Growing apart isn’t about what changes. It’s about whether that change keeps nagging at one of you.
They came into the session together, both in their early forties, and sat down straight away as if they knew it might take a while. No sign of a fight. No slammed doors, no accusations flying across the room. Just two people sitting next to each other who no longer quite knew how to find their way back to one another.
“We’re afraid of losing each other,” she said. He nodded. That was all they needed to explain why they were there.
On paper, everything was fine. Two good jobs, no money worries. Their youngest had just left home, to a student room three hours away, with a fridge full of leftovers and a mother he really didn’t need to call every day.
So what was actually wrong?
She said it first: he doesn’t talk anymore. He said it right back: she only tells me what to do. Two complaints, pointed straight at each other. And neither one was right, not because they were wrong about what they felt, but because they’d got hold of the wrong cause.
What happens when a child leaves home?
As long as a child lives at home, a large part of your attention goes there without you noticing. Who still needs a textbook, who needs picking up, how that conversation with a friend actually went. You don’t consciously schedule that, it just happens.
When that falls away, it’s not only the child who leaves the house. The attention that used to go there disappears with them, or it shifts, and you usually only notice once it’s already gone quiet for a while. That feels like distance between you, even though nothing has actually broken.
This isn’t just something I’ve noticed in my own practice. Family therapy has long treated children leaving home (‘launching’) as its own stage in the family life cycle, with its own task attached: the couple has to reshape the relationship between the two of them, separate from years of being mainly parents (McGoldrick, Preto & Carter, 2015). An eighteen-year American study of women in midlife showed what happens when that reshaping goes well: it wasn’t how much time couples spent together after the children left that predicted a stronger relationship, it was the quality of that time (Gorchoff, John & Helson, 2008). In other words, the attention shifts either way. The only question is where it goes.
This couple had never once named it as a meaningful moment in their relationship. Why would they? Their child was off to study. That’s good news, not a crisis.
Is this normal, or is something wrong?
This is where people often startle at their own feelings: they assume quiet means something’s broken. Research paints a more nuanced picture.
An American study of nearly 3,800 couples, drawing on the long-running Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, found that couples without children still at home reported greater closeness than couples who still had children living with them (Tracy, Putney & Papp, 2022). Note: this study compares different couples at a single point in time, it doesn’t follow the same couples before and after their child left home.
At the same time, not everyone automatically hits a crisis once the house empties out. Research among 316 parents from different cultural backgrounds found that only a minority actually experience what you’d call ’empty nest syndrome’. It depends heavily on who you are and how your relationship was doing already (Mitchell & Lovegreen, 2009).
An emptier house is no guarantee of misery, and no guarantee of romance either. It’s an opening.
What comes through it depends on what you do with it, exactly as it did for this couple.
So what actually helps?
I didn’t solve anything for this couple. That’s not what I do anyway within couples therapy. During our online sessions, I paid attention to something simple: how much space each of them got to actually talk. Not to respond, not to defend themselves. To talk.
Slowly, they started talking to each other again, instead of about each other or against each other. They started practising loving communication again, even if they wouldn’t have called it that themselves. After a few sessions, she noticed he actually had far more to say than she’d realised, he’d just never said it because no one was asking anymore. She discovered things that mattered to him that had never come up in twenty years. He discovered she mainly wanted to know what their future together looked like, because that gave her a sense of security she’d lost without even realising it.
Free workbook
Recognise this feeling of growing apart, but not sure where to start?
You’ll receive the workbook by email
What if it went quiet for you too?
Maybe it wasn’t your youngest leaving home. Maybe it was a move, a new job, a parent falling ill, or simply a stretch of life that changed without either of you putting words to it.
Quiet isn’t the problem on its own. Some couples genuinely enjoy it, finally some room again for themselves and for each other, without everything revolving around someone else. For this couple, it was different. She’s a real doer, goal- and task-focused. A few years earlier, when things felt unsettled, perhaps due to menopause, she turned it straight into courses and silent retreats. This time, though, the sudden quiet felt different. It felt like a loss of connection. He felt constantly called out for it. That’s the real signal, not the quiet itself, but that one of them was struggling with it, and that they both felt it without knowing what to do about it.
So if it’s gone quiet between you too: don’t ask yourself whether quiet is inherently a problem. Ask whether one of you actually experiences that quiet as unwelcome, as distance, as something that keeps nagging. If so, that’s what deserves your attention, not because quiet is wrong, but because something is clearly asking to be addressed.
Ready to talk about it?
You don’t have to wait until the moment you’d call ‘we’ve grown apart’. Book a free introduction call and find out what’s really going on for you, and what can shift once you sit with it together.
Book a free introduction call and find out what’s really going on for you.
