Emotional Starvation: When Your Marriage Snuffs Out Your Spirit

Emotional Stravation

Intimacy Anorexia

As a marriage and family psychologist as well as specialist in working with recovery from sex addiction, I’ve had to accept that a certain number of marriages will wither from lack of TLC where both spouses suffer the affects. However, I also know that some of you are dealing with a bigger, more dangerous beast: a pernicious form of love avoidance called intimacy anorexia. Your intimacy hunger comes from being emotionally starved by your spouse. Whether it is by passive-aggressiveness or passive-avoidance, your spouse consistently puts up barriers or sabotages your attempts at emotional connection.

If you want the broader intimacy-anorexia pattern, read Is Intimacy Anorexia the Hidden Sniper in Your Marriage? and If My Husband Is Intimacy Anorexic, What Am I?.

“I don’t want to know your heart and I won’t let you know mine.

You needs don’t matter; you don’t matter.”

Fairy tales don’t prepare us for intimacy deprivation. As women, we are particularly unprepared. If you are in an intimacy anorexic relationship, you probably didn’t recognize the gradual buildup of deprivation until your spirit began to shut down. In the early years of your emotionally anorexic marriage, you spent more and more time trying to figure what was missing and how to get through to your husband, desperately seeking the perfect set of words that would make him understand the emotional starvation. If you are also dealing with a spouse who struggles with pornography or sexual addiction, the sharp pain of betrayal may have may have masked your awareness of the duller but ultimately more damaging pain of the relational neglect.

You tried harder and harder, physically and spiritually exhausting yourself in the process. It probably took many, many years of this before it dawned on you that the reason you are in emotional starvation is because you are being starved by your spouse; the reason the anorexic won’t release the break on the emotional shut off valve is that leaves him in control of the level of emotional intimacy.

What are the signs that you are lacking intimacy?

Emotional starvation rarely announces itself. It shows up in small, ordinary moments that add up over the years. You may recognize some of these:

• You feel more like roommates or business partners than husband and wife.
• Your conversations are about schedules, bills, and the kids, almost never about either of your hearts.
• Affection, praise, and sex have become rare, or they only happen on his terms.
• When you reach for closeness, you are met with busyness, criticism, blame, or silence.
• You feel lonelier sitting next to your husband than you do when you are alone.
• You have stopped sharing what matters to you, because it never seems to land.
• You spend a great deal of energy rehearsing the right words to finally get through to him.

Any marriage can go through a dry season. The concern is when the distance becomes a lasting pattern, and when your attempts to close it are consistently turned away.

What does a lack of intimacy do to a woman?

When the need for emotional connection goes unmet year after year, it takes a toll on far more than the marriage. The women I work with often describe:

• Deep loneliness, the kind that is harder to name because you are not, technically, alone.
• Self-doubt. You start to wonder whether you are too needy, too much, or not enough, and whether the problem is you.
• Exhaustion from years of trying harder, explaining better, and carrying the relationship by yourself.
• Anxiety and sadness that can settle in so gradually you stop noticing them.
• Anger and resentment, often followed by guilt for feeling them.
• Shutting down. Eventually, to protect yourself, you may stop hoping, stop asking, and go numb.

None of this means something is wrong with you. These are understandable responses to being starved of connection. If the sadness has become heavy or constant, or you are struggling to sleep, eat, or get through the day, please talk with a counselor or your doctor.

What are the common causes of a lack of intimacy?

Not every intimacy-starved marriage is an intimacy anorexic one. Distance can grow for many reasons, and there is rarely a single cause. Some of the most common are:

• Stress and busyness. Work, children, and caregiving can crowd out time and energy for each other.
• Unresolved conflict. Hurts that were never repaired can harden into resentment and quiet withdrawal.
• Depression, anxiety, and health problems. Mental-health struggles, hormonal and other medical problems, and medication side effects can all reduce the desire for closeness.
• Past trauma. When closeness or touch was once tied to harm, getting close can still feel unsafe.
• Betrayal and sex addiction. Sexual energy that goes outside the marriage, through pornography or affairs, leaves little room for closeness at home.
• Intimacy anorexia. A spouse actively withholds emotional, physical, and spiritual closeness, often as a way to stay safe and in control.

Because these causes can look alike from the outside, it helps to have an assessment with someone trained to tell them apart. Knowing what is driving the distance is the first step toward knowing what will help.

Taking the next step

If left untended, intimacy deprivation is as damaging to your spirit as food starvation is to your body. Be aware that if you are combating intimacy anorexia, the typical relationship self-help book will be inadequate and standard marriage therapy may actually be harmful. To learn more about intimacy anorexia, checkout our page on intimacy anorexia or to find a counselor trained in dealing with intimacy anorexia and intimacy deprivation, contact the AASAT.