If you’ve experienced the pain of long-term loneliness and romantic disappointment, a relationship can feel like a breath of fresh air.
But far too many relationships end up becoming deeply unfulfilling and boring, often much more quickly than you expect.
If this is happening it can be distressing and anxiety-producing. It may even cause you to try to repress the emotions of disappointment and frustration you’re having in order to give it “more of a chance.”
But the following crucial signals show that you’re secretly bored with your relationship and it’s just not working out for you anymore.
1) You feel bored and listless deep-down
It’s not something you think of often, and you do your best to avoid it:
But deep down you have to admit that your relationship does not excite you in any way.
It is not just that the initial honeymoon has faded off, it is that a slow, creeping realization is setting in that you are just not that well suited for your partner, at least not in your own perception.
Clinical psychologist Roxy Zarrabi, PsyD. puts it well:
“You feel a growing discomfort about the relationship but ignore it or rationalize it by telling yourself that all relationships are hard and take work or that you know the other person can change.”
2) You daydream of other romances
You frequently find yourself daydreaming about sleeping with other people or pursuing a romance with them.
The idea of escaping and being with someone else is an almost daily fantasy that you engage in.
It goes far beyond the purely erotic to a real desire for companionship and love that you do not feel in your current relationship.
As licensed clinical social worker and psychology writer Jenni Jacobsen says:
“You might picture what it would be like to be able to live on your own and not have to answer to anyone, or you might think about being able to flirt with attractive people out at the bar without worrying about crossing the line.”
3) You dodge time together
While a certain amount of boredom and humdrum daily routines are to be expected in any relationship, you find that yours seems even worse.
If you are being honest, you actually find yourself intentionally dodging time with your partner and low-key avoiding them at some periods.
You just don’t really want to spend time with them.
And no matter how much you try to convince yourself, you feel like deep down you know you’re not a good match.
4) You have very little desire for sex
Sexually you find that your interest has waned far more than you expected.
It is not only that you don’t really want to sleep with your partner anymore, but that you actively avoid it in some cases.
You almost never initiate and you respond to their advances frequently with excuses or with claims that you are just not in the mood or too tired.
As Jacobsen puts it:
“The research shows that people who are bored in a relationship have sex less often and find sex to be less exciting. If you’re not trying to spice up your sex life, the two of you may have grown so bored that you just avoid sex altogether.”
5) You’re bored of doing things together
Doing activities together no longer interests you very much at all.
Even Hobbies or Sports which you find enjoyable become less enjoyable when you picture doing them with your partner.
There is something about how you relate to them and their place in your life which makes you genuinely feel a loss of interest in both them and the activities which you used to love doing together with them.
6) You feel emotionally detached
All of the preceding points indicate a definite high level of emotional detachment.
You simply do not feel very connected to your partner anymore and you are not very invested in their well-being.
While you still care for them a certain amount, it rarely occupies much of your time or energy. In fact, you frequently find yourself thinking of them as an afterthought or only out of a sense that you should as a form of obligation or social role.
“If you’ve grown bored, you may simply ignore problems because you see no point in fighting for your relationship,” observes Jacobsen.
7) You frequently miss past relationships
In addition to daydreaming about fantasies and being with someone else, you often find yourself lost in nostalgia.
Connections and love interests which you had in the past occupy your mind and heart for significant amounts of time.
You may find a song playing on the radio which brings up bittersweet memories of someone you once loved.
The relationship you are currently in, by contrast, feels second rate and simply doesn’t engage that much of your attention.
8) You keep secrets from your partner
While you may not feel great about it, you have begun to keep secrets from your partner.
If this is the case it generally indicates that there has been a breach of trust or that you simply want to create more distance from your partner.
The secrets are a realm where you have knowledge that you are not sharing.
“If your partner consistently brings negativity into the relationship, like constant criticism, pessimism, or lack of support, it can impact your emotional well-being,” notes therapist John Kim LMFT.
9) You try to distract yourself from the relationship
You are not sure about whether you want to break up, but the creeping sense of boredom and ennui keeps persisting.
As a result, you try to find the middle ground by distracting yourself from the relationship in various ways, including by spending more time with other friends.
You may also do it by focusing your energy on hobbies and interests that don’t involve your partner. But the underlying boredom with the relationship continues.
10) You don’t find them funny or interesting
If you are being honest with yourself, you simply don’t find your partner very funny or interesting. At least not anymore.
In some cases it is because the initial attraction has worn off.
But in other cases it is quite frankly because there wasn’t really that much of an emotional or personality connection to begin with and you’re only now coming fully to terms with the lack of compatibility that always existed.
Rather than the connection deepening as you had hoped or becoming more profound, the opposite has happened and you have drifted into a kind of empty partnership that is quite boring to you.
As therapist Jamie Cannon MS, LPC notes:
“Conversations at the start of a relationship are understandably more superficial and lighthearted—but if you’ve been in a relationship for an extended period of time and still can’t seem to have a serious, heartfelt conversation, it may be a signal something’s off.”
11) You don’t want to plan a future together
Thinking about the future with your partner makes you feel nothing. If anything you feel slight anxiety and a desire to avoid the subject.
You don’t feel certain about breaking up, but you do feel certain that an unlimited amount of time together with them going forward feels like an absolutely boring prospect.
You are simply not looking forward to it, even if you find yourself trying to talk yourself into it or convince yourself that it won’t be as boring as you think. Something is fundamentally disconnected in the relationship and you are having trouble coming to terms with it.
12) You often consider ending it
When you’re very bored with a relationship, it’s natural that you will consider ending it quite frequently.
However, rather than finalizing that and deciding for sure to end the relationship, you find yourself waffling back and forth and feeling quite unsure whether that would actually be a good decision.
Will you regret it? Will you meet someone new or go years without really having a solid relationship again? Are you just being oversensitive?
The more that you have self-esteem or decision making issues, the more you may struggle to really decide whether or not to end the relationship.
As Zarrabi explains:
“When you want so badly for a relationship to work that you avoid these important truths, they don’t go away. They show up at first as a small whisper, then they grow louder until it becomes harder and harder to ignore them.”
As the legendary BB King sang, “the thrill is gone, it’s gone away for good.”
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