posts below:
How to have effective communication in marriage.
4 annoying habits that cause communication barriers in marriage.
(2) The barriers of your shame:
Shame is considered a feeling that we are not worthy of being cared about because of the thought that we are flawed, it is definitely toxic to your relationship. In a relationship, loneliness and shame are often correlated closely, and they act together in a vicious cycle of circular logic like this: when we are feeling lonely in a relationship, we may tell ourselves that there should be something wrong with us. And then when we are feeling something goes wrong with us, we often think that this is the exact reason why we feel lonely.
When loneliness and shame combine, it becomes particularly difficult to share each other’s feelings and keep the mutual connection.
Shame is a self-conscious emotion that we will inevitably feel numerous times throughout our lives. Compared with men, women have a relatively intense sense of shame. Generally, our proneness to shame begins in childhood. Since our childhood, we have already been more or less ashamed of receiving the message that we are inadequate, that our emotional needs are excessive or inappropriate, and that we are a trouble-maker, and that we are a burden to others.
Over time as you internalize those shaming messages, you tend to become conflicted about your own emotional needs in a relationship, and the dilemma is that you are still in need of help from others in daily life, but these needs cause you to turn against yourself because you are not willing to bother others. At a deep level, you are prone to feel unworthy, because you think if you make yourself vulnerable to others (including your husband), humiliation and rejection are going to follow. Maybe you haven’t realized these beliefs in your mind, but most likely they have already been firmly and deeply planted in your mind; again, almost every wife can have such a sense of shame at a certain stage of life, so you have to learn how to overcome it.
Like many married women who are feeling lonely in marriage, probably you would also not like to talk honestly with your husband about your loneliness; and you choose to isolate yourself from your husband – pocket your true feelings and avoid him by emotionally withdrawing; no doubt, that results in more feelings of shame.
Shame can segregate your emotional life, forming an internal prison in which parts of you exist in solitary confinement; in your married life, unnecessary shame may greatly reduce contact with your husband; especially when you are in desperate need of your man’s help and meanwhile you are controlled by these internal shame dynamics, shame intensifies your feelings of loneliness.
(3) Living in excessive secrecy:
It is unobjectionable to preserve some privacy in a marriage, but too much privacy can border on secrecy;
We have started to learn to keep secrets from others long ago for various reasons, and secret-keeping can easily become a habit that follows us into adulthood. Logically, you may know there is no need to keep some secrets from your husband; yet you still hold onto those secrets, fearing that certain loopholes will be created if you shared that part of yourself. Those secrets are often related to shame, the fear of rejection, the anticipation that he is likely to react negatively if you let him know them. Maybe you have already got accustomed to keeping secrets in an automated, mindless way. This kind of secret-keeping may have become a way of relating that seems so normative that you may rarely question.
Secrecy is a typical form of hiding; when you hide a secret from your husband habitually and constantly, emotional intimacy is doomed to suffer. It forces you to withhold parts of yourself constantly; but in daily life, it is inevitable that you feel the urgent need to talk with your husband about something involving your secrets; over time, the excessive inner contradictions are enough to cause you to feel lonely in your relationship.
By the way, to help you repair emotional intimacy in your marriage, you might go on to read the post below:
7 tips on how to get back emotional intimacy in marriage.
(4) Family chores:
In the honeymoon stage, couples feel the passionate love all the time. But over time, these thrilling feelings fade away; and meanwhile, the pedestrian reality of marriage life crashes in gradually. It happens to every couple, and this may make a wife experience a stronger feeling of disillusionment and even loneliness.
After the honeymoon goes away, the majority of newly married women start to be conscious of the sharp difference in viewpoints of many things between women and men, it is often seen that wives and husbands hold the opposite opinion as to family chores. Even though the two of you have fully discussed many big and small family issues in theoretical or legal terms and have prepared their solutions ahead of time, probably you will still encounter unpredictable difficulties and obstacles when putting those solutions into practice.
The following gives you 2 related examples in which a married woman feels lonely in her marriage:
- The allocation of roles and responsibilities in marriage:
In the chore wars, a married woman tends to fall victim eventually. For example, a couple has already settled the issue of husband-wife responsibilities, the husband work full time, and the wife works part-time and meanwhile maintains chores at home; but unexpectedly, this clear allocation of responsibilities leaves the woman feeling alone and isolated.
- The husband’s family of origin:
If the husband is too closely enmeshed with his family of origin, his wife can easily feel lonely; for example, the husband’s mom took care of almost all the household chores at home when he was a child; so he and his mom may both take it for granted that his wife should also handle most chores at home; but his wife doesn’t want to act as a solo housekeeper in her married life, so the husband’s mother may feel the need to rush into the married life as a household helper. It is common for the wife to experience loneliness in case the husband’s extended family excessively disrupts the normal order of married life. Certainly, maintaining ties to each other’s extended family is quite reasonable, but a happy marriage means that both spouses have to prioritize and value the relationship, therefore some limits and boundaries with other people (including the family of origin) are required to be established.
(5) The arrival of a new baby:
After a baby was born, a big number of women start to assume the role of a stay-at-home mom and start to devote the time and love to the baby with all their hearts. However, she will inevitably feel shellshocked and exhausted from nursing complications, late-night feedings, and the consequent complete disruption of her daily routine. In addition, being a stay-at-home mom means increased social isolation, so this type of woman is prone to loneliness in married life.
And it is common for a stay-at-home mom to become so child-centered that the husband-wife relationship is bound to be damaged, especially when both parents have to work hard to support the family (they become more focused on their children when all the family members are together; in this way, they try to compensate for their guilt of not looking after their children at home).
Without giving enough attention to the marital relationship, the emotional distance between couples only tends to grow during the child-rearing process. The feelings may not be timely noticed until one spouse suddenly feels so lonely in the marital relationship that the realization of a lack of care for the other spouse hits home.
(6) The empty nest:
Generally, couples in their late 40s have to accept a fact – their children start to move out of the home to build their own families. From then onwards, the once lively atmosphere in the family starts to become more and more silent. Furthermore, at this stage, most husbands usually still work energetically while a lot of women start to concentrate more and more energy on housework. Then a phenomenon called “empty nest syndrome” arises in those married women. And this syndrome may not only simply make women feel lonely in their marriages, but also go hand in hand with a life-altering midlife crisis because the emotional distance which is created between couples throughout the child-rearing years becomes particularly apparent at this point.
After years of devoting most of their energy to raising children, many husbands and wives have to seek common interests again in order to save their marriages. Without well-established habits and patterns that enable couples to closely connect again during this stage, most women will end up feeling profoundly emotionally detached from their husbands.
Then, let’s start to talk about how to stop feeling lonely in marriage:
Maybe you do not feel that there is something “wrong” with you and your husband right now, but there are still plenty of things that you can do to stop feeling lonely in marriage, such as below:
(1) Give him attention:
When you are feeling lonely in marriage, you two are prone to get into a “Mexican Standoff” – wait to be spoken to or wait for the other to make the first move emotionally. Under such a situation, you might take the initiative to give him attention to get his attention back. For example, if your man isn’t holding your hand while you are shopping in the supermarket, you might take the initiative to hold out your hand and let him take yours; when he is not carefully listening to what you say, you might directly ask him what is happening in his mind; when he is not interested in things about you, you might try to make a conversation by finding topics closely related to him, such as how he envisions his future career/life, and what he thinks about the recent movie/ TV show that he is watching.
If you want to receive focused attention from your husband, make sure to give him enough amount of your attention first.
During the lonely time, it is also inevitable that he fails to timely realize what you are missing; in this case, he may need a reminder, and many times he also wants you to actively express your emotional needs in a more specific way so that you are more likely to get what you expect from him.
To get your man’s attention back, you might go on to read the related post below:
How to keep your husband’s attention – Rekindle the fire in your marriage.
(2) Learn to satisfy yourself when he is not present:
You both should have some separate time to explore what interests each other, and this can be stimulating for you two when you stay together later. The more independence you nurture, the more self-confidence you gain and the less needy you feel. It is always interesting for men to have fun with and know more about a woman with good self-possession.
Another good idea to stop feeling lonely in marriage is to nurture your own social life. Your own social circle can be a beneficial environment that you can have a deep, pleasant, and productive meeting of the minds. A lot of married women admit that many of their good friends are more prone to be on the same page with them than their husbands and that their friends are more likely to provide gratifying understanding than their husbands. Surely, your friends can not take your husband’s place, and they are additional for the marriage, but they can greatly help you feel less lonely in your relationship.
On the other hand, you have to learn how to enjoy your alone time; after all, getting married does not mean your husband can be with you all the time. As long as you really regard it as a project that is worth undertaking, sooner or later, you definitely can find a series of things that you like to do alone, such as reading, gardening, fishing, swimming, painting, hiking… Actually, feeling lonely in marriage helps you better understand your unique personality of amusing yourself. Therefore, when you are feeling lonely in marriage, try to keep trying new or interesting things.
In short, learning to enjoy yourself is a necessary step toward mitigating feelings of loneliness whether you do it alone or with other people.
(3) Schedule times for intentional connection:
In a marriage where both spouses do not connect with each other regularly, one or both spouses naturally feel lonely in the relationship. Therefore, the intentional connection should be viewed as a necessary part of a healthy marriage.
And you are advised to schedule regular times for intentional connection; during your scheduled times, you might consciously ask some emotionally deep questions that can recall the past days when you spent happily together, such as “We have been together for such a long time, what do you think is the most amazing spiritual experience?”, and “In your mind, what are the most memorable things that you have done for me?” Conversation starters can be all sorts of topics that reach your man’s heart, so you might also bring up the subjects like his work, your household issues, or your kids. This type of conversation can be a mix of fun time and business time, sometimes you two need to connect and discuss your calendar or budget, and other times you might do some enjoyable things together (For example, you can watch your favorite TV show together and joke with each other during the commercials).
(4) Seek common interests:
Developing common hobbies and interests is an effective way to stop feeling lonely in marriage because it significantly strengthens the concept “We are a team”, by deepening the sense of connection, intimacy, and especially friendship. And here are some simple tips for seeking common interests with your man:
- Hark back to the past:
Recall the days when you were dating him for the first time. There must be some activities appealed to both you and your man once before. Probably you could dust off and share those early interests again.
- Schedule time for mutual activities:
If you chronically overschedule, your relationship is bound to be affected. In view of this situation, on your mutual calendars, you might block out a fair chunk of time to engage in an activity together (particularly an activity that requires mutual cooperation). Better yet, set a recurring date for an activity so that you both save each other time.
- Have a positive attitude:
No matter what you do together with him, do it with a cooperative demeanor and a loving heart. If you are resentful and sullen, you will defeat your own purpose. Once you decide to have fun with your husband, make sure to put on your bright smile in front of him.
The final word:
The negative effect of loneliness in marriage is probably more profound than you thought. If you are feeling lonely in marriage now, you are supposed to take action to tackle this emotional problem as soon as possible, rather than let it continue to damage your marital relationship.
Again, feeling lonely in marriage is not a rare phenomenon, and almost every wife can experience it at a certain stage of her married life. Unfortunately, some wives feel almost intolerably lonely in their marriages, and they choose to get divorced because they think they should have a better life; however, the majority of wives find a way out of this dilemma ultimately and their marriages get improved afterward. And in most cases, it makes more sense to survive in an unhappy marriage than to quit a marriage simply.
If you are feeling bored and lonely in your marriage and wonder how to make your marriage thrive again, you might go on to read the page below:
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
7 simple tips on how to get your husband interested in you again.
What to do when your husband is not affectionate towards you?
How to deal with an emotionally distant husband – Make him open up.
Signs your husband is pulling away – Why he seems distant.
What should you do when your husband says he hates you?
What to do when your husband is bored with you – Rekindle your marriage.
Why your husband is distant – How to stop him from being distant.