Articles |
Boredom and Disconnection in Love
A lyrical essay on how boredom and disconnection haunt love relationships—not as proof of their failure, but as invitations to deeper presence, risk, and recognition. by Niko Marinos Psychologist/ Psychotherapist 
Introductory Text Love, like any long voyage, passes through both storms and stillness. Yet one of the most difficult phases for couples to name is neither betrayal nor conflict, but the quieter erosion that comes when days pile up without surprise or recognition. Boredom and disconnection are often treated as failures—proof that passion has died or that something essential is missing. But what if they are signals, thresholds, or even disguised invitations? This essay explores the subtle ways love falters into silence, and how those silences can be heard, named, and transformed. ⸻ Author’s Note This essay emerges from years of listening to couples who do not come to therapy because they are fighting, but because they have stopped fighting. Their relationships have settled into what they describe as “calm,” yet beneath the surface there is a profound loneliness. As a psychodynamic psychotherapist, I wanted to bring together clinical echoes, theoretical thought, and the lyrical language of literature to trace the lived texture of boredom and disconnection. My hope is not to prescribe solutions but to open a space where these experiences are recognized as part of love’s terrain, and where the act of naming becomes itself a form of intimacy. ⸻ Boredom and Disconnection in Love ⸻ Boredom in love rarely arrives with a bang. It creeps in softly, like damp air seeping through a crack in the window. Couples often mistake it for safety: we’ve reached calm waters, no more storms. Yet calm can tilt into stillness, and stillness into a stagnation where intimacy quietly gasps for air. What once felt like the warm pulse of companionship becomes a muted hum, background noise against which life continues. The faded thread of everyday life I think of a couple who once described their evenings as a “ritual of silence.” She prepared dinner, he washed the dishes, they scrolled their respective screens, and the day ended. No fights, no visible wounds—just a slow fading of the thread that once bound them. The boredom was not about each other’s company but about the loss of vitality in the space between. As Christopher Bollas once suggested, boredom can signal the repression of desire, the avoidance of aliveness that feels dangerous. When intimacy becomes invisible Disconnection is more subtle still. Partners sleep side by side, yet it feels like an ocean lies between them. One partner said to me: “I don’t remember the last time he looked at me, really looked.” Here, the absence is not physical but symbolic: the loss of recognition. Jessica Benjamin calls it the collapse of mutual recognition—the moment the other no longer serves as an alive subject but as a fixed object. You are there, but you are not felt. The paradox of safety There’s an irony here. Many couples work hard to avoid conflict, to keep the peace. Yet the very absence of friction can become lifeless. Winnicott noted that vitality requires risk; a relationship that is too manicured, too cautious, may fall into a kind of internal exile. The couple becomes polite roommates, carefully stepping around each other’s pain but also around each other’s passion. Reclaiming the unknown The way back is not through novelty tricks or prescribed “date nights.” Those can help, but they often graze the surface. What boredom and disconnection are really asking is: Will you dare to meet me as an unknown again? Will you risk questions without easy answers? One partner might ask: “What are you afraid to tell me?” Another: “When did you last feel alive with me, and when did you stop?” These questions unsettle, but they reopen the possibility of surprise. Case echoes I recall a man who admitted, after twenty years of marriage, that he had grown bored not with his wife but with himself. He had stopped reading, stopped creating, stopped courting his own vitality. In his words: “I wanted her to entertain me when I had abandoned my own imagination.” His boredom was less about her than about the echo chamber of his own withdrawal. Another woman spoke of the ache of invisibility: “I am everyone’s caretaker—our children’s, my parents’, even his—but I am no one’s desire.” Her disconnection was not the absence of conversation but the absence of being chosen, seen, mirrored. Theory folded into the lived Boredom, then, can be understood psychoanalytically as a defense—protecting the couple from the danger of raw truth, from acknowledging anger, unmet longing, or ambivalence. Disconnection is its companion: a refusal of recognition, a retreat into internal fortresses where safety replaces presence. Yet both boredom and disconnection are also invitations. They signal that something vital has been buried, that the relationship must pass from the first intoxication of love into the deeper, riskier ground of presence. Closing thought Every love, if it endures, will face its seasons of quiet discontent. The question is whether the couple can hear boredom not as the end but as a threshold. To stay with it—not rushing to fix, not fleeing to distraction—can open the possibility that love grows less like a firework and more like an underground spring. Hidden at first, yet carrying the force to renew. ⸻ Glossary • Boredom (in love): A state where intimacy feels muted, often masking unspoken conflict, desire, or fear. • Disconnection: The experience of being physically present but symbolically unseen by a partner. • Recognition (Jessica Benjamin): The mutual acknowledgment of the other as a subject with their own vitality. • Mutuality: The shared space of exchange where both partners remain alive and responsive to one another. • Relational Integrity: A therapeutic framework emphasizing symbolic honesty, emotional responsibility, and the capacity to “stay with” discomfort in relationships. • Winnicott’s Vitality: The idea that aliveness requires risk, play, and unpredictability, not merely safety. ⸻ References & Influences • Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. (1987). • Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. (1988). • Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. (1971). • Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. (1977). • Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. (1927). [for its portrayal of the silences and inner lives within marriage] • Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. (2006). ⸻ |