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Relationships
Are You Trapped in a Stale Relationship?
The problem could be a few arguments but no real connection.
Posted February 29, 2024 Reviewed by Ray Parker
Key points
- Couples can become stale over time due to unresolved conflict and lack of shared interests.
- The keys are resolving old problems, tolerating strong emotions, and developing common interests.
- The most important step is acknowledging the problem and having honest and open conversations.
Maria and Ben have been married for 10 years and have a 2-year-old son, Carter. While they both say that they rarely argue and agree on parenting and feel the other is a good parent, their relationship is suffering.
On a typical day, they each come home from work: One cooks dinner while the other focuses on Carter; they have dinner and get Carter to bed, then one drifts off to their computer while the other drifts off to the TV. At 11 p.m., they go to bed and do it all over again the next day.
Their story is familiar. Couples like Maria and Ben and older couples—those in midlife with children leaving or newly entering retirement—easily fall into the same patterns. Like Maria and Ben, they say they get along but feel disconnected or bored by their everyday lives. “Do I want to keep doing this for the next 20 years?” they ask themselves.
I call such couples “stale couples” because, like days-old bread, their energy, enthusiasm, and passion for each other have dried up. But why? Basically, they are struggling with two problems.
1. Sweeping things under the rug. This problem is understandable but serious: The tendency to sweep problems under the rug rather than deal with them head-on. While some couples are wired to engage in arguments and anger easily, many others are afraid of conflict, confrontation, and strong emotions, all derived from childhood coping.
When problems arise, they ignore the issue, give in, and let the other do what they want or compromise to avoid conflict. They end up watering down what they each really want.
Over time, this accommodation or avoidance leads to ongoing and accumulating problems with no solutions, resentments about accommodations made without appreciation, or both feeling that their lives are growing increasingly different from what they initially imagined. If you avoid conflict, you tend to substitute distance—the distance that Ben and Maria feel. They fall into parallel lives. You do what you do; I do what I do with few ways to connect beyond parenting.
2. Lack of common interests. Maria and Ben enjoyed many outdoor activities like hiking, camping, and traveling in their early relationship before Carter. At the same time, other couples may have bonded around going to concerts or partying with friends on weekends. But like most of us, Ben and Maria are not the same people they were on Day One; their interests have changed over the years.
Sometimes, it is because of logistics: You can’t take a young child to a concert or on a long hike. But more often, it’s because they’ve changed as individuals: They no longer desire the adventure, or the partying has gotten old.
For those further down the developmental line, changes are normal: The child-centered middle-aged couple has outgrown their child-centered life, and with kids leaving home, they’re left with how to connect now and spend time together just as the recently retired couple is no longer building their lives around work. Regardless of the reason, they are facing a new challenge: finding common interests that can bring them together.
The way out
1. Time to look under the rug and solve problems. If you’re afraid to bring up things that bother you—the towel left on the bathroom floor—or suggest things you like—going for a hike together—there’s a meta-problem about feeling safe enough to be assertive. Similarly, if you’re still hurt by some incident at Christmas two years ago, despite your efforts to say that the past is the past, your feelings won’t change unless you do something different.
Doing something different is about speaking up with honesty, clarity, and a clear plan, a solution to any lingering problems. But more importantly, doing something different is to stop avoiding confrontation. The challenge is to take the risk of doing precisely that: saying how you feel and need despite your anxiety to find out that what you feared would happen doesn’t.
This is about healing old wounds. This is about running your life and your relationship better every day. If you don’t feel safe bringing up concerns, problems will never be solved. If you can’t say what you really want, your life will be watered down.
2. Get off the couch. If you lack common interests, you need to find new ones, but you can’t do that by sitting on the couch. Instead, you need to go out together and explore. Here, Maria and Ben sign up for a hiking meet-up, or they both volunteer to work on a political campaign. It’s time to upgrade your interests, stop falling into the autopilot of YouTube, Netflix, and social media, have honest conversations about what interests you, and then try out new opportunities to see what works for you.
The theme here is that everyday life doesn’t need to fall into a too simple, unrewarding everyday life. The challenge is to push against this inertia, this autopilot, the comfortable weight of routine, be bold and clear, and say what’s important now.
Don’t settle. Don’t water down what’s important to you.
References
Taibbi, R. (2017). Doing couple therapy, 2nd ed. New York: Guilford.
