Falling out of love: why it happens and what it means

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Sometimes it happens so slowly that you only notice it afterwards. The excitement when they came home has turned into a polite hello. You love them, probably, but you are not sure you are still in love. And then the questions arrive: Is this normal? Is something wrong with me? Is this the end?

Falling out of love is one of the least talked-about experiences in relationships, and one of the most common. In this article I look at why it happens, what research tells us about love over time, and how to understand what your feelings might mean.

The shape of love over time

Psychologists often describe romantic love as having several parts. One well-known model distinguishes passion, intimacy and commitment.

In many relationships, these parts change at different speeds. Passion, the intense longing and physical attraction of the early months, usually becomes calmer. Intimacy and commitment can grow deeper. When passion fades, some people interpret it as love fading, even though something else may be growing in its place.

Long-term love can stay intense

There is also good news from research. In a brain imaging study, people who had been married for about 21 years on average and still reported being intensely in love showed activity in reward areas similar to people in early love, together with areas linked with attachment (Acevedo et al., 2012). Intense love over decades is possible for some couples. It tends to look calmer than early infatuation, with less anxiety and more security.

Many couples experience a dip

At the same time, many couples experience declines in romantic love, especially in the first years together. Researchers who followed newlyweds over their first year of marriage studied how love changes in this period, and noted that changes in love in newlyweds predict how marriages develop later (Acevedo et al., 2020). Relationship satisfaction also tends to decline slightly over time, both in couples who become parents and in those who do not (Mitnick et al., 2009).

So a decline in feelings is common. What it means depends on the story behind it.

Why people fall out of love

There is rarely a single reason. Some common ones:

• Routine and stress: work, children, illness, moving countries. Little time and energy is left for each other, and the relationship becomes logistics.
• Accumulated hurt: disappointments that were never spoken about or repaired slowly create distance.
• Feeling unappreciated: in experiments, expressing gratitude to a partner led people to feel more positive about the partner and more comfortable voicing concerns (Lambert & Fincham, 2011). When it disappears, warmth often follows.
• Growing in different directions: people change, and sometimes their values and wishes for life change too.
• Personal struggles: depression, burnout or anxiety can numb feelings in general, including love. A review of a decade of research also concluded that relationship satisfaction depends on many factors, including stress and the economic conditions couples live in (Karney & Bradbury, 2020).
• Unmet needs: for closeness, sex, freedom or recognition, sometimes needs that were never voiced.

Can love come back?

Sometimes, yes. Feelings respond to experiences. When couples reduce negative communication, they also tend to feel more satisfied with their relationship (Johnson et al., 2022). New shared experiences, honest conversations about what has been missing, more appreciation and repairing old hurts can all bring closeness back. Some couples describe a “second falling in love”, quieter than the first, and often deeper.

When a relationship has run its course

Sometimes, though, falling out of love is a sign that a relationship has run its course. This can happen quite naturally. Over the years people change: their values, their wishes for the future, the way they want to live, where they want to live, whether they want children, how much closeness or freedom they need. Circumstances change too, through a new job, a move, an illness or children growing up. Two people who fitted well at twenty-five may want very different lives at forty, without either of them having done anything wrong.

Even when nobody is at fault, this can hurt a lot. Many people feel something close to grief: for the partner, for the shared plans and for the person they were in that relationship. Research on recent breakups shows that people often go through sadness, low mood and disturbed sleep afterwards, similar in some ways to mild depressive symptoms (Verhallen et al., 2019). That pain does not mean the decision was wrong. It can simply reflect how much the relationship meant.

Ending a relationship with care and honesty is a legitimate outcome, and it can be an act of respect towards both of you. If that is where you are, How to get over a breakup may help.

What you can do now

• Be honest with yourself. Write down what you feel, without judging it.
• Look at your own well-being. If you feel flat about many things, it may be worth looking at your mood first. See Burnout, depression or just a low mood?
• Talk, gently. “I’ve been feeling far away from you, and I miss us” opens a conversation more easily than “I don’t love you anymore”.
• Try something new together. A different place, a shared project, a class. Novelty can wake up curiosity.
• Get support. A couples therapist can help you explore what has happened, without pushing you towards staying or leaving.

If your partner has fallen out of love

Sometimes you are the one who hears “I don’t feel the same anymore”. This can be one of the most painful sentences in a relationship. It is natural to want to fix it immediately, to try harder, to ask for reasons, or to protect yourself by pulling away.

If you can, give the conversation some time. Ask what your partner is feeling and since when, and what they think has changed. Share how this affects you, too. Your partner’s feelings are real, and so are yours. Sometimes this conversation opens a period of honest work on the relationship. Sometimes it is the beginning of a separation. In either case, you deserve support, from friends, from family, and if it helps, from a professional.

Falling out of love does not always lead to the same place. Some couples find their way back to closeness after a period of distance. Others decide to separate and later see the relationship as an important part of their life. Some stay together for other reasons, such as children, friendship or shared plans, and find a form that works for them. There is no right ending that applies to everyone.

It can also help to remember that feelings move over time. A phase of emptiness or irritation may change, especially when stress decreases or when both partners start to talk honestly about what they need. At the same time, it is important not to ignore a feeling that keeps returning over a long period. Giving yourself time to understand what is happening, alone or with support, can make the next step clearer.

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References

• Acevedo, B. P., Aron, A., Fisher, H. E., & Brown, L. L. (2012). Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(2), 145–159. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsq092
• Acevedo, B. P., Poulin, M. J., Collins, N. L., & Brown, L. L. (2020). After the honeymoon: Neural and genetic correlates of romantic love in newlywed marriages. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 634. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00634
• Johnson, M. D., Lavner, J. A., Mund, M., Zemp, M., Stanley, S. M., Neyer, F. J., Impett, E. A., Rhoades, G. K., Bodenmann, G., Weidmann, R., Bühler, J. L., Burriss, R. P., Wünsche, J., & Grob, A. (2022). Within-couple associations between communication and relationship satisfaction over time. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(4), 534–549. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211016920
• Karney, B. R., & Bradbury, T. N. (2020). Research on marital satisfaction and stability in the 2010s: Challenging conventional wisdom. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 82(1), 100–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12635
• Lambert, N. M., & Fincham, F. D. (2011). Expressing gratitude to a partner leads to more relationship maintenance behavior. Emotion, 11(1), 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021557
• Mitnick, D. M., Heyman, R. E., & Smith Slep, A. M. (2009). Changes in relationship satisfaction across the transition to parenthood: A meta-analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 23(6), 848–852. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017004
• Verhallen, A. M., Renken, R. J., Marsman, J. C., & Ter Horst, G. J. (2019). Romantic relationship breakup: An experimental model to study effects of stress on depression (-like) symptoms. Plos One, 14(5), e0217320. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217320

This article is exploratory and meant for information and reflection. It cannot capture the full complexity of any individual situation, and your own experience may be different. It does not replace a diagnosis or treatment.

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