The signs of an unhappy woman in a relationship: how to recognise them

She still talks, but about logistics: who's doing the shopping, what time you're getting home, whether the cat has been fed. The real conversations, what she feels, what's on her mind, what she wants to do with her life, have disappeared. She doesn't start them anymore, and if you do, she answers in two sentences, politely, and moves on.

It's not a bad mood. It's a woman who has stopped expecting anything from those exchanges, and silence between two people who live together is rarely an accident: you go quiet when you get the feeling that talking changes nothing.

Not just in bed, although that counts. The small gestures too: the hand on your shoulder as she walks past, the morning kiss that wasn't a formality, sitting next to you on the sofa instead of in the armchair across the room. It doesn't stop all at once. It gets rarer, and one day you realise the last spontaneous hug was... you don't know when anymore.

For many women, physical contact follows the state of the relationship: when she no longer feels close to you, her body says it before she does. For some, it's even their first way of showing they care about someone.

Work, nights out with her friends, a new sport that suddenly takes up all the space. Having a life of your own is healthy. The signal is when those activities are visibly there to avoid being alone together: she comes home late and looks almost pleased to be too tired to talk, every weekend is filled up so there's never an empty moment, because in that empty moment, you might have to say things to each other.

Your keys left in the wrong place, the way you chew, the light left on in the hallway. Things that weren't problems six months ago. That irritation is never about the keys: it's a frustration that has built up and comes out there, because the real conversation about what's wrong hasn't happened. Answering annoyance with annoyance is one more argument that never gets to the real subject.

You mention a weekend away together, she says "we'll see". You bring up a bigger place, this summer's holiday, a shared project, she changes the subject or stays vague. A woman who no longer pictures a future with her partner has often already started imagining what comes next without him. Not necessarily with someone else: alone, freer, different.

It's one of the most telling signs, because picturing a future takes wanting the story to last. If questions about the future make her uncomfortable, it's because she doesn't have the answer, or doesn't want to say it.

You go away for two days for work, and she's lighter on the phone than when you're in the same room. You go out with your friends, and she doesn't ask what time you'll be back. It's not that she wants you to leave: it's that your presence takes effort, and your absence gives her a rest. Said like that, it's hard, but it's one of the most reliable signs on the list.

She used to ask what you thought about a purchase, an invitation, a problem with her mother. Now she decides on her own and tells you afterwards, when she remembers to. From the outside, everything works: the bills are paid, the fridge is full. But the two of you no longer decide anything together, and she's showing you that she no longer needs you for that.

There's a point, in a relationship that's going badly, where the arguments stop. It looks like a lull, and it isn't one. When a woman stops arguing, it's not that she's at peace with the situation: it's that she has decided it's no longer worth it, that nothing ever changes, and that she might as well save her energy.

That silence is more worrying than any argument, because it means she has let go. Psychologists call it disengagement: she no longer fights for the relationship, she puts up with it while she waits. It's often at this stage that you wonder whether it can still be saved or whether it's already over.

An unhappy relationship leaves marks. A woman who feels ignored or constantly criticised ends up not thinking much of herself. It can show as letting herself go: she stops paying attention to herself, sees fewer people, wants fewer things. Or the opposite, a new attention to how she looks, a new haircut, sport, clothes she had stopped wearing, as if she were trying to exist again, for herself or in someone's eyes.