Humans have emotional needs, and the primary way we satisfy those is via our relationships. The closer a relationship, the more it satisfies our emotional needs and the greater the emotional intimacy in the relationship. Even though emotional intimacy can exist in any relationship, a romantic relationship is usually how most people satisfy their most important emotional needs.
When there’s high emotional intimacy in your romantic relationship, you invest a lot of your resources, especially emotional energy, into it. You do that because you’re getting a high return on your emotional investment. I call it eROI, emotional return on investment.
If your emotional needs are no longer being met, it makes sense that you’ll want to decrease your emotional investment in the relationship. That’s what emotional detachment in a relationship is all about. You’re essentially conserving your emotional energy reserves because you’re not getting a good eROI.
Detaching forces
Relationships are characterized by attaching and detaching forces. Experiencing positive emotions and love in a relationship makes you want to attach to your partner and keep emotionally investing in them. Experiencing negative emotions and pain in a relationship activates detaching forces, motivating you to emotionally detach.
A relationship fluctuates between these forces. Experiencing one or even a few episodes of ‘wanting to detach’ isn’t going to break the relationship. What matters is, overall, which forces are dominant? Attaching or detaching? If, over time, detaching forces predominate attaching forces, the relationship is unlikely to last.
Stages
Emotional detachment can occur instantly. For example, when someone catches their partner cheating on them. The event is too painful for emotional detachment to unfold slowly. But more often than not, emotional detachment does unravel in recognizable stages. These stages are by no means linear. People can move back and forth many times through the stages. They’re only a rough framework to help you identify where your relationship might currently stand.
Related: Emotional detachment quiz
1. Emotional overwhelm
Emotional detachment begins with emotional attachment. You can’t emotionally detach from someone you’re not emotionally attached to, after all. When you’re emotionally attached to someone, you experience intense positive emotions. But the same attachment can also become a breeding ground for experiencing intense negative emotions due to recurring conflicts.
These intense negative emotions lead to emotional overwhelm and emotional strain. They activate the detaching forces and motivate you to pull away. You may experience:
- Stress (relational)
- Anxiety
- Disappointment
- Hurt
- Dissatisfaction
- Burnout
- Emotional drain
- Emotional fatigue1Wu, Q., Qi, T., Wei, J., & Shaw, A. (2023). Relationship between psychological detachment from work and depressive symptoms: indirect role of emotional exhaustion and moderating role of self-compassion. BMC psychology, 11(1), 344.
The negative emotions you’re experiencing become too much to bear. You’re like:
“I can’t deal with this anymore.”
“I’m tired. I didn’t sign up for this.”
Emotional detachment can occur without conflict. For example, when your partner has found a new potential partner to divert their emotional resources to despite your relationship being harmonious.
2. Emotional numbing
Think of emotional attachment as having a high positive score on emotional intimacy. Say, 4/5 or 5/5. When detaching forces activate, they pull down that score. Emotional numbing is a response to relational stress.2Glover, Hillel. “Emotional numbing: A possible endorphin‐mediated phenomenon associated with post‐traumatic stress disorders and other allied psychopathologic states.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 5.4 (1992): 643-675. The mind mutes down your ability to feel emotions, so you can feel less emotional pain. That also decreases the ability to feel positive emotions.
The emotional intimacy score drops to 1/5 or 0/5. You may say:
“I feel nothing.”
“It doesn’t matter to me anymore.”
3. Emotional withdrawal (Minor)
Now the detaching forces are beginning to show their effect on your behavior. You start detaching in subtle ways. Your conversations with your partner become short and superficial. You’re no longer interested in how their day went. No longer curious about what’s happening in their life.
You might slowly increase the level of your emotional investment in yourself, your work, and your other relationships. The emotional energy you’ve managed to withdraw from your relationship has to be re-allocated somewhere. Arguments and conflicts may still occur here and there.
The emotional intimacy score drops to -1/5 or -2/5.
You’re like:
“I’ll focus on myself.”
“I need more friends.”
4. Emotional withdrawal (Major)
If the relationship continues to be unsatisfactory, you’ll keep emotionally detaching more and more. The small emotional detachments will accumulate, and you’ll realize that there’s now an emotional chasm between you and your partner. You might be living in physical proximity to each other, but emotionally, you’re miles apart. It feels like you’re roommates. Almost no sharing of emotions occurs, and the conversations are all transactional.
Meanwhile, you’re heavily investing in your other life areas, in everything but your partner. Arguments and conflicts are unlikely to occur because they require heavy emotional investment. Emotional intimacy score drops to 3/5 or 4/5. You’re like:
“The relationship isn’t worth saving anymore.”
“I can’t live like this for the rest of my life.”
5. Complete detachment
At this point, you’re just looking for the last straw that breaks your relationship’s back. You need a final, compelling reason to completely detach. When you get that reason, there’s truly no turning back. The relationship can no longer be salvaged. Complete emotional detachment is likely to be accompanied by complete physical detachment, i.e., you break up and physically leave your partner.
You may need to do identity work to redefine who you are outside the relationship.3Winkler, I. (2018). Identity work and emotions: A review. International journal of management reviews, 20(1), 120-133. You’ll likely revise your criteria for an ideal partner, or you may decide you’re done with relationships altogether. You may grieve the loss of your relationship for a few months, and that’s normal.
Emotional intimacy score drops to -5/5. You’re left with a lot of emotional energy that you can invest however you want.
You may say:
“I feel so much peace, so much relief.”
“I need to rebuild myself.”
