“I Love Them, but I’m Not in Love Anymore—And I Don’t Know What to Do”
“We’ve built a life together. They’re good to me. There’s no big drama, no betrayal. I care about them deeply. But something’s changed. I’m not in love anymore—not in the way I used to be. I don’t feel pulled toward them. I don’t feel lit up around them. And I don’t know if that means I should stay, or if that means something essential has ended.”
Dear Sasha,
This is one of those fragments that sits like a stone in the center of your chest. Not because it’s explosive, but because it’s heavy. Because it speaks to a kind of grief that doesn’t get much air. You’re not in crisis. You’re not angry. You’re not falling apart. But something no one else can see has quietly unraveled inside you, and now you’re left holding the ache of uncertainty.
What you’re describing is a tension that lives at the heart of so many long-term relationships: the difference between loving someone and being in love with them. That difference is easy to mock, easy to dismiss as immaturity or restlessness. But it’s real. And when you start to feel that gap open up—when love shifts from spark to obligation, or from intimacy to polite coexistence—it becomes very difficult to know what to do next.
You’re not confused because you don’t care. You’re confused because you do. And that’s what makes this so hard. If you didn’t care, the decision might be clearer. If you were full of resentment or contempt, the path might be obvious. But instead, you’re sitting in a quiet middle place. One where nothing is wrong—but nothing feels right anymore, either.
That is a deeply lonely space to inhabit.
It’s lonely because the world doesn’t offer you a clear script for it. The cultural narratives about love tend to live at the extremes: either you’re wildly in love, or you’re breaking up. Either you fight for it with everything you have, or you walk away and “choose yourself.” But what about when the truth is softer? What about when you still care, still respect, still enjoy the person—but something inside of you has gone still?
Romantic ambivalence is one of the most emotionally complex states to live in. Because it asks you to hold two truths at once: I love them, and I don’t feel in love with them anymore. Those truths don’t cancel each other out. They coexist. And the work isn’t to rush to resolution—it’s to stay with that complexity long enough to learn what it’s asking of you.
Sometimes that ambivalence is a phase. A season brought on by fatigue, stress, disconnection, or emotional shutdown. Long-term relationships go through long winters. Periods where intimacy feels forced, where attraction dims, where connection becomes more about habit than hunger. That doesn’t always mean the love is gone. It can mean the love has retreated to a quieter place—and might be recoverable, with time, attention, or honesty.
But sometimes, ambivalence is not a passing season. Sometimes it’s a slow truth surfacing. The acknowledgment that the love is still there, but the kind of love that once bound you to this person—the longing, the inspiration, the feeling of seeing your life reflected in them—has shifted into something else. Something more platonic. More logistical. More about shared history than shared future.
And that’s when the grief starts to take shape.
Because even if nothing “bad” has happened, you’re still losing something. The dream you built together. The emotional identity you had with this person. The story of what your life would be. And grieving that kind of loss—quiet, unprovable, invisible—is its own heartbreak. Especially when the person you’re grieving is still right beside you, smiling, kind, doing the dishes.
You wrote that you don’t know what to do. That’s not surprising. Because there’s no obvious next step here. And the world is full of people ready to give advice—people who will tell you to stay and fight for it, or to leave and find something more passionate. But no one else has to live your life. No one else has to sit in your heart every morning and feel what you feel.
So maybe instead of rushing to do something, the first invitation is to get quiet enough to hear what’s true for you. Not what you’re supposed to feel. Not what you fear losing. But what your body knows. What your intuition has been whispering.
Are you willing to explore whether the connection could be revived? Not with guilt or pressure, but with curiosity. Have you spoken this out loud to your partner in any form? Or have you been carrying it alone, protecting them from your truth at the cost of your own peace?
There’s no shame in outgrowing a relationship. No failure in recognizing that what once fit you no longer does. And there’s also no shame in choosing to stay—not out of fear, but out of conscious commitment to a different kind of love. The question is not whether either path is valid. The question is: which path can you walk without abandoning yourself?
That’s the center of it. That’s the hard part. Because either way, there will be pain. Either way, there will be loss. Either way, there will be moments of doubt and longing. But only one path will allow you to stay in integrity with your own heart.
And that path doesn’t have to be walked today. You can sit with this question. You can breathe through the ambivalence. You can take your time. The truth will become clearer. It always does. And when it does, you’ll know—not because the decision will be easy, but because it will feel like alignment.
Whatever happens, I hope you choose in a way that lets you be proud of how you treated yourself and the person you’ve shared your life with. Love doesn’t always end with a bang. Sometimes it fades. Sometimes it shifts. And sometimes it transforms into something that still has value—but no longer fits inside the story of romantic partnership.
If that’s where you are, you’re not heartless. You’re honest.
Still here, holding the questions with you.
–RJ