How Couples Drift Into Roommates

(Spoiler: there’s nothing sudden about it.)

Nobody wakes up one Tuesday, looks across the kitchen island at the person they once couldn’t keep their hands off, and thinks “ah… flatmate.” It doesn’t happen like that. It happens the way damp happens in an old house. A bit of condensation here, a grey patch behind the wardrobe there, and then one day you move the wardrobe and the whole wall is furry.

The “suddenly” is just the day you moved the wardrobe.

I sit with couples going through this every week.

They are usually two very decent people, with a shared mortgage, a shared calendar, a shared Costco membership, and absolutely nothing going on between them that couldn’t be handled by a well-organised office manager.

Almost always, one of them is baffled. “But I do SO much,” they tell me. “I don’t understand what s/he wants.”

Right. Let’s talk about that.

Logistics are not intimacy.

I cannot stress this enough, and I’m going to stress it anyway.

If I text my husband “we’re out of milk” and he comes home with milk, I do not swoon.

I do not think “wow, my marriage is in a really good place right now.”

I think “we have milk.”

If I’d been the one passing the shop, I’d have bought the milk. That’s just called being a functioning adult, babe, not devotion. “I never forget to pick up milk” does not equal “so you should desire me and want sex.”

My Instacart person sometimes brings me milk, I don’t need (or want) to have sex with them either.

Picking up the kids, running a forgotten charger over to the office, unloading the dishwasher… these are all lovely, thoughtful, sometimes necessary things you might need from your partner throughout the week. If one person is doing most (or all) of the logistics and the other person is doing none, you have way more problems than just intimacy, and I suggest a good couples therapist before you even attempt coming to me.

But logistical needs do not equal emotional needs (again, unless they’re not getting met at all).

A relationship where the logistics hum along more or less fine but no one is discussing emotional/relational needs is a very efficient roommate situation.

You can have a clean kitchen and a cold bed.

Most couples I work with have never once asked each other, directly: “What do you need from me in this relationship?”

Not “need anything from the shops?”… A totally different type of question.

Without asking it, you’re bumbling around in your relationship being perfectly “nice” and helpful perhaps, but emotionally you’re just throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks> Worse, I see clients who then get cross that their partner won’t eat or doesn’t like their wall pasta.

In order to know what someone wants, you have to ask them.

What I get couples to do is sit down once a month and each write out:

five logistical things you’d like from the other person
five emotional things
five couple goals for the month

Then compare.

Keep the list positive. Not “you never ask me how my day was or listen to me when I’m telling you something.” That’s blaming, not asking.

“I’d love you to take a real interest in how my day went and ask questions about things I care about” is a positively framed ask. “I’d like us to connect by doing fun activities together without the kids at least once a week” is another.

Keep the ones you both light up at. If she wants go-karting and you want a wine-and-cheese hike and neither of you is thrilled by the other’s pick, don’t just choose one and end up with a martyr in the passenger seat. Keep going until you land on something you both fancy.

Supportive means showing up for what s/he asked for, not what you assumed they wanted.

Otherwise you get this: I tell my husband I need proper quality time four times a month, he says “brilliant, sex four times a month,” and I say “that is emphatically NOT what I asked for.”

Mismatch. Very common. Very fixable… if you ask.

When did you last go out, just the two of you? If the answer involves the phrase “before the kids,” I’m going to need you to sit down.

“We can’t find a babysitter” is the most common excuse I hear and, with love, it’s bollocks.

There are brilliant sixteen and seventeen year olds who will happily sit on your sofa, play board games with your children and march them off to brush their teeth at half eight.

Yes, in the Bay Area they’ll charge you twenty-five to thirty bucks an hour, which is extortionate, but that’s what a date night costs. If you don’t waste date nights on fancy restaurants and go to a pub quiz instead, you’ll have more fun and still probably come out cheaper for it.

Budget for it the way you budget for the dentist.

And once your kids are ten-ish, if you’re only popping out ten minutes down the road, a camera in the living room and a phone they know how to use goes a long way. (“It’s 8:32 and we said 8:30.” Cue scurrying.)

Again, I want to emphasize, please don’t waste babysitter money on a restaurant.

You can eat at home. Sitting across a table making polite conversation is how roommates do dinner.

Go and DO something. Escape room. Pub quiz. Karaoke. Comedy show. Go-karting. A smash room, if there’s some aggression that needs working out (no judgement).

Or the cheapest one of all: get a sitter, pack a rucksack with a bottle of wine and some cheese, hike somewhere gorgeous at sunset and sit at the top talking about anything other than the kids.

Arthur Aron’s research on couples found that doing new, slightly exhilarating things together does far more for relationship satisfaction than doing pleasant, familiar things together. The escape room is doing more for your marriage than the nice Italian place ever will.

Picture a first date where he turns up at your door and says “right, I’m here and I’m present, so… sex?” You’d shut the door in his face. Rightly.

When you were dating, you made an effort. You showered, you smelt nice, you booked something. You laughed. At the end of the night you said “I had a wonderful time, can we do this again?” and maybe there was a kiss, or maybe just a hug, depending on how good the date was. And after enough of those, after rapport and trust and a growing sense of wanting to get closer, THEN came the kissing, the touching, the rest of it.

That order of events shouldn’t expire once you get married. For loads of people, and especially for women with a full-time job and a head full of everyone else’s needs, desire is responsive: it turns up once things already feel good, rather than arriving on its own to kick things off. (Emily Nagoski has written about this brilliantly.)

If all your partner gets from you is a task list, a whiff of resentment and the vague expectation that it’s “been long enough,” of course nothing’s stirring. On what basis would it?

Usually not. If you’re both still there, and one of you is reading articles like this at eleven at night, something’s still alive.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Ask the question. Stop counting. Find a sixteen year old to babysit. Book something that isn’t a restaurant.

Personally, if my husband and I don’t get roughly one proper adult-on-adult outing a week without the kids, I start to wonder what I’m married for. I could find a co-parent on Craigslist. Your number might be different. Some couples need more, some need less. Nobody needs zero.

And the ones who’ve been at zero for years… well… they’re usually the ones asking me how they suddenly became roommates.

You're running a household. You are not running a marriage.

Ask the question nobody asks

Date night is not dinner

Romance comes before sex. It always did.

So... is it too late?