How Hard Times Turn Long-Term Partners into Roommates and How to Find Your Way Back
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 14 hours ago
Written by Joanna Kristensen, Sex & Relationship Coach
Joanna Kristensen is a certified sex coach helping long-term couples revitalize their sex lives, deepen intimacy, and work through the relationship challenges that come with years together.
When stress takes over, sex and intimacy are usually the first to go. But it doesn't have to stay that way. Getting back to each other is easier than it seems. When you commit to someone for the long haul, you're not just committing to the person. You're committing to everything life will throw at you both, and life throws a lot.
Children arrive, all consuming. As they grow, they face their own struggles, and you desperately want to help them. Parents get older, become sick, and need you in unexpected ways. Money tightens. Health issues surface. Grief stays longer than expected. There are good years and really hard ones. Most long term relationships will experience both, often more than once.
In all of it, sex and intimacy are almost always the first things to step aside because everything else feels more urgent right now. You'll deal with it later, and then later keeps moving.
This is not a personal failing. It is what happens when two people who love each other get hit hard enough by life for long enough. The question isn't whether this will happen in a long term relationship, it will. The real question is, how do you build something resilient enough that, when it does happen, you don't lose each other, and you know the way back?
When stress takes over, sex steps back first
When we're under sustained stress, the body shifts into survival mode. The nervous system focuses on what feels essential, handle the urgent, get through the day, keep everything from falling apart. Sex and emotional closeness are simply not the priority. Not because they don't matter. Because survival mode doesn't leave much room for either.
The effect on a relationship builds slowly and quietly. You stop reaching for each other as often. Conversations start to revolve around who picks up the kids, what needs to be paid, and what's happening tomorrow. The closeness between you is still there, but it stops surfacing often enough to be felt.
Then there are our coping mechanisms. Under stress, most people fall back on whatever helps them get through, and those strategies are rarely the same for each partner. One needs to withdraw, decompress in silence, and have some time alone. The other needs closeness and presence. Both are completely normal responses to stress. But without ever naming it, the space between those two approaches quietly becomes the distance itself.
That's exactly what happened with us. I thought we were solid. I genuinely did. My husband and I have been together for seventeen years. For the past year and a half, life has been relentless, financial stress, health issues, grief, supporting our daughter through a really difficult period. My way of coping is to pull inward. His is to connect. We were both doing the only thing that felt right to us, and we were quietly moving apart without either of us fully seeing it.
Then one morning, he told me what I hadn't let myself notice, that we had become roommates. That our conversations had become almost entirely about practicalities. That we weren't really together anymore, not in the way that counts.
My first reaction was anger. Our relationship had felt like my anchor through all of this, and that image cracked in a single conversation. But once the anger settled, genuine gratitude took its place. Because he was right, and if he hadn't said it, we would have kept going exactly as we were, loving in the day to day sense, but not intimate. Not truly present to each other.
Our circumstances haven't changed, and we are still under a lot of stress. But we are closer now than we were that morning. We stopped pretending it wasn't affecting us, and slowly, things got better.
Is this a phase, or something to worry about?
Most of us ask this question privately, not out loud, and often not to our partner. A marriage is considered sexless when sexual encounters fall below ten times a year. Many couples going through genuinely hard periods will find themselves there without having made any conscious decision about it.
But that definition describes a pattern, not a permanent state. There's a real difference between sex going quiet because life is relentless right now, financial stress, illness, grief, exhaustion, and a longer term disconnection rooted in unresolved resentment or a growing emotional gap between two people. The first tends to shift as life does. The second usually needs professional support.
For some people, desire does return naturally once the stress lifts. But it's not automatic, it depends on whether the couple has maintained an emotional connection and whether they actively create the conditions for desire to return. This isn't only about surviving the hard seasons. It's a daily practice that determines how quickly you bounce back when life gets hard. What matters most isn't how often you're having sex right now. It's whether you still feel close, like you're genuinely in this together, not just managing it side by side.
The conversation we keep putting off
Before anything else, something has to be said out loud. Not a formal sit down, just an honest, calm acknowledgment of where you actually are right now. Most couples put this off because saying it makes it real. There's a fear that naming the distance confirms something that can't be fixed.
What usually happens is the opposite. Saying it is almost always a relief, not a comfortable one at first, but the relief of no longer pretending. The distance was already there. Naming it just stops it from quietly growing.
How you start matters. Gottman's decades of research on couples shows that raising something difficult as information rather than accusation makes all the difference. "I've been missing us lately" opens a door. "You never make time for us" closes one.
It's also worth saying directly, if it applies, "I think the ways we handle stress are pulling us in different directions right now." That one sentence can dissolve a lot of hurt that's been building without either of you fully understanding why. Because it shifts the story from one of you not caring enough to both of you trying to get through the same hard thing in different ways. Choose a calm moment. Say something simple and true. That's enough to start.
What helps and how to build resilience for next time
This is not a one time fix. Long term relationships move through seasons, and hard times will come again. The goal is to build a relationship and a sex life resilient enough that when they do, you bounce back faster and find your way back to each other emotionally and physically more easily each time. The habits that make that possible are built in the ordinary days.
Emotional connection
One of the most common ways couples drift during a hard season is by retreating to their own ways of switching off, scrolling, binge watching, headphones in, separate corners of the house. None of that is wrong in itself, but when it becomes the default every evening, you stop actually being together. You're in the same house and completely elsewhere.
Rebuilding starts with choosing to be genuinely present to each other again. Sitting together without screens. A walk. A family dinner without phones on the table. Staying curious about who your partner is right now, what's weighing on them this week, what's shifted for them, rather than assuming you already know.
According to Emily Nagoski in Come Together, couples who sustain a strong intimate bond over time are those who consistently show up for each other in small ways, even during challenging moments, for example, by putting down their phones when their partner enters the room. Asking how something went and actually listening to the answer. Laughing together at something small. These aren't grand gestures, they're what keeps the emotional account between you full enough that when life gets heavy, you bounce back faster.
Physical connection
When sex has been rare for a while, non sexual touch tends to disappear too, and then the only time physical contact reappears, there's an unspoken expectation attached to it. The partner who isn't in the mood starts avoiding even a hug. The other reads every bit of physical distance as rejection. Both end up stuck in the same loop.
The way out is bringing touch back into daily life without it needing to go anywhere. A real kiss goodbye before leaving for work. Holding hands. A hug that lasts more than a few seconds. Sitting close on the sofa. These rebuild the physical sense of belonging to someone that quietly erodes under prolonged stress, and from that ease, desire has much more room to return.
When you do come back to sex, it doesn't have to be great every time, and it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Making out, a quick and connected encounter, something slow and unhurried, all of it counts. Dr. Barry McCarthy's Good Enough Sex model makes exactly this point, a couple's sexuality moves between different registers depending on what life is bringing. Sometimes it's deeply connected. Sometimes it's playful and light. Releasing the pressure of needing to be perfect every time removes the weight that keeps many couples stuck in avoidance.
It also helps to stay connected to your own sexuality during difficult periods, separately from your partner. Solo pleasure isn't a replacement for being together, but it keeps you in contact with your own desire when life has taken everything else. Orgasm is a genuinely effective stress reliever, it releases tension and lifts your mood. The balance to aim for is staying sexually alive in yourself, so that when you do come together, you're both bringing something to it.
Key takeaways
In long term relationships, sex and intimacy going quiet during hard periods is common and normal, not a sign that something is wrong between you.
Chronic stress puts us in survival mode. Our bodies stop prioritizing desire. Creating the conditions for it to return takes some active intention but not grand gestures.
Different ways of coping with stress can look like distance or a lack of interest. Usually, it's just two people trying to get through the same hard thing in different ways.
The honest, calm conversation is always the real first step. Everything else follows from it.
Emotional connection, being genuinely present to each other, not just nearby.
Physical connection, daily non sexual touch, and sex that doesn't always have to mean intercourse, making out counts too.
This is a daily practice, not just a crisis response. The more consistently you tend to it, the more resilient your relationship becomes, and the faster you bounce back emotionally and physically when life gets hard.
If this resonates
Think back over this past week, did you spend any quality time together, just the two of you, or as a family, away from screens and separate routines? Did you touch each other without it needing to go anywhere?
Those small things matter more than they seem. If you're in a hard season and feel like you could use some support getting closer again, I'd love to talk. A free discovery call is simply a conversation, you share what's going on, and we look at what might actually help in your situation.
Book your free discovery call here. If you'd like to start exploring on your own first, my free guide How to Want Sex Again helps you see what's getting in the way of your desire right now, and choose one small thing to try this week.
Read more from Joanna Kristensen
Joanna Kristensen, Sex & Relationship Coach
Joanna Kristensen is a certified sex coach specializing in sex and intimacy for long-term couples. She works with couples where sex has become infrequent or stopped altogether, where mismatched desire or physical challenges are affecting confidence and connection, or where patterns of avoidance and pressure have quietly taken hold. She also supports couples navigating life transitions that can reshape both sex and intimacy. Having experienced infertility, parenthood, infidelity, and her own midlife transition, she brings a grounded understanding of how life changes a couple’s sex life and intimacy — and how to restore both in a lasting way. Her philosophy: Don’t replace it — repair it.
