Why do I feel nothing for my partner?

Because something has switched off, and it switched off for a reason. Numbness in a relationship is rarely the first thing to happen. It tends to come after a long stretch of trying, hoping, arguing or absorbing, when a part of you decides that feeling is too expensive and stops. Working out what it is protecting you from is more useful than deciding what it means.

What flatness tends to mean

A few causes come up again and again. More than one may be true.

Exhaustion. Small children, shift work, illness, money worries, caring for a parent. When everything is being spent elsewhere there is nothing left for the relationship, and the nothing can feel like the relationship's fault.

A long time without repair. Rows that never resolve, needs that were stated and ignored, a conversation you have had forty times. At some point people stop having it and stop feeling the lack. The flatness here is grief that was never allowed to be grief.

Protection. If your partner has hurt you, frightened you, or made you feel small for years, numbness is a sensible response. You cannot be hurt by someone you have stopped feeling anything for. This kind often lifts, painfully, when the person is out of your life, which is why people who leave sometimes feel the loss only afterwards.

Your own low period. Flatness that extends to everything, not only to your partner, that affects food, sleep, work and the things you used to enjoy, may be about you rather than the relationship. Your GP is the right first conversation.

A relationship that has finished. Sometimes the feeling is gone because the relationship is. Two people who wanted different lives, or who grew in different directions, and the love ran out without anyone doing anything wrong. This is real and it is nobody's fault.

Telling them apart

Ask what else has gone flat. If it is only your partner, look at the relationship. If it is everything, look at yourself first.

Ask when it started. A date usually surfaces: after the second child, after the affair, after the row about your mother, after they lost their job. What happened then, and was it ever dealt with?

Ask what you feel when they are away. Relief suggests protection. Nothing much suggests exhaustion or an ending. Missing them, to your surprise, suggests the feeling is buried rather than gone.

Ask what you would need in order to feel again, and whether it is something your partner could give. If you cannot think of anything, that is worth sitting with. If you can, and you have never said it, that is a conversation.

Your own part

Numbness is also a position. It is possible to stop feeling as a way of stopping trying, and to blame the relationship for the result. If you have withdrawn, gone quiet, stopped saying what you want, your partner is living with the flatness too, and they may be reading it as contempt. The cause may still lie elsewhere, but you are in it, and what you do next matters.

What this might mean for you

If the relationship may simply have run its course, the member module When it is simply a mismatch is about ending something without a villain. If the numbness came after years of being hurt, What this has cost you helps you see what was spent and on what. The free module Who were you before? is for finding the person who used to feel things, which is usually the first step back whichever way you go.

Feeling nothing is a signal that something needs attention. It is not yet a verdict on the relationship or on you.