How Two People Who Love Each Other End Up Strangers
You didn’t see it coming.
That’s the part that haunts people. Not just the disconnection itself, but the mystery of it. You didn’t have a catastrophic fight that split everything in two. There was no single moment you can point to and say, “There. That’s where we lost each other.” You had love. Real love.
And somehow, without a clear explanation, you ended up in a marriage that feels hollow, distant, or on the edge of something you never imagined.
So you ask the question that keeps circling: How did we get here?
It’s a good question. An important one. And I want to give you a real answer. An actual explanation of the process that brings two loving people to a place of disconnection. Because once you understand the process, the bewilderment starts to lift. And when the bewilderment lifts, something else becomes possible.
The Confidence That Costs You
Here’s something I’ve observed across decades of working with couples in crisis: most of them didn’t stop loving each other when the trouble started. In fact, the trouble often starts because of the love.
Couples who feel secure in their relationship develop a quiet confidence that it can handle anything. The love is solid. The foundation is there. And life, with all of its demands and complications, starts making claims on your time and attention. A career push. Young children who need everything you have. Aging parents. A health scare. A move. A loss.
And in the middle of all of it, you make a decision that feels completely reasonable at the time: you back-burner the marriage.
Not permanently. Not as a statement. Just temporarily, while you handle what’s in front of you. You love your spouse enough to believe the relationship can wait. It’s strong enough. It’ll be there when things settle down.
This is what I call hitting the Pause Button on your marriage.
And here’s the critical thing to understand: you didn’t choose it. Not consciously. It wasn’t a decision you made sitting down with a pen and paper. It was a gradual, subconscious shift in priority. The marriage moved from the foreground of your life to the background, while something else took center stage.
This happens to good people in good marriages. In fact, it might happen more to people who feel secure in their love, because they trust the relationship can absorb the distance.
It can’t. Relationships don’t actually pause. They move… either toward connection or away from it. The Pause Button is an illusion. But by the time most people realize that, significant distance has already accumulated.
Two Ways the Pause Button Gets Hit
What I want you to understand next is that the Pause Button doesn’t get hit the same way in every marriage. There are two distinct patterns, and recognizing them matters. This is not to assign fault, but because they explain how both of you ended up in the same disconnected place.
The first pattern I call Parallel Disconnection.
In parallel disconnection, both partners hit pause at roughly the same time, in response to the same life event… but independently, without telling each other. The same external pressure reorganizes both of your lives simultaneously. Kids arrive, and you both pour yourselves into parenting. A career opportunity demands total focus, and you both respect that without saying so. A family crisis pulls attention away from the marriage, and both of you quietly step back to manage it.
Neither of you is avoiding the marriage. Neither of you thinks anything is wrong. You love each other. You are handling life together, side by side. You just assume the relationship is fine — solid enough to wait — while you both focus elsewhere.
Months pass. Sometimes years. And one day you surface from whatever consumed you, reach for your spouse, and realize the distance between you is much greater than you knew. You both backed away from the same door at the same time, and neither of you noticed until you were far from it.
The second pattern is Reflective Disconnection.
This one is subtler. One partner pulls back first. Not dramatically. Just the ordinary kind of back-burnering we’ve been talking about. And the other partner adjusts. Not with resentment, not with a conscious decision to withdraw in return. Just... adjusts. Accommodates the new distance. Tries not to crowd someone who seems busy or preoccupied.
I hear this described in a very specific way. Someone will say: “I just knew they were busy and didn’t want to be a bother.”
That sentence sounds like consideration. It sounds like love, actually. Giving your partner space, not demanding attention they can’t give. But what it really describes is a withdrawal that mirrors the first one. One of you accommodated the distance until both of you were living inside it.
In reflective disconnection, both people tend to carry a quiet belief that things will return to normal eventually. That the busyness will end, the pressure will lift, and the closeness will come back on its own. It often doesn’t. The adjusted distance becomes the new normal, long after the original reason for it has passed.
Different mechanisms. Same destination.
The Complaint That Points the Wrong Direction
Here’s where it gets important… and where most couples get stuck.
When the disconnection finally becomes undeniable, both partners typically experience it the same way: as something the other person is doing, or failing to do: You’re not present. You’re not affectionate. You’re not interested in me. The complaint feels completely accurate, because it is. The other person really has withdrawn. The distance is real.
But here’s what I’ve seen over and over again: both partners are making the identical complaint about each other.
Both people are saying, in their own way, I want connection, why aren’t you giving it to me?
When two people lodge the exact same complaint about each other, that’s not a conflict between two different problems. It’s actually a signal. And what it signals is that you’re both describing the same dynamic from the inside: a disconnection that belongs to neither of you entirely, and to both of you together.
The complaint feels like it points outward. It feels like evidence of what your spouse is failing to do. But when the complaint is identical on both sides, it’s actually pointing inward. It’s pointing toward something happening inside each person, and between you as a system.
This is where the “but I’m the one trying” conversation usually starts. And I want to speak to that directly, because I hear it constantly.
Maybe you are trying now. I believe you. But here’s the question worth sitting with: How were you part of the disconnecting process?
That’s not an accusation. It’s an invitation to see the full picture. Because the process we’ve been describing — the Pause Button, the parallel withdrawal, the quiet accommodation — doesn’t happen to one person while the other watches. It happens to both people, usually without either of them realizing it. You are where you are, with choices made… most of them subconscious, most of them understandable, none of them malicious.
The question isn’t who did more damage. The question is: what do you want to do from here?
Why This Matters
Understanding how you got here doesn’t fix anything by itself. But it does something essential. It replaces bewilderment with clarity.
When you don’t understand the process, you’re left searching for the villain. The moment someone failed, the reason one person is more responsible than the other. That search is exhausting and it leads nowhere useful. It keeps you locked in a story about the past rather than a decision about the future.
When you understand the process, the story changes. You weren’t betrayed by your spouse. You weren’t let down by love. You were both caught in a pattern that’s remarkably common, remarkably human, and (this matters) remarkably workable, when you decide to address it.
The love that made you confident enough to back-burner the marriage is still relevant. That confidence wasn’t wrong about the existence of the love. It was only wrong about one thing: the idea that love is self-sustaining without attention.
It isn’t. No relationship is. But that’s not a verdict on your marriage. It’s just the starting point for what comes next.
You asked how you got here. Now you know. The more important question is what you do with that.
If you can see how you are disconnected because of hitting the Pause Button, it is time to UN-pause your connection.
And if you need help with that, do grab my Un-Pause App RIGHT HERE.