There’s a quiet truth many couples stumble into but rarely name: love doesn’t disappear so much as it drifts, slipping beneath the surface of ordinary days. Life gets heavier, schedules tighten, small bodies need so much, and somewhere between school pick-ups and grocery lists, the relationship that once felt effortless becomes something you have to find your way back to.
Psychologists have long noted that intimacy is most vulnerable not during crisis, but during prolonged periods of emotional undernourishment — a slow erosion Gottman (1999) famously called “the absence of turning toward.” It doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. Sometimes it looks like nothing at all.
And yet, inside a marriage, it can feel like standing a few steps away from the person you love most, unable to bridge a distance that wasn’t there before.
Dinner Drift
The evening is a choreography they know by heart: pasta boiling, a child asking for more water, the other dropping a fork for the third time.
They move around each other like practiced shadows — passing plates, wiping spills, cutting fruit into tiny pieces.
Conversation thins to logistics: Where’s the bib? Did you answer the teacher? Don’t forget the forms.
No one looks up long enough to meet the other’s eyes.
By the time the table is cleared and the counters wiped, she realizes they’ve gotten through an entire meal without a single moment of real seeing.
Just the hum of the dishwasher and two adults who once lingered at dinner, laughing over shared wine, now too tired to reach across the small distance that somehow grew vast.
Nightfall, Again
He reads the same book again, voice low, patient. She waits in the living room, the house finally quiet enough for them to meet in that tender hour that used to belong to them.
But the minutes drag, and the silence settles heavy. She knows before checking — the story has finished, the lamp still glows, and he is asleep beside their child, shoes still on, hand resting on a tiny shoulder.
She watches them for a breath, then closes the door halfway.
There’s a loneliness that isn’t loud at all. It’s the kind that comes from sleeping beside an empty space.
No one warns you that even the healthiest marriages can enter seasons like this — seasons where affection is still present but harder to reach, where connection flickers instead of glows.
Love isn’t one static thing but rather a shifting blend of passion, intimacy, and commitment, each rising and receding over time.
What you are living isn’t failure.
It’s a season.
And seasons, by their nature, are meant to change.
Understanding the Seasons of Love
We aren’t taught to expect that love will have weather.
Most of us grow up believing that if we chose well and work hard, connection should remain steady — a sort of emotional constant. But human closeness is far more alive than that. It has cycles. Rhythms. Times of abundance and times of barrenness.
Clinical work and longitudinal studies — like Karney & Bradbury (1995) — show that most couples move through predictable emotional seasons. Not in a neat order, not on a schedule, but in a pattern that repeats across the lifespan of a marriage. There are stretches of effortless intimacy, where desire and warmth flow easily, and there are stretches where partnership feels more like co-management than romance.
The truth is that a relationship can be loving even when it feels muted.
It can be stable even when joy sleeps.
It can be committed even when the spark dims for a time.
If you’ve found yourself looking across the dinner table wondering where the ease went, or lying awake beside someone who feels just out of reach, you’re not alone. You’re moving through a season — one every long-term relationship knows in its own way.
Why the Post-Baby Dip Happens to Almost Everyone
For many couples, that shift becomes most pronounced after children arrive.
The post-baby dip is so common that psychologists often describe it as almost universal, a convergence of exhaustion, identity upheaval, and depleted bandwidth. Shapiro’s work (2000) showed that nearly two-thirds of couples experience a drop in relationship satisfaction in the first three years of parenting, not because they love each other less, but because they are stretched beyond recognition.
Sleep fragments your nights.
Responsibilities multiply.
Your time is no longer your own, and the version of you that once had energy for late-night talks or spontaneous affection feels like a ghost you vaguely remember.
Women often experience a sharper internal split — pulled between tenderness and depletion, craving closeness but guarding the tiny reserves they have left. Men often grapple with feeling peripheral, unsure how to bridge the increasing emotional load their partner is carrying. Both end up lonely, but in different rooms.
This isn’t pathology. It’s physiology, psychology, and the sheer weight of caregiving.
And when couples don’t have a framework for what’s happening, they tend to assume something is wrong with the relationship itself.
But more often, nothing is “wrong.”
You are simply inside one of the most demanding seasons a marriage will ever face — one that asks for gentleness rather than judgment, for patience rather than panic.
When Limerence Returns
There’s a moment — often quiet, often unexpected — when your inner world startles awake.
Maybe it’s someone at work who laughs at your joke a little too long.
Maybe it’s a stranger whose warmth brushes against something dormant in you.
Maybe it’s not a person at all, but a daydream, a flicker of fantasy that startles you with its brightness.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov wrote about this state in 1979, calling it limerence — an involuntary surge of infatuation that arrives with a rush of idealization and a thrum of aliveness. And while it’s usually framed as danger, the deeper truth is more complex.
Limerence tends to appear when a long-term bond has gone quiet.
When love is still there but buried beneath logistics.
When the psyche is thirsty for vitality and mistake-proof attention.
It isn’t evidence of betrayal.
It’s evidence of starvation.
Not starvation for another person, but for parts of yourself that haven’t had oxygen in a long time — the playful part, the desired part, the fully-seen part.
And so your imagination starts scanning for a source.
If this has happened to you, it doesn’t mean your marriage is broken. It means something in you is trying to speak.
Soft reflection questions can gently turn the light inward:
What does this fantasy offer me that I am missing?
When was the last time I felt chosen or alive in my own relationship?
What hunger is this pointing to?
Limerence is not a roadmap — it’s a compass.
And if listened to early enough, it can guide you not away from your marriage, but back toward the tender, unattended places inside it. For a deeper exploration of this process read: The Spark Outside Marriage: Understanding Limerence, CEN, and Fearful-Avoidant Patterns (+ Free Guide)
The Fork in the Road
Every couple drifting through an emotional autumn eventually reaches it — the quiet, almost invisible crossroads. Nothing dramatic announces it. There’s no slammed door, no decisive moment. Just a subtle shift in how you meet each other.
Two paths open.
One is the path of leaning away.
It’s paved with delayed conversations, half-hearted nods, habitual criticism, small resentments left to accumulate like dust. Emotional outsourcing begins — not always toward a person, sometimes toward work, screens, or the numbing busyness of caretaking. The distance grows inch by inch, almost politely.
The other path is leaning in.
It isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel cinematic. It looks like curiosity in moments of tension, like saying “I miss you” instead of “Why are you always distant?” It sounds like taking responsibility for your part of the dance. It feels like catching the faintest flicker of disconnection and choosing to meet it with care.
John Gottman’s research (1999) long suggested a simple truth: marriages are built not on grand gestures, but on tiny moments of turning toward one another. A glance. A question. A softened tone. These microscopic repairs, done consistently, are what thaw emotional winter and prevent long, barren stretches.
The crossroads isn’t about choosing romance.
It’s about choosing honesty.
Choosing to name what’s been fading.
Choosing to reach out even when it feels safer to retreat.
If both partners choose that — even imperfectly — autumn can become a season of renewal rather than decline.
The soil is still warm.
Everything can still grow.
Moving from Autumn Back to Spring
Love doesn’t vanish; it changes form. It slips quietly into routines, hides beneath exhaustion, and waits for small openings to be noticed again. Reconnection doesn’t require grand gestures. It begins with tiny, intentional breaths of attention, gestures of care, and gentle invitations to re-enter one another’s world.
The first step is restoring safety — for yourself and for each other. Relationships grow in warmth when both partners feel seen and understood rather than criticized. Notice how conflicts unfold, where words trigger defensiveness, and how exhaustion amplifies tension (more on that here). Practices drawn from Internal Family Systems remind us that beneath every reaction is a vulnerable part of the self seeking recognition. Meeting that part with curiosity and kindness can soften both your own and your partner’s nervous systems, creating the space for closeness to re-emerge.
Next comes relearning each other. Love lives in attention. Tiny, repeated gestures — a question about the day, noticing a sigh, returning a glance — are the seeds of intimacy. John Gottman’s research (1999) shows that these “micro-moments” accumulate over time, turning toward rather than away, repairing quiet cracks in the connection. Rituals of togetherness, whether a morning coffee, a short evening walk, or a shared gratitude practice, help couples anchor each other amid the chaos.
Finally, there is repair and renewal. This is about curiosity and creativity: speaking without blame, taking responsibility for missteps, and introducing novelty where life has grown predictable. You may want to check out: Childhood Emotional Neglect and Conflict Resolution in Relationships: How the 5 Love Languages Can Help Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg, 2003) offers tools to express unmet needs without triggering defensiveness. Shared projects, learning something new together, playful moments — even small ones — spark the nervous system and invite desire to return. Esther Perel (2006) reminds us that curiosity, novelty, and self-expression are not luxuries in long-term relationships; they are lifelines.
Repair is also about timing and tone. A gentle acknowledgment of hurt, a soft apology, or a brief check-in can prevent days of cold silence from hardening into weeks. These acts are not dramatic rescues; they are deliberate, mundane, human, and profoundly effective.
The path back to spring is rarely linear. There will be setbacks, lapses into old habits, moments of doubt. Yet each small reconnection — each intentional turn toward one another — warms the soil. Gradually, autumn’s quiet drift can give way to tenderness, attentiveness, and desire once again.
Love, like the seasons, is cyclical. It waits patiently for care, ready to bloom when tended.
My Gift to You: A Free Companion Guide for Rekindling
Sometimes, the thought of rebuilding intimacy can feel overwhelming. Where do you start when small moments have been missed for months, or even years? One gentle way to begin is with a set of small, deliberate practices — a guide to returning attention, curiosity, and tenderness to the relationship.
These are not rigid exercises, but invitations: notice the little gestures your partner offers each day, pause to breathe together, check in on feelings without blame, and create tiny rituals that are just yours — a shared cup of coffee in the morning, a short walk after dinner, or a hand held while doing chores. Reflecting on your own patterns — when you withdraw, what triggers defensiveness, what helps you feel safe — can illuminate pathways back to connection.
A companion guide can help anchor these efforts: short reflection prompts, sample ways to speak without accusation, a seven-day micro-practice plan, and simple rituals of gratitude and touch. It turns the abstract idea of “rebuilding closeness” into actionable, gentle steps that fit into real life.
A Book That Brings It All Together
If the idea of love as a changing, cyclical force resonates, Gary Chapman’s The Four Seasons of Marriage is a natural next read. It’s not a manual, but a mirror: a reflection of marriages that have weathered frost and bloom alike. Chapman writes with warmth, insight, and an eye for the subtle patterns that can carry couples from quiet drift back into closeness.
The book helps readers identify which season their relationship is currently in and provides exercises to deepen contentment or warm a cold bond. Couples often say it opened gentle conversations they had never been able to start before — not about what’s wrong, but about what might yet grow. Reading it together can illuminate small shifts, moments of attention, and practices that help the relationship return to spring after a long autumn.
If you’re planning to read Chapman and wish to support both independent bookstores and my work, here are my Bookshop links — one for the US, and one for the UK. Thank you!
The Renewal
Weeks, months, sometimes even years can pass before a couple notices the quiet shift. And then, almost imperceptibly, something softens. A glance lingers a moment longer. A hand finds another in the kitchen. Laughter returns, not loud or urgent, but warm and real, carrying the memory of all that once felt effortless.
The couple from the opening vignette might still move through routines, still balance children and work, still face exhaustion. But now there is a subtle change: awareness. They notice the small bids for connection, answer them, and allow tenderness to grow in tiny increments. Autumn has been met with curiosity, care, and patience — and beneath its fallen leaves, spring is already taking root.
Love, like the seasons, is cyclical. There will always be winters, when the world feels cold and the heart feels distant. There will be autumns, when connection drifts in the background of busy life. But every season holds within it the seed of renewal. What matters is remembering that growth is still possible, that tenderness can be tended, that intimacy can be rekindled — and that these quiet moments, repeated over time, are the truest signs of a love alive.
Even after years, even after drift, love can return — not as it once was, but as something deeper, wiser, and full of quiet grace.
References:
Chapman, G. (2005). The Four Seasons of Marriage. Tyndale House.
- Get on Bookshop US | Bookshop UK
Gottman, J., & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books.
- Get on Bookshop US | Bookshop UK
Karney, B. R., & Bradbury, T. N. (1995). The longitudinal course of marital quality and stability: A review of theory, methods, and research. Psychological Bulletin, 118(1), 3–34.
Perel, E. (2006). Mating in Captivity. HarperCollins.
- Get on Bookshop US | Bookshop UK
Rosenberg, M. B. (2003). Nonviolent Communication. PuddleDancer Press.
- Get on Bookshop US | Bookshop UK
Shapiro, A. (2000). Couples and the post-baby dip: Managing intimacy and identity. Journal of Family Studies, 6(2), 127–145.
Tennov, D. (1979). Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Scarborough House.
- Get on Bookshop US | Bookshop UK
Explore Further:
Why Couples Bicker Over Small Things (Part 2 of 3)—Stress, Triggers, and Miscommunication
How to Stop the Cycle of Conflict When One Partner Shuts Down and the Other Gets Loud
When Your Partner Shuts Down: How to Stay Connected Through Exhaustion, Loss, and Silence
Leave a Reply