Finding Your Way Back to Two

Empty nest: relationships after children leave home

Twenty years ago, an evening alone together might have felt like a luxury. Now that the children have left home, being a couple can feel different from what either partner imagined. So, what has changed?

In the consulting room, we often meet couples who feel adrift at this stage. They expected to miss the children, but perhaps not to feel unfamiliar to each other.

For years, family life can give couples shared purpose, things to talk about and a daily rhythm. They may have worked well together as parents while their relationship as two adults received less attention.

Children can also act as a buffer, often without anyone realising. When dinner is for two and weekends no longer revolve around them, old tensions can become easier to hear. A couple may wonder whether they have grown apart, or whether the distance was always there.

The feelings that follow are often mixed. Pride in the children's independence can sit alongside sadness at being less needed. Relief and excitement may be followed by guilt, or by uncertainty about where to begin, or whether to start again. For many, being a parent has been central to their identity, both individually and as a couple. The questions can become "Who am I now?" and "Who are we now?"

Empty nest can also be experienced as a form of grief, and partners may respond in very different ways. One may fill the calendar with holidays, dinners and projects, while the other withdraws into the home. Neither may realise that both are managing similar feelings of loss.  Without that recognition, a wish for space can be heard as rejection, and a request for company as pressure. Each partner may see sadness in the other but not in themselves, or be unsettled by a wish for freedom they cannot yet see in themselves.

Finding their way back to each other can mean meeting someone who has changed, while recognising changes in oneself. There may be losses to acknowledge, and possibilities neither partner has yet considered.

In couples therapy, partners can look at these shifts without having to decide straight away what they mean for the future. Understanding what lies beneath familiar arguments can help them talk more openly and think about how the relationship might develop, taking account of who each of them is now.

If you are finding your way through this stage together, we offer couples therapy in central London and online. Get in touch to arrange an initial consultation.

Yanni Spiro, Couple Therapist and Co-founder