A patient I'll call Kyra spent her therapy sessions talking about how disappointed she was with her husband. "Sometimes he feels so far away," she complained. The couple did not seem to have sexual problems, and the time she spent with him still made her happy; there was just not enough of it. Sitting in my office, Kyra was confused. Loneliness was not what she expected from her three-year-old marriage. "If this was a good relationship," she said, "I wouldn't feel this way." But it was hard for me to see how the marriage could be much better without completely changing the personalities of the hard-working husband and sensitive wife.
"I just don't want to feel second," Kyra insisted, as she told me how upset she got when her husband interrupted dinner to take a phone call from his cousin. It reminded her of how she used to feel when she was a child and her mother and sister would talk animatedly with each other. She would tug on her mother's sleeve but be ignored. She thought those feelings of being neglected were behind her—she had found the man she loved, and he was her friend as well as her lover. But now she was filled with doubt.
The dawning of loneliness is a very strange time in a relationship. It can be a sign that something is wrong—but this is not always the case. One of the age-old truths about love is that while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, it also washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. Sooner or later, love makes us feel inescapably separate.
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