How to Deal with Boredom in a Relationship

16.12.2019

Erich Fromm once made a remark about boredom, “People who are able to respond productively to activating stimuli, are almost never bored, but in our cybernetic society, such people are an exception. As for the rest ... other people are constantly bored if they do not find at least some means of stimulation."

Do you agree that boredom is a characteristic growth in our society? Most people do not know how to respond to irritants if they are not very strong ones. That is even stability and harmony can be harmful to the couple as they can serve as reasons for boredom in a relationship. How to avoid this frustrating feeling in your communication with partner and is it considered normal at all? We will shed light on this below.

Is Boredom Normal in a Relationship?

The man was originally created in order to conquer the horizons, solve emerging problems, develop and learn new things. When this is not present in our life, silent dissatisfaction or even hidden hatred arises towards oneself, towards others, to the monotony of life.

Let’s consider an example. We say, “I’m bored with washing the dishes,” but we mean, “I am constantly doing the dishes, it seems that there is no end to this. If only someone helped me or at least praised my efforts.”

We are facing a problem that we do not solve, and this is what makes us suffer. But you can establish a duty in the family, ask everyone to wash, buy a dishwasher, and go to the cafe from time to time. Conclusion: boredom is a series of unsolved problems that we do not want to deal with for one reason or another. And it is completely normal if you feel it in relation to your partner. This is an indicator that there are some pitfalls in your even seemingly perfect family life, you need to be honest with yourself and each other and address the problems. You should neither be afraid nor ignore them because it will not make your life any easier, your partner or you can end up surfing through the women seeking men sites or cheating out of boredom.

Signs of Boredom in a Relationship

The feeling of boredom in long-term relationships has even some advantages. You know that the partner takes care of you and will always come to the rescue, and there is always someone to talk to. But even in the most loving and friendly relationships, a monotony crisis may come over time, and then one of you will get bored. If you feel that your partner has recently become bored with relationships, do not despair. This often happens. The main thing is that you can always add novelty and refresh the emotions, it doesn’t mean making your other half jealous by watching pictures of single girls but adding a rational grain of something interesting. Try something new to bring life and interest back to your joint time spending. So, here are signs of boredom in a relationship.

1. Demonstrative indifference

If your partner or you used to be interested in doing something with each other, but now you show indifference, it's time to take a closer look at the relationship. One of the troubling signs is the lack of enthusiasm for things that you were previously interested in doing with your soulmate. When your partner gets tired of the relationship, even the most interesting things become a burden. If earlier you always planned some interesting dates in different places, but now it has stopped, this is a sure sign that you need to wonder how to cure boredom in a relationship.

2. The loss of interest

How often do you and your partner do something new together? If the desire to try something new has disappeared together, then this is a sure sign of boredom. If earlier your partner was ready for everything new, whether it is about new places or new ways of hanging out, and now they want to do the same thing all the time, this is a sign that your significant other isn’t enjoying the relationship as much anymore. It may sound strange, but relationships can become uninteresting when new experiences become routine.

3. The desire to spend less time together

Does your partner increasingly come up with reasons to spend time apart from you? If so, then this means that they want to be somewhere else, walk with friends, or just get busy doing other things because they do not enjoy spending time with you. When being bored with a partner, we try to avoid doing things together and involve in the activities that mean communicating or cooperating. As we expect that they will not bring us any joy, they will be a strain, and we will count minutes to their end while the time lasts eternity with someone you feel tired of.

4. You stopped asking each other questions

When you meet a new person, everything about them is interesting to you. You can talk for hours, getting to know each other closer. And although this interest runs out over time, there should always be some minimum of curiosity, at least how your day went. When your partner is bored in a relationship, they are less and less interested in knowing about your day, affairs, personal troubles, and they do not feel the obligation to wonder how you feel. They stop asking how your day went because they are tired of hearing about it and know that as soon as you start talking, they will want you to shut up. A bored partner does not ask what is happening in your life because they are no longer interested in your answers.

5. Staring at the phone when you are together

We all sometimes get too stuck on the phone, but if your partner almost always pays more attention to the screen than you, it means that they are bored and find the social and virtual life happening on the web more interesting than the live conversation with you. Such behavior can be called "being alone when together."

If a partner is tired of your relationship, they can continue to spend time with you physically, but at the same moment, isolate inside. It means you can be sitting in the same room scrolling through a news feed or listening to podcasts on your device instead of talking to each other or doing something together. The opportunity to be alone is important in any relationship, but joint spending is no less important. Even watching YouTube or refreshing the Instagram feed may be done at one or another part of the day but try to do this while one of you is in the bathroom or on your way to work in public transport. How to prevent boredom in relationships? Arrange your schedule to spend more time being present with each other at the moment.

Main Types of Boredom in a Relationship

Even scientists have several different approaches to explaining what causes boredom in a relationship and subsequently what are the main types of this feeling. The most common says that boredom replaces something else.

1. For example, feelings or desires are suppressed, a person “does not notice” them, and other activities designed to replace them are perceived as unsatisfying, uninteresting. Boredom is an unpleasant state when a person feels the desire and inability to engage in any satisfying activity.

2. Boredom generates a violation of one of the mechanisms of attention. A person cannot concentrate on internal emotions and factors (the feelings and thoughts) or external stimuli (irritating factors/those stimulating interest). They notice discomfort and “designate” circumstances as “guilty.”

3. On the other hand, there is a theory that people need a certain amount of stimulus to “have something to process the brain.” The stimulation may not be enough, and a person begins to get bored, feel like in a vacuum where neither bad emotions cause dissatisfaction nor good ones joy. Everything they feel is the apathy, indifference and complete void of things worth attention.

4. Boredom can “grow” out of existential problems, “Why do I even need this?!” “There is no sense in anything I do anyway.” When people do not see motivation in general, any component of their life becomes senseless as a separate unit. They have no willing to put effort and feel frustrated because the situation seems to stay in a standstill, no changes, neither positive nor negative happen and that is why it is not worth trying at all.

How to Fix Boredom in a Relationship

Dealing with boredom in a relationship requires determining the core problem that lies deep behind this puzzling feeling. As any other reaction of our psyche, it did not occur randomly without a reason. After you do this, you can proceed to save your couple. Try some of the things described below and implement them either in your personal life or in your behavior as the family. If they do not help, you should consider group therapy and individual couple training. So, how to fix boredom in a relationship?

Spend more time alone with yourself. During this time, try to calm down, relax. Meditate on something, better on an abstract object, not attached to the current moment. Do not think about work or current affairs, but make plans, think about yourself and your future, about how to achieve your happiness and what you need to do. Critically assess your current family, financial position, state of health and mind, are there any problems concerned with them?

Can they be solved and how to do it? If you can’t make yourself think, concentrate, and if you are distracted by thoughts about current affairs, then you need to learn how to relax, clear your mind and put your thoughts in order. It is a mistake to believe that there is no universal exercise that helps get rid of many problems. There is such an exercise - this is meditation. By practicing that, you will learn to relax and clear your brain of thoughts, to exist in the present moment, discarding worries about the future and past memories.

The action of this practice is directly aimed at eliminating the main source of boredom: inner anxiety and fear of being alone with oneself. During meditation, you listen to what is happening inside, establishing a connection with your body. It helps look at many things soberly and impartially, and thereby, get rid of many prejudices. This is perhaps what you need for avoiding boredom in a relationship.

Learn to enjoy peace and quiet. You can just lie on the grass for a long time, look at the sky and try not to think about anything, or lie in bed, eyes closed, listening to calm, slow music. Try to spend more time in nature, in silence. Take a walk, walk at a slow pace, just looking around. One way of how to deal with boredom in a relationship is to start with your inner calmness. Do you feel frustrated because you see no future for your couple? Do you get so busy with the work that you spend less and less time with your beloved? Maybe this boredom substitutes the feeling of aggression? This can be passive aggression on yourself or on the circumstances not dependent on none of you. You should clearly divide what bothers personally you and the problems with your couple or the partner themselves. Do not direct your negativity onto the partner if the trouble lies in you.

Think of a hobby, an occupation. Choose an area in which you would like to develop and get some skills, for example, photography and photo retouching, cycling, music (this can be either mastering a musical instrument or gaining skills in computer applications (sequencers) for creating music and mastering, it depends on what is closer to you), programming, writing blog articles, chess, poker, spiritual practices, etc. Do not underestimate yourself even if you have already once made an effort to start an activity that was not crowned with success because to truly get carried away with some business, you need to master it at least a little. Any new hobby, even the most unloved in the beginning, can start to bring joy as soon as it gives the first result, you get gradually better in it or just better than others and some skill appear. Just start. Try yourself here and there, experiment.

Instead of spending free time at home and at work for all sorts of nonsense, do something that will develop you, that will make your leisure time productive and then you can invite your partner to join. And who knows, there may be a new hobby when you master it perfectly, it will become your favorite business in the future, thanks to which you will gain financial independence, get rid of office shackles and change your life for the better. You just need to start, you should be neither lazy nor afraid to learn new things. Maybe your feeling of boredom in relationship masks the feeling of overall frustration due to the unrealized potential.

Restore lost emotional connection. How? Remember yourself and your partner at the dawn of your relationship. What were you like? Crazy adventurers, passionate lovers, maybe it all started with friendship? You admired each other endlessly and believed that "the sky is the limit for you two." For some time, such a relationship relied on emotions and new impressions, and when everything has "settled," the energy connection began to be lost.

Any relationship needs to be worked on. Love union cannot exist on its own. Restoring emotional connection requires confidential communication and tactile contact (hugs, kisses, affection, sex).

Communicate with your spouse. Share ideas, problems, ask how the day went, what kind of relationship they have with their boss, with colleagues, what happens or doesn't work out. Consult on various issues, ask for help. Do not reproach, but emphasize its pricelessness, "Without you, I would not be the person I am and would not cope with the majority of things I do." In a word, help your beloved to feel needed and reawake the feeling of tenderness towards them inside yourself too. Maybe your boredom is just a sign it is time to change something and not at all an indicator the love has gone or that you have made a wrong decision deciding to dedicate your life to this person.

When Boredom Is a Reason to Break off a Relationship?

The main message of typical recommendations for fighting boredom is that your system needs changes, so you should give them to it. Cook your favorite stew in a new way; stand not with your right foot, but with your left; go home not the usual way, but that winding and through the gateway. Your system stagnates like water in a gasoline puddle, therefore, changing the schedule should help and lead the couple to their former passion. But why does all this not work for relationships?

You can also recall the famous technique in sexology, when a couple is invited to spend the night in a hotel, thereby warming up the relationship with a veil of something forbidden. A legitimate game of breaking the rules. But does it make the boredom go away? The first time, yes, and then even this game gets uninteresting and gets lumpy.

So, it’s important to understand that simple routine changes do not solve the problem of boredom. This does not work because external changes will not allow internal experiences. No. The system needs a deep approach. And when you have tried everything, you already upgraded your personality and feel better as the person, maybe the reason is really in your partner. Or the thing may be that your union doesn’t work, you do not match each other, and further relationships will only cause more feelings of nothingness and tiredness.

In many aspects, boredom is the feeling that you are trapped. And you would not get into it if you control what you can. Boredom can be especially annoying for people who have many choices or used to have them. Maybe this is how it is associated with a privileged position because it is difficult for you to find its cause. For example, people who used to have an open relationship or various partners without obligations in their youth, when matured and having entered an exclusive union, feel trapped and bored. As if their freedom is now limited.

If you are like Zelda and Francis Scott Fitzgerald, wandering around the world, arranging orgies, and you still feel bored, then this turns into a giant existential crisis. Because boredom is such a motivating, pushing, annoying force, it can be useful. Hopefully, now that it’s much easier for you to talk about boredom in general and think about your own frustration, to make some decisions instead of struggling with this feeling or pretending that you do not experience it. Now you can soberly assess your relationship and find the way out of the vicious circle of indifference towards your partner.