Parents may also underestimate how much grief they’ll experience when the children leave. After all, you’re saying goodbye to an entire stage of family life: the noise, the meals, the conversations in the kitchen, the feeling of being needed and even the maddening irritations are all suddenly gone.
Partners don’t always experience this transition in the same way. One person may feel relieved and excited by the newfound freedom while the other feels lonely or unmoored. These mismatched feelings can quickly turn into arguments:
Why aren’t you sad? Don’t you miss them?
Why are you so sad? Aren’t you happy we can have more free time together?
Why do you suddenly want to travel all the time?
Why don’t you ever want to do anything?
Children moving out can also expose dissimilarities in the relationship that were easier to overlook when life was busier. Family members often connect around shared interests. A parent might have talked about books or politics with one child and sports or relationships with another. Once those daily conversations disappear, each spouse may become more aware of what they don’t share with the other.
Additionally, personality-driven preferences in a couple may become more apparent when the children are no longer around. One spouse may want to be out with friends, taking trips and trying new things, while the other is perfectly happy reading at home. One may want more togetherness while the other wants more space. Those differences aren’t necessarily a problem, but they can become a lot more noticeable when the children are no longer providing so much of the activity and connection in the household.
While sometimes the empty nest may reveal problems that have been lurking beneath the surface, other times it’s simply a difficult adjustment in an otherwise good marriage. Six months of feeling awkward, lonely or unsure what to do together doesn’t mean you married the wrong person – you might just need help finding your new groove.
It’s also worth remembering that the empty nest usually doesn’t happen in isolation. It may arrive around the same time as retirement, ageing parents, health problems, menopause, changes in sexual desire, career changes or financial worries. Sometimes couples assume that the marriage is the problem when, in fact, they’re having to absorb several major life changes at once.
How to rekindle and strengthen your relationship
The challenge of the empty nest isn’t only getting used to a quiet house. It’s figuring out how to become a couple again while also developing a fuller life outside of parenting.
If you’re heading into this stage (or are already there), here are a few things that can help:
- Talk about it ASAP. Don’t assume you both have the same picture of what the empty nest will look like. Similarly to how couples don’t always align on their aspirations for retirement, one of you may be imagining travel and adventure, while the other is imagining more time at home. It’s better to discover those differences and set realistic expectations for one another well before you’re fighting about them.
- Don’t wait until the kids leave to pay attention to the marriage. If communication has become mostly about schedules, bills and children, start rebuilding the connection before the house is empty. This can be tough to do when you’re strapped for time, but creating new routines such as dinners out once a week, regular walks together, seeing friends, taking a class or planning trips can begin to give this stage its own rhythm. Talk with your partner and come up with a list of activities that could increase your feelings of closeness and connection.
- Give yourselves some time. Major transitions are often messy at first. Feeling lonely, irritable or disconnected doesn’t necessarily tell you what the next 10 years of your marriage will look like. Try not to draw sweeping conclusions about the relationship while both of you are still adjusting.
- Don’t expect to become joined at the hip. You don’t need to have all the same interests or spend every free hour together. A good marriage or partnership can include shared activities along with separate friends and hobbies. In fact, it’s healthy to have social connections and interests outside of your partner; they help each person maintain a sense of identity and bring fresh energy back into the relationship.
- Don’t make your adult children responsible for your happiness. It’s understandable to miss them, but leaning on them to fill the emotional space they left behind can make it harder for everyone to move forward. Your relationship with them may need to change as they build lives of their own, just as you and your partner need to build a satisfying life in this next stage.
- Start with friendship. If you’ve drifted apart, don’t pressure yourselves to suddenly become wildly romantic. Start by doing things together and becoming curious about each other again. The romantic feelings may have to be rekindled with time, action and patience.
- Get help if the same fights keep going nowhere and the distance keeps growing. If every conversation ends in blame, withdrawal or contempt, couples therapy can be useful before resentment becomes the main way you relate to each other.
The goal here isn’t about trying to get back to who you were before you had children. Too much has happened, and both of you have changed, perhaps for the better in many ways. The task is to figure out who you are now, both as individuals and as a couple. That may mean grieving what’s over, repairing what’s been neglected and finding new things to enjoy together.
The house may be quieter. Your lives don’t have to be.
- Joshua Coleman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in California’s Bay Area, keynote speaker, author and senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. His newest book is Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties & How to Heal the Conflict. His Substack is Family Troubles.
