2 Early Warning Signs Of A 'Soft Breakup'
It doesn't happen overnight. It happens in the silences, the polite smiles, and the moments you stop reaching for each other.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | November 10, 2025
Relationships rarely fall apart overnight. Most drag on for a while, until they tip over and begin their descent into disconnection. Often, both partners try to hold on in their own ways. They might convince themselves it's just a rough patch, or hang on to the routines and rhythms of the relationship to keep its semblance alive.
Researchers behind a longitudinal analysis published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology also came to the same conclusion. They followed thousands of couples and traced people's relationship satisfaction, especially during the painful period of time leading up to the breakup.
By comparing couples who eventually separated with those who stayed together, they noticed a pattern: relationship satisfaction declines gradually, often for months or even years before the breakup happens. Using data from four large national samples, the researchers were able to delineate the two phases a relationship goes through before a breakup:
- The preterminal phase. In the first stage, relationship satisfaction declines slowly and subtly. This is when a couple might still be trying to fix things and rationalizing the distance as a "rough patch."
- The terminal phase. The decline is much steeper in this phase. Emotional connection and intimacy drop sharply, often beginning six months to two years before the actual breakup.
This points to the fact that, emotionally, many relationships end long before they officially do. As this happens gradually, it hardly feels like a breakup at first. This is the phase where both or one of the partners start to detach to avoid admitting to their feelings or reality.
This "soft breakup" is the subtle beginning of the end for many relationships. Here are two signs that you might already be in one.
1. You Avoid Discomfort More Than You Seek Connection
Distance in a relationship builds up slowly and quietly. On the surface, the relationship might look fine, and both partners may follow an unsaid routine as a couple. What they might realize in retrospect, however, is that somewhere along the way, their connection shifted from intentional to autopilot mode.
This phase looks peaceful from afar, but ignorant up close, where you don't fight as much or stop bringing up things that bother you. You're no longer trying to be understood and prefer coexisting peacefully instead. The space once occupied by curiosity gets taken up by routine and silence.
In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers wanted to understand how avoidance goals — that is, the tendency to avoid discomfort or conflict — affect the way couples communicate during disagreements.
The researchers videotaped 365 couples discussing a relationship issue and analyzed over 28,000 moments of interaction to see how each partner responded to the other's behavior in real time. People who were more avoidance-oriented or motivated to prevent conflict or protect themselves emotionally were found to handle conflict differently.
- Instead of softening or resolving tension, they stayed stuck in negative communication loops such as defensiveness, withdrawal or criticism.
- When their partner acted negatively, they didn't de-escalate. In fact, their negativity often intensified in response.
- This pattern held true even when controlling for other factors, like relationship satisfaction or personality traits (e.g., neuroticism). In other words, the tendency to avoid discomfort was a deeper communication style that persisted regardless of the relationship's overall quality.
In contrast, partners who were less avoidant were more likely to calm down and reconnect as the conversation went on. Their negativity was found to actually decrease over time.
Avoidance goals reflect a deeper fear, maybe of rejection, loss or vulnerability. But the paradox is, the more someone avoids discomfort, the more disconnection grows. In a soft breakup, this avoidance starts showing up slowly.
- You or your partner stop bringing things up because "it's not worth another argument"
- Conversations stay polite but lack depth
- You convince yourself you're keeping the peace, but, really, you're just preserving distance
This study shows that avoidance becomes self-perpetuating. When one partner withdraws, the other feels unseen or rejected. This fuels more negativity and widens the gap in emotional understanding.
2. You Feel More Lonely With Them Than Without Them
One of the subtlest warning signs of a soft breakup is when you start feeling alone together. Feeling lonely in a relationship is often a direct result of emotional disconnection. Over time, this is what enables couples to grow apart despite being physically close.
A longitudinal 2020 study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies tracked over 2,300 couples for eight years to understand how loneliness shapes relationship satisfaction over time. What they found was that loneliness doesn't just result from low relationship quality; it also predicts future declines in satisfaction for both individuals and their partners.
People who reported feeling lonely at the start of the study were more likely to experience declines in relationship satisfaction over the years. The authors of the study suggest that this may happen because lonely individuals tend to become more sensitive to signs of rejection and withdraw emotionally — a concept labelled as the "risk-regulation model."
This withdrawal creates a feedback loop: the lonelier one feels, the less they reach out, which then increases emotional distance for both partners.
While loneliness was not found to be a shared trait within couples, the effects of loneliness were shared. Even if only one partner felt lonely, both suffered from lower relationship satisfaction over time.
In the context of a soft breakup, this kind of loneliness can often show up subliminally. Partners might feel like they're together but the emotional intimacy starts thinning out. One partner might feel the distance first and begin to pull back out of resignation. The other may sense the withdrawal and mirror it, often without even realizing it.
To put this in perspective, if you're feeling like the connection hasn't necessarily disappeared in your relationship, but it's also no longer being actively co-created, that might be a sign of a soft breakup. You're still together and still showing up; however, the emotional investment has slowed down. You might be sensing something fade, even if nothing dramatic has happened.
While awareness about this phase can be helpful, it's important not to overanalyze every quiet moment or label it as a soft breakup. Every relationship goes through phases of distance; it's part of being two evolving people who share a life. The real concern is when neither partner notices or tries to bridge the distance. If you do recognize the drift, that awareness is often the very thing that, for many, can save the relationship.
When trying to reverse a soft breakup, you should start by talking to understand, rather than to fix. Reframing conflicts as opportunities, not failures, can help you develop this habit faster. Disagreements often mean you still care enough to be heard, and they can bring buried emotions back to light.
Furthermore, if you recognize that there is a sense of loneliness in the relationship, whether in you or your partner, do not assume it to be a dead end. Instead, treat it as a reminder that love needs attention. From here, you both need to be deliberate in your efforts to make each other feel seen and supported.
Finally, you can start rebuilding your connection from a place of curiosity. This can help you leave your assumptions aside and try to get to know your partner for the person they are evolving into as they grow with you.
While soft breakups begin with a decline in relationship satisfaction, they're often less about falling out of love and more about forgetting to keep choosing each other, day after day. The good news is that, at the end of the day, satisfaction can also be rebuilt again gradually with mutual willingness.
Do you often feel unseen or emotionally distant in your relationship? Take this science-backed test to understand why you might feel lonely, even in the presence of your partner: Loneliness in Intimate Relationships Scale
A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.