Elderly couples often don’t talk. How to reconnect and have emotional communication

People together a long time can be emotionally distant. Regularly starting a conversation, listening and empathising, can help close the gap

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After decades together, some elderly couples run out of things to say, but following some expert tips can get them talking again. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 6:15pm, 1 Dec 2024

They’ll get up in the morning, have breakfast, pick up a prescription at the doctor’s, go to the supermarket – always together. Many older couples spend 24 hours a day together, some of them cramped in a small flat much of the time.

Despite their spatial closeness, emotional distance between them may grow – and perhaps the nagging realisation that they no longer have anything to say to each other.

“Often, too, when one’s on the phone [and the other within earshot], they’ll press the speaker button. So not even phone calls give them something new to tell each other,” says Michael Vogt, a professor of social work at Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Germany.

Or they’ll go into the treatment room together when one of them has a doctor’s appointment. “This constant listening in heavily satiates the relationship,” adds Vogt, who does research on couple relationships and sexuality in old age, and counsels couples.

Elderly couples may spend all their time together, even going into medical treatment rooms together. Photo: Shutterstock

It is not unusual that couple relationships evolve this way as the partners grow older, he says, since their social contacts increasingly thin out: “Friends die, their kids live far away.”