Relationship Loneliness: When You Feel More Lonely in a Couple Than When You’re Actually Alone.

I keep telling myself: I have all the information I need. He is unavailable, maybe it’s not because of lack of love but because of his job (the end result is exactly the same), he is not prioritizing me, he has a different background and religion which would make this relationship extremely hard even if it did work and he never ever plans to see me.

Let’s be honest, I should have gone running for the hills long ago.

This got me wondering, why do we stick around when we are in fact feeling shit in our relationship?

A few days ago during my nightly and insomniac ‘way-too-many-instagram-videos’ scroll I fell onto a love guru called Derrick Jaxn who was talking about a very interesting concept: ‘relationship loneliness’.

What is relationship loneliness?

Here is how he explains this phenomenon:

‘You wanna know what the slowest but surest way to loose your woman is?

It’s by creating for her what I call relationship loneliness’.

Relationship loneliness is when you make your woman feel more lonely in a relationship with you than she ever felt whenever she was single.

And the difference is when you’re single, you’re in solitude, you’re in your own company, but with relationship loneliness there is this rejection, this abandonment.

It’s almost malicious, because emotionally you make her feel invisible like you could care less whether she stays or she leaves, you put her needs last on your priority list, you’ll get to it when you get to it. You could care less about the wellbeing of that woman and it’s not like men don’t deal with this but men jump ship way quicker than women whenever they’re not happy whereas women stay and fight, fight and fight some more.

I had a woman coming in here dealing with this recently and her whole thing about why she was standing was in her words:

‘The grass is not always greener on the other side, the grass is greener where you water it’.

I said, ‘you know what I agree with you but sis I’ma keep it real.

There ain’t no grass where you are at, that is sand that you’re standing on. In fact it’s quicksand, you’re sinking, and the more you pour over yourself in that relationship because you’re trying to save it and the more you water it because you think it’s grass, the faster you’re gonna sink.

The more you stay in this relationship the more likely you are to drown, and by ‘drown’ I mean loose yourself in that relationship because it’s already happening.

The faster you water it and the longer you stay in that relationship the faster you’ll drown.

Ain’t nobody worth that and in fact you gotta get out of there as fast as you can.’’

Derrick Jaxn

It’s rough my friends, to be in relationship loneliness.

Why not just leave? You may be wondering.

I have summed it up to three main reasons:

Alone it’s even worst: you are feeling so lonely and low that the idea of also then being once again officially ‘alone’ leads you to believe that in reality you would feel less alone in your shit relationship than you would if you broke up with your partner.
I can’t start from scratch again: you are dreading the idea of going out there and having to identify someone new to hopefully fall in love with.
Is there really somebody better? Initially you had identified something amazing about this person, this is why you had invested in them in the first place, so a part of you is still hoping that this may be the right person if only…

If only…

There is no if only’s my friends. There truly aren’t.

That same man, Derrick, also talks about the fact that us women choose potential. Men don’t, men choose what’s right there in front of them.

No man says, she’s beautiful if she looses 100 pounds, let me date her and hope she does…or she has the potential to be a great mom for my children, if only she stopped partying so hard and decided to get therapy.

Men choose what they see. Men choose what’s there in front of them.

Us women, on the other hand, we choose potential. We build a vision of what it could be, of what, thanks to our input and help most of the time, we could transform this person and this relationship into.

Spoiler alert: chances are, you will never live out your projected life.

This doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to only focus on right here right now, but where is their path headed? Are you aligned in values? Is he valuing you? Is he giving you the most precious gift he has to give: time?

Why it’s so hard to let go.

Relationship loneliness is a thing, my friends. It truly is. It makes you feel so lonely that you forget what it was like when you were alone and doing great.

As humans, we are wired for connection and we are not wired for change. Letting go is very very tough, however if you feel this deep rooted pain you are feeling in your current state, whether you are dating this person or even if you simply like them and spend significant time daydreaming, you need to ask yourself: is this pain truly worth it?

Is it really worth sitting here wasting our time, our energy and our hearts for this?

I don’t think so.

As we say in italian:

Meglio soli, che mal accompagnati.

‘Better alone, than in bad company.’

I wish all of us experiencing relationship loneliness to find the courage to walk out. Just as we would never do it to someone else, no one deserves to take away our happiness.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.

***