This episode is about the loneliness women feel inside of relationships and how that loneliness can cut deeper than anything else, even when someone is sitting right next to you. If you’ve been moving through your days feeling invisible, misunderstood, or emotionally starved inside your own home, please hear me when I say this: you are not alone. Loneliness in marriage has become one of the most common and most deeply painful experiences women quietly carry.

Throughout this episode, you’ll hear me talk about the female loneliness epidemic inside relationships and why the loneliness you feel is not a personal failure. It is your body, your intuition, and your unmet needs trying to get your attention in the most honest way they know how. I also share seven grounding steps that can help you gently validate your own experience, reconnect with what you truly need, and begin rebuilding emotional safety from the inside out.

As I always say, you, my love, deserve to be happy.

What you’ll hear about in this episode:

• How emotional labor conditions women into feeling disconnected and unseen
• The somatic signs of emotional deprivation and what your body is quietly trying to tell you
• Seven gentle grounding steps to help you validate your reality and rebuild emotional safety
• How to recognize the difference between a temporary rut and the deeper experience of chronic loneliness
• Why the loneliness you feel may be a sign that you are waking up to your truth, not breaking down

Resources & Links:

Get Your Curated Podcast Playlist
Focused Strategy Sessions with Kate
The Divorce Survival Guide Resource Bundle
Phoenix Rising: A Divorce Empowerment Collective
Kate on Instagram
Kate on Facebook
Kate’s Substack Newsletter: Divorce Coaching Dispatch

The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast Episodes are also available YouTube!

Show Transcript:

Kate Anthony: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome back. Today I wanna talk to you about something that I hear a lot of women who are in the deciding phase talk about a lot. It’s something that I certainly experienced myself for many years, and that is. The loneliness that you feel inside of a relationship and how that can feel more lonely than anything else.

So if you’re listening right now with that tightness in your chest, and if you have been going through your day feeling invisible, misunderstood, emotionally starved. Inside of your own relationship, you are absolutely categorically not alone. In fact, loneliness inside of a marriage has become one of the most common and most deeply painful experiences that women share.

They share it with each other. They share it with me. [00:01:00] They say that there’s a male loneliness epidemic. I believe that there is a female loneliness epidemic inside. Of relationships and I wanna talk to you about why you might feel this and feel more alone than ever, even with someone sitting on the couch Right next to you.

I wanna talk to you about why this loneliness is not a personal failure, why it’s not a sign. That you’re broken and why It’s actually one of the most important messages that your body and your intuition are trying to send you. Okay, so let’s get into this. One of the first things that women tell me, of course, when they finally get brave enough to reach out or, have had enough and they reach out, it’s, and it’s some version of, I feel so alone, right?

I’m living with a roommate or a ghost. The way that I think about it and feel about it is that being alone is one thing, but. Feeling alone in a relationship is something else entirely. It’s like an internal exile. It’s waking up next to someone [00:02:00] and still feeling like there’s no one there. It’s carrying groceries and laundry and the mental load and the emotional world of the family alone, even though there’s technically another adult.

And there’s often shame attached to it, right? We tell ourselves I should be happier. It’s not that bad. Other people would be happy to have what I have. Or maybe I’m just too sensitive. Maybe I expect too much. But here’s the truth. Loneliness in marriage is not a sign that you are lacking. It is a sign that your needs.

Have been overlooked, dismissed, or chronically unmet. So I wanna start this by talking about emotional labor. Because that is where so much of our loneliness begins. Women are socially conditioned from childhood even to be the caretakers of [00:03:00] emotional connection. We are taught to read the room, anticipate needs, regulate everybody’s feelings, smooth over tension, initiate all the hard conversations, and maintain the wellbeing of the relationship alone.

What happens when you are carrying all of that? You become the one who notices when something feels off, who brings up problems? Who initiates repair? Who schedules therapy? Who reads the book? Who carries the emotional tone of the entire house, who tries to keep the peace, who tries to bridge the gap?

And when you’re the only one doing the connecting, you end up feeling overwhelmingly disconnected. You cannot feel connected when you’re the only one doing the connecting. It doesn’t work that way. And then this whole thing [00:04:00] creates a dynamic where your partner gets to be comfortable. Because there’s someone who is trying to bridge all the gaps for them, and you get to be lonely.

Here’s where my feminist lens comes in to play, sharply into focus, because this isn’t just a personal issue, it is a structural issue as with almost everything. So in heterosexual relationships, women are taught explicitly or implicitly that their job is to be accommodating. To be understanding, to carry the emotional weight, to keep the relationship afloat.

And men are often socialized out of emotional skills entirely. They’re taught to avoid vulnerability, to avoid introspection, to avoid emotional accountability, to shut down, withdraw, distract, or get defensive. So you have one person doing all of the [00:05:00] heavy lifting. The other person leaning on it or resisting it entirely, and you end up feeling invisible and exhausted.

You end up feeling like you’re too much or not even enough or both at the same time, and loneliness becomes the water that you’re swimming in. Loneliness is often the first red flag that we have been trained to ignore. I wanna talk to you about the somatic side of loneliness because this is important.

Loneliness isn’t just emotional. It is physiological. It shows up in your nervous system. It shows up in your body as a heaviness in your chest. Numbness shut down, hyper vigilance, feeling emotionally starved, feeling like you’re holding your breath in your own home, not wanting to bring anything up because you are.

Scared or tired of the lack of response or the response that [00:06:00] you’re gonna get, right? Whichever it is. You’re walking on eggshells. You’re tired of feeling calmer when your partner is not around, you’re feeling like you’re disappearing. Your body knows the truth before your brain wants to admit it. You’re not imagining this, you’re not dramatic.

Your body is registering. Chronic emotional deprivation. Chronic emotional deprivation. It’s like a disease. So I wanna repeat what I said something earlier and it’s important, so take a breath with me. You cannot create connection alone, and a lot of us spend years trying years reading relationship books alone.

Listening to podcasts alone, going to therapy alone, begging for change [00:07:00] alone, my love. If you could fix this through effort, you would have fixed it years ago. You are not under-functioning. You are over-functioning. And here’s the deeper truth. In many marriages, the one who is disconnected often benefits from that disconnection.

They don’t feel the pain of it the way that you do. You are the one carrying the emotional load, the relational responsibility, the accountability, and they are benefiting from it entirely. And it’s not because you’re failing, it’s because you are the only one doing the work, and your loneliness is a messenger.

It’s not a verdict, but it is telling you something. It is telling you that your needs matter, that your emotional world matters. You deserve reciprocity. You deserve presence, not just proximity. [00:09:00] It’s telling you that something in the relationship needs to change. You cannot keep shrinking yourself. To maintain a sense of stability.

In fact, loneliness is often the first signal that you have outgrown your role in the marriage. The role where you were, the caretaker, the regulator, the emotional center, right? Loneliness is trying to wake you up.

So I wanna offer you a few grounding steps for anyone listening and feeling this really deeply. So the first thing I want you to do is just name the truth to yourself. Just name it, stop gaslighting your own experience. Say it loudly. I am lonely. [00:09:00] I am lonely. Naming it alone. So powerful. It’s the first step.

The second step is notice your emotional labor load. Name what you’re carrying, acknowledge how much responsibility has been put on you. Okay? Now in the beginning, this is just for yourself. Name it for yourself. You don’t need to go rushing off to your partner right now and explaining this to them First, name it for yourself and acknowledge.

Really how much responsibility has been put on you. Number three, I want you to identify your unmet needs. Not to fix your marriage today, but to reconnect with yourself. What are my unmet needs, right? Because when you go so long with having needs that are unmet, you start to forget what they are. So let’s I start to identify them.

Number four, I want you to [00:11:00] pay attention to your body. Your nervous system will tell you everything you need to know. When do you tighten up? When do you soften? When do you feel safe? When do you disappear? Keep a log, keep a journal. Number five, confide in one safe person. Break the isolation. You don’t have to carry this alone.

Find at least one, probably woman, ’cause she’ll get it. And tell them the above, right? Everything that you have said to yourself, one through four, confide it in one person who is safe, you know is safe. Now, number six, if it is safe to do once you have really grounded yourself in what your needs are and the pain of not having them met, if it’s safe, share one of these truths with your partner.

Not to change them, but to express your emotional reality. Again, only if it’s safe to do [00:12:00] if you go through this process and then you’re like, I can’t possibly share it with him, because he will dismiss, he will be abusive, he will flip it, he’ll use it against me, he’ll weaponize it, then it is not safe, and that is a lot of information for you right there.

So number seven, if it is not safe to do focus on your internal boundaries. Emotional safety comes first. You’re not required to be brave with someone who is repeatedly unsafe, right? That’s not bravery, that’s danger. So you focus on your internal boundaries. What is the reality for me? If the reality is that it’s not safe, then I keep my boundaries around myself.

I don’t share things that are unsafe. I don’t share things that are vulnerable with people who are unsafe. That’s an internal boundary that sometimes we have not mastered yet. So that’s it. Those are the seven steps that I want you to [00:12:00] focus on right now. One, name the truth to yourself. Two. Notice your emotional labor load.

Three. Identify your unmet needs. Four, pay attention to your body. Five. Confide in one safe person. Six. If safe, share one truth with your partner and seven, if it is not safe, focus on your internal boundaries. I wanna address what if it’s just a rut, right? Is just a rut or is this something that sort of has become the relationship, right?

A rut happens to all couples, but chronic loneliness is something else entirely. So you might be experiencing chronic loneliness if you’ve brought it up many times. Nothing changes. Or you get some crumbs that disappear within a week or two. If you feel more like roommates, if you feel emotionally starved, [00:15:00] if you feel more at peace when they’re not home, if you can’t wait for them to go on a business trip, ’cause you love life when they’re not around, if you feel like you’re starting to disappear inside yourself.

Or if you keep lowering your expectations just to survive. This is usually when women find me or they come to me, right when they realize this isn’t temporary. This is the relationship. And as painful as that realization is, it is also the beginning of something incredibly powerful, and that’s your own personal clarity.

So I wanna leave you with this. I wanna remind you that your loneliness is not a flaw. It is not a weakness. It is not a sign that you didn’t try hard enough. Your loneliness is your wisdom speaking to you. It’s your body saying, I cannot thrive in emotional deprivation. [00:16:00] It’s your intuition saying you deserve connection.

You deserve reciprocity. You deserve to feel loved, seen, and valued. As I always say, you my love deserve to be happy. So maybe you’re not breaking down, maybe you’re waking up. So if any of this hit home for you. If you feel seen or validated or less alone, I want you to know that you don’t have to navigate any of this in isolation.

You can get my free curated podcast playlist if you go to kate anthony.com/playlist. You answer a couple of questions and then you are gonna get a curated list of episodes that will support you the most in your journey right now, because there’s over, I don’t know, over 300 and some odd 350 or something, I don’t know, episodes of this podcast.

And you might be like know where to begin. That would, that’s a great place to start the [00:17:00] playlist. And if you want community, right? Real connection, real support, real clarity. That’s what we do inside of Phoenix Rising, so you don’t have to be lonely in this anymore. There’s a whole group of women who are having this conversation every week over in Phoenix Rising, and you can find that on my website, kate anthony.com.

And click on, there’s a tab at the top right that says Join Phoenix Rising. So go take a look at that, check it out, and that’s it. I just wanted to talk about loneliness and the female loneliness epidemic and just let you know that you are not alone. Your voice, your body, your intuition, it’s all talking to you and it’s telling you something real powerful that you deserve to hear.

Alright, my love. Take tender care of yourself today, and I will see you next week. Bye.

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DISCLAIMER:  THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING LEGAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL ADVICE.  YOU SHOULD CONTACT AN ATTORNEY, COACH, OR THERAPIST IN YOUR STATE TO OBTAIN ADVICE WITH RESPECT TO ANY PARTICULAR ISSUE OR PROBLEM.

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