Why We Go Cold on Our Partners

 

The story of the path to coldness in love is well known: We start off full of affection for one another, and then, with time, feelings fade. We start prioritizing work, we check our phones while they are speaking, we don’t especially want to hear how their day went. There’s a popular surface explanation for this kind of emotional frost; ‘that people naturally get bored of one another. In the same way as they get bored with everything else – the gadget that once seemed so amazing, or the film they used to love.’

Going cold is, in this story, simply the unavoidable consequence of familiarity. But there’s another explanation, dark at first, but in the end, more hopeful. The loss of interest isn’t either natural or inevitable. The boredom is something at once more complicated and more active – it exists, because we fell hurt by, angry with or scared of our partner, and because we haven’t found a cathartic way to tell ourselves, or them, about it.

Tuning out isn’t inevitable, it is a symptom of disavowed emotional distress, it’s a way of coping. We’re internally numbed, not just a touch based. This can sound strange, after all we might have no active sense that our partner has been hurting, angry or hurt by us. The idea seems laughable or extreme. It makes our partners sound like monsters or ourselves like weaklings, neither of which is true.

The self that loves in a relationship is not the normal, adult self we know from other zones of our lives. We may mostly be hugely resourceful and resilient, but the person who loves is an infinitely more vulnerable being. We should imagine it like a smaller, younger, more defenseless version of ourselves that lives in our heads and is no tougher and not much wiser than we were babies, which is when so many of our needs for, and ides about love were formed. It is vulnerable self that continues to direct our hearts even if we are 6’2” tall with a pointy beard.

The loving self has a gossamer thin ego. It gets hurt, frightened, and upset with desperate ease. You can deeply distress it by interrupting it during the story it’s telling you about the sandwich it had for lunch, by preferring a book to cuddling, or being a bit tricky about what channel it should watch on TV. Of course, these are, by ordinary adult standards, tiny slights but we don’t love by adult standards. These small arrows are enough to wound the self that loves to its tender, emotional core.

Ideally, of course, the small self would at once point out what’s happened, it would carefully explain that it’d been frustrated and hurt, but mostly it just stays silent. That’s forgivable, it doesn’t properly understand what is wrong, it just knows it is in pain and is driven by an instinct to withdraw and protect itself, which translates into behavior that looks pretty cold. If the adult self had to give to voice to the loving self’s upset, it could sound and feel absurd, which partly why it doesn’t. There can be something especially humiliating in having to say; ‘I don’t feel you took enough interest in the details of my lunch break.’

The parts of us that make themselves vulnerable in love don’t obey the ordinary adult rules. The consequence is that the loving self-dries up; it doesn’t want to have sex, it gets sarcastic and irritable, but it doesn’t even know why it is like this, it isn’t putting on an act, it is confused. 

To learn to cope we need a prominent mutual awareness and forgiveness of the dynamic of sensitivity and distress and commitment to decode it when engagement and indifference descend. We have to create a forum in which so-called minor, love-sucking hurts can safely be aired without the other dismissing, as they always so easily can, the issues at stake as childish or imagined.

The touchiness of the loving self is ridiculous, if judged by the more robust standards of the rest of life, but this is not the rest of life. When we have gone cold, we may not truly have lost interest in our partners, we might just need an opportunity to imagine that we are quietly really rather hurt and furious with them, and we should have access to a safe forum in which our tender and critical feelings can be aired, purged and understood without risk of humiliation.