Life // Love // Sex: Is it bad to want alone time away from your partner?

We’ve all come home after a long day and just wanted to curl up in a dark room and just listen to silence. Here’s how to (nicely) tell your partner to leave you alone.

I work a stressful job that takes up a majority of my time. When I get home I just need an hour or two to decompress before I have any other interaction with another person.

The issue is, I need that time away from my partner as well but I can sense I’m hurting their feelings.

They say that I shouldn’t be wanting to get away from them when I’m stressed and instead I should be wanting to spend more time with them.

What do I do? Is it bad that I want alone time away from my partner?

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Navigating much needed alone time when you have a partner can be tricky business.

Finding a sweet spot so you get enough time to recharge but also manage to spend that quality time together takes trial and error.

We’ve all come home after a long day and just wanted to curl up in a ball, in a dark room and just listen to silence.

Unfortunately on those days, sometimes your partner has been itching to talk to you all about their day.

How do you tell them you just need some time by yourself without them taking it personally?

I spoke to couple and family therapist, Moria Joyce who says communication and boundaries in the early parts of your relationship are vital to avoid issues like this one.

“If people come into the relationship feeling okay and are in touch with themselves, they should have no trouble saying to their partner that they need their alone time,” she said.

“You don’t need permission to nurture yourself.”

Moria said that if you’re someone that needs alone time, you don’t need to feel ashamed about that or ask permission.

“(At) the beginning (of a relationship), we often try really hard to work hard on the bond and we often forget to say what we need,” she said.

Speak to the hand: The experts say we’re lucky if our partner, even in long-term marriages, meets 60 per cent of our needs. Picture: iStock

Moria described our time as a pie chart — a part for ourselves, our friends, our partner, our family and everything else.

“It’s a myth that our partner meets 99 per cent of our needs.

“We’re lucky if our partner, even in long-term marriages, meet 60 per cent.

“We get a lot from work, our children, our faith, our mates, our religious groups or political affiliation – we’re made up of all these bits.

“You’re your own person, you’re not just half of a jigsaw.”

Moria stressed that each relationship is different — some crave or desire traditional relationships where they believe they should be joined at the hip, while others are more comfortable experiencing their relationship from a distance, perhaps only seeing each other once every few weeks.

Whatever way it works for you, disruptions to your relationship’s regular flow can push even the closest couples away from each other.

Whenever a couple decides it’s time to move in together, their relationship dynamic can change quite substantially.

“When people move in together, they tend to try to recalibrate how much time they spend together and how much apart,” Moria said.

Moria suggested being quite pragmatic early on. Speak to each other and ask how are you going to navigate it?

If you suddenly receive an urge to spend less time with your partner and more on your own with no reasonable explanation, there might be an issue.

Disruptions to your relationship’s regular flow can push even the closest couples away from each other.

Moria said that experiencing the urge to get away could be attributed to a variety of causes — the relationship could be toxic for example, or perhaps you’re craving alone time to rediscover yourself.

Or maybe, as the reader is, you’re just stressed at work and need that extra TCL time to yourself before you can fully commit to your partner the way that you want to.

Moria said to ask yourself: do you have good communication? Are you able to truly listen to each other? If you’re feeling a need to have a bit more separate time, is the need coming from you or is it caused by your partner? How can you explore that with your partner? Do you think that they are feeling threatened? Why?

When we first start seeing someone we want to be around them all that time. Moria calls this the “luminescent stage”. We often find ourselves not wanting to be around anyone else but them. This stage can last a few months up to a few years, but what eventually happens, is you start to want to be fulfilled from other slices of your pie chart.

This shift can initially cause anxiety and worry, leaving you asking yourself — do I still love my partner? But it’s only natural.

If your partner isn’t on the same page and their feelings are getting hurt reassure them that the love is just as strong.

Moria noted that we often take on board our partners issues thinking that we have to fix it.

“It’s a bit of a myth that we will find someone who makes us feel okay. It might feel like that in the beginning but still we left to work on our own problems. Our own insecurity is often one of the issues that comes up when there is an issue of somebody controlling or feeling that the partner has to fix their insecurities.”

While it’s important to support your partner and their feelings, it’s vital that they come to terms with the fact that you wanting alone time hasn’t necessarily gotten anything to do with them.

Life // Love // Sex is a new weekly column exploring modern relationship, dating, sex, love and life issues. Email reader questions and feedback to our columnist here.