Falling out of love with your partner: is it normal, and what does it mean?

Why this feeling is so hard to read

People rarely say this out loud. It usually arrives as a quiet thought while you're doing something ordinary: 'I don't think I feel it any more.' Then comes guilt, especially if nothing is wrong, your partner is kind, and everyone thinks you're fine.

One reason the thought is so unsettling is that we use one word, love, for several different things. Robert Sternberg's well-known theory (1986) splits it into three: intimacy (closeness and being known), passion (attraction and intensity) and commitment (the decision to stay with this person and look after what you have). These can move separately. You can lose passion and keep intimacy. You can feel committed while feeling very far away. So 'I've fallen out of love' may be true of one part and not another.

What is normal, and what normal doesn't tell you

Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron (2009) reviewed the research and separated two things: the obsessive, anxious passion of a new relationship, which tends to fade, and romantic love with intensity and sexual interest but without the obsession, which some long-term couples report keeping. So if what you've lost is the can't-eat, can't-sleep feeling, you're in very ordinary company.

It also isn't inevitable that everything fades. In work by Daniel O'Leary and colleagues (2012), a substantial minority of people married for more than ten years still described being very intensely in love. That's worth holding both ways. It may be reassuring, because it suggests love can last. It may also be uncomfortable, because 'everyone feels this way' isn't quite true either.

Five things that can feel the same from the inside

• The rush ended. You still like them, trust them and want them around. What you miss is intensity. This often feels less alarming once it's named.
• You've drifted. You've become a very good team for running a household, and neither of you has asked the other a real question in a year. Love may be there, starved of attention.
• Something still hurts. Resentment can feel exactly like not caring. If you think about a specific incident when you ask yourself why you've stopped feeling, it may be unhealed hurt rather than lost love.
• You're low or depleted. If you feel flat about your work, your friends and your food too, the issue may not be your relationship. Joel and colleagues (2020) found life satisfaction, negative mood and depression among the strongest personal factors tied to how people rated their relationships, across more than 11,000 couples.
• Something has really changed. You've grown in a different direction, or you no longer want the life you're sharing. This also happens, and it isn't a failure of effort.

Three questions that may help you tell them apart

Try answering these in writing, over a few days rather than in one anxious night.

• When did it start, and what else was going on? A clear start around a baby, a job loss, or an illness points somewhere different from 'I can't remember ever feeling it'.
• Is it only with them? Is there anything you still look forward to? If nothing brings pleasure lately, please take that seriously in its own right and consider speaking with a doctor or counsellor.
• If they had a great day, would you want to hear about it? What about if they were ill, or in trouble? Care that's still there under the flatness tells you something. So does its absence.

How to find a counsellor or therapist →

Should you say anything to your partner?

You don't owe anyone the raw version of a thought you've only just had. 'I don't think I love you any more' is very hard to take back, and it may turn out not to be quite what you meant. It often comes out in the middle of an argument, which is the worst place for it.

Saying nothing for a long time has its costs too. Your partner may notice distance and invent their own reasons. A middle path is to describe what you notice and what you'd like, without announcing a conclusion you haven't reached.

A small experiment, instead of a big decision

Feelings are poor at telling you what they'd do under different conditions. If your life for the last two years has been work, children and phones, you don't actually know how you'd feel about this person in a different week. So consider a bounded experiment: for two weeks, do a little of what's been missing, such as twenty minutes of proper attention a day and one thing that's new to you both. Then look honestly at what happened.

Nothing moved is information. Something moved is information too. The experiment doesn't commit you to anything. Samantha Joel and colleagues found that changes in relationship quality over time were largely unpredictable from what people reported about their relationships, so nobody can reliably tell you how this ends in advance, including you. ELOVIYA's Reconnect program is built as this kind of two-week trial, and it never tells you whether to stay or go.

The Reconnect program: fourteen evenings →

If your partner has said it to you

Being told this is a shock, and it's very hard to think well in the first days. You don't have to respond with a plan or a persuasive case. It's fair to ask for time, and to ask questions: 'How long have you felt this way? Is there someone else? Do you want to try, or have you decided?' The answer to the last one matters most for what happens next, and it's fine if it takes them some time to answer it honestly.