By Victoria Holroyd, PhD, LPC | Couples Therapist | The Relationship Center of Hampton Roads
It’s 2:00 in the morning. The house is quiet. The person you’ve built your life with is sleeping right beside you while you lie there staring at the ceiling, heart pounding, asking yourself a question that feels almost too frightening to put into words:
Am I still in love with them?
I’ve been sitting across from people in this exact moment for over 25 years. Not at 2 AM — but in the aftermath of it. They come in carrying that question like a stone, equal parts terrified and ashamed. So before I say anything else, let me be direct: you are not broken, and your relationship is not over just because you’re asking that question.
What does it mean when you suddenly question your love for your partner?
Questioning your feelings for your partner — especially in a long-term relationship — is more common than most people realize, and it doesn’t automatically signal the end of a marriage or partnership. In over two decades of couples therapy, I’ve found that this kind of doubt most often reflects a transition, not a conclusion.
What you’re likely experiencing is the end of the infatuation phase — the neurochemical high that characterizes early love and that, despite what movies would have us believe, is not designed to last forever. When it fades, many people interpret the quieter feeling that remains as loss. Sometimes it is. But more often, it’s an invitation to build something more real and more durable.
Love in long-term relationships is not a constant state. It has seasons. Doubt is part of those seasons — not evidence that you chose the wrong person, but often a signal that something in the relationship needs attention.
Is it normal to fall out of love with your spouse?
Yes — and it’s important to distinguish between falling out of love and experiencing a lull in emotional connection. These are different things, and conflating them leads couples to make decisions prematurely.
Emotional distance, boredom, and a loss of warmth are extremely common in long-term partnerships, particularly during high-stress life phases: raising children, career transitions, loss, health challenges. Research consistently shows that relationship satisfaction follows a non-linear path — it fluctuates, and intentional intervention can reverse downward trends.
The middle of the night is also not a good therapist. Exhaustion strips away nuance, and isolation turns a feeling into a verdict. What feels like certainty at 2 AM often looks entirely different after sleep, perspective, and honest conversation.
What should you do when you feel disconnected from your partner?
When the initial panic settles, here’s where I’d invite you to start.
Recover first. Don’t wake your partner up in a panic, and don’t start rehearsing an exit in your head. Your emotional baseline is compromised right now. Feelings are data — important data — but they are not directives. How you feel at 2 AM on a Wednesday is not the whole truth about your relationship.
Reframe what you’re looking at. When couples are emotionally distant, the brain tends to hyper-focus on flaws and frustrations. Try shifting the question from “do I still love this person?” to “what have we stopped doing that used to keep us connected?” That’s usually where the real answer lives.
Start small with repair. Most couples don’t end up in my office because of one catastrophic event. They drift. Life gets loud — kids, work, stress — and the relationship gets whatever’s left over, which is often not much. Repair doesn’t require a grand gesture. It requires a small, honest step: a real conversation, a moment of genuine contact, choosing to show up for the relationship even when the feeling isn’t there yet.
Can a marriage be saved when the spark is gone?
In my clinical experience — working with hundreds of couples across more than 25 years — the answer is most often yes, when both partners are willing to do something different. The couples I see make the most progress are the ones who stop waiting for the feeling to return on its own and start taking action to create the conditions for it to come back.
One of the most important reframes I offer couples is this: when you can’t connect to the person, connect to the relationship.
On the days when you look across the dinner table and feel nothing, trying to manufacture warm feelings is a losing battle. But you can choose to honor what you’ve built together — the shared history, the commitments you’ve made, the life you’ve constructed side by side. That consistency and safety is what creates the conditions for love to return. Commitment isn’t a feeling; it’s a daily choice.
This is core to the work I do using Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and the Gottman Method — both evidence-based approaches to couples therapy that help partners understand the emotional patterns beneath the disconnection and rebuild from there.
When should you seek couples therapy for relationship disconnection?
If you’ve been feeling emotionally distant from your partner for more than a few weeks, if you’re having the same arguments repeatedly without resolution, or if you’re privately wondering whether the relationship has a future — those are clear signals that a professional perspective would help.
You don’t have to be in crisis to benefit from couples counseling. Many of the couples I work with come in early, before things have deteriorated significantly, and that’s when the work is most effective. Waiting until someone has one foot out the door is possible to work with, but it’s harder.
At The Relationship Center of Hampton Roads, we offer couples therapy in Williamsburg, Norfolk (East Beach), and Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, as well as telehealth sessions across Virginia and New York. Our therapists are trained in EFT, Gottman Method, Imago, and other evidence-based approaches to relationship repair.
You don’t have to figure this out in the dark.
If you’re lying awake tonight, hear this: a moment of doubt is a chapter, not the conclusion. It’s information. And it’s often the beginning of some of the most meaningful work a couple will ever do together.
If you’re ready to explore what’s underneath these feelings — whether in individual therapy or together in couples counseling — we’re here.
Reach out here to us today!
