Nobody in Your Life Gets It. That’s Not a You Problem. That’s a Gap Problem.
by Lauren Canonico, LCSW and Sophie Talmadge Silleck, LMSW
On the specific loneliness of feeling unknown in your own relationships — and what it actually takes to close that gap.
Feeling lonely even in close relationships is common for queer, polyamorous, and gender-diverse people navigating body image and intimacy. Learn why the gap exists and how affirming therapy in New York and online helps close it. There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from working too hard or sleeping too little, but from spending years in rooms where nobody quite gets the full picture of who you are. Editing yourself in real time, laughing at the right moments, answering the right questions, and leaving out the parts that would take too long to explain.
You’re not isolated. You have people. Maybe you have a lot of people. But somewhere between the version of you that shows up at dinner and the version that lies awake at three in the morning, there is a gap. That gap has been there so long it has started to feel like just the way things have to be.
But they don’t. That gap has a name, a source, and a way through.
Can You Feel Lonely Even When You Are in a Relationship?
Yes. Loneliness inside relationships is one of the most common and least talked about experiences for queer, polyamorous, and gender-diverse people.
Ask most people what loneliness looks like and they will describe someone alone: eating by themselves, coming home to an empty apartment, spending Friday nights without plans. But that is not the only kind of loneliness that can be painful. The loneliness that quietly dismantles wellbeing can be subtler, yet still disorienting, because it happens inside relationships. Inside friendships. Inside partnerships you genuinely care about. You’re not physically alone. You’re just not fully known.
A recent study published in the journal LGBTQ+ Family, found that queer people can simultaneously report greater feelings of loneliness and positive wellbeing — not because something is wrong with them, but because being uniquely understood by people closest to you makes you more aware of when you are not. The gift of being known highlights the gap where you are not. And for a lot of people, that gap is enormous.
Being partnered doesn’t fix it either. LGBTQ+ adults in relationships still report feeling lonely when the world doesn’t fully recognize or understand what they have. You can be deeply loved by someone and still feel profoundly unseen, because the loneliness was never about the person in front of you. It’s about the context you’re both living in.
For people whose relationships or identities sit outside what people around them understand — whether that means navigating non-monogamy, queerness, gender identity, or living in a body that does not fit the mainstream narrative — the gap between inner life and outer presentation compounds quietly over time. Not dramatically. Just constantly.
And underneath that is something even harder to name. How much of yourself you have each learned to hide just to feel safe enough to stay close. How vulnerability became something you both rationed over time, offered carefully and only after calculating whether the other person could actually hold it. How being truly seen stopped feeling like relief and started feeling like a risk neither of you knew how to take anymore.
But here is what that protection costs. When you are so focused on managing the risk of being seen, you can end up sending a different signal entirely — that there is nothing more to show, that you do not need more closeness, that this is as far in as you go. Not because that is true. Because the guarding itself becomes the message. And without meaning to, you can create the exact distance you were trying to protect yourself from.
This does not start as a relationship problem. But it can quickly become one. When two people have each spent years learning to protect themselves, distance between them can be nearly inevitable
Vulnerability is not a bonus feature of intimacy. It is the foundation of it. And when both people in a relationship have learned to ration it, closeness can get incredibly tricky to build and maintain.
Therapy can help you stop getting in your own way, reconnect with your needs, and increase your tolerance of the risk required for vulnerability and deeper intimacy. This is a knot that can be untangled in therapy, either on your own or in relationship therapy.
Why Do Queer and Polyamorous People Feel Like Nobody Understands Their Relationships?
Most of the frameworks people use to understand relationships were not built with queer or non-monogamous lives in mind. And explaining your life to someone who is working from a different framework is so exhausting that most people eventually stop doing it.
There is a particular kind of mental gymnastics that happens when your life requires translation.
You want to talk about something real: a dynamic in your open relationship that is bothering you, a boundary someone crossed, something you are trying to figure out about yourself. And before you can even get to the actual thing, you have to build the entire context from the ground up. You have to explain your relationship structure, manage the reaction, reassure the person you are confiding in that non monogamy can be healthy and satisfying and everything is fine before you can talk about what isn’t, assuming all this educating hasn’t zapped your ability to still feel okay talking about it.
That is not connection. That is labor. Invisible, unpaid, unacknowledged labor. And after a while, most people stop trying. Not because they don’t want to be known, but because starting over every single time costs more than most people have left to spend. And after a while, most people stop trying… not with their therapist, but with the people they actually want to be close to. Not because they don’t want to be known, but because starting over every single time costs more than most people have left to spend.
People in polyamorous and non-monogamous relationships often stay quiet about it, and it’s not because they’re ashamed. The risk of rejection and condemnation from family, friends, and colleagues is real, and the cost of explaining and managing the fallout can outway the benefit of trying to be understood.
Queer people, regardless of gender, are statistically less likely than straight people to have the kind of built-in relationships that come from family, school, or colleagues who share their experience. When foundational relationships don’t reflect who you actually are, the gap between your inner life and your outer presentation grows over time. Quietly. Until you realize you have been holding your breath in most of the rooms you spend your time in.
And here is the part that rarely gets said out loud: even when you find your people, even when you build a community that understands your relationship structure or your identity, the loneliness does not always disappear. Research found that queer people with friends who share their sexual identity report greater life satisfaction and less loneliness, but being understood in those spaces also heightens awareness of where they are not understood. Being known in one room makes the gap in every other room louder.
That is not a reason to stop looking for the room where you are known. It’s a reason to understand that loneliness is structural, not personal. It was built into the world you are moving through. And it deserves more than a self-help list.
What Is the Connection Between Body Image and Intimacy?
Body image and intimacy are directly connected. Dissatisfaction with one’s body reduces relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, and emotional closeness with partners, regardless of relationship structure and sexual orientation. You do not have to have a clinical eating disorder for body image to affect your relationships. Negative body image can impact anyone.
Especially for queer and gender-expansive people, body image is not just personal; it’s political. Research exploring the relationship between queer identity and body image found that participants consistently described their bodies as sites of visibility, safety, and risk. How they felt about their bodies was inseparable from how safe they felt being seen. When visibility in your body carries risk, social, relational, or physical, feeling good in it becomes complicated in ways that go far beyond what the mirror shows.
For people navigating non-monogamy or multiple partnerships, the stakes compound further, as more intimacy can mean more vulnerability. More vulnerability means more exposure to body image triggers. And when body image pain is triggered, it does not stay contained in a neat little box. When your body image struggles take you out of the present moment, that may also affect your partners’ experiences of intimacy and closeness too. The body story you’re carrying moves right into your relationships.
The way you feel about your body and the way you experience sex aren’t always separate. They can be connected consciously and even unconsciously. Body image struggles and sexual difficulties often come from the same place, so working on one without the other leaves the most important part undone.
Why Is It Hard to Be Present During Sex When You Have Body Image Issues or an Eating Disorder?
When we feel self-conscious during sex, mental resources that could be going toward enjoying physical sensations and connection are instead redirected toward intrusive, dysphoric, dysmorphic or ruminating thoughts. When our brains are running a constant vigilance toward how our bodies look, we cannot simultaneously be present.
The loop is recognizable to anyone who has lived it. You are physically there, but you are also simultaneously evaluating every angle, every movement, every possible thing your partner might be noticing. That you fear might make you appear undesirable or unlovable. The anxiety that’s created pulls you out of your body at the exact moment intimacy asks you to be in it.
Research shows that nearly half of people with eating disorders report either avoiding or abstaining being entirely absent from sexual relationships. Not because they don’t want connection, but because experiencing your body during sex can be overwhelming, or downright triggering.
Feeling self-conscious about your body during sex is a significant way that eating disorder symptoms contribute to sexual dissatisfaction. And with either binge eating or a restrictive eating disorder like anorexia, replaying body image worries in your head gets in the way of actually enjoying sex, which can quickly lead to avoiding it more and more. That avoidance then reinforces a negative relationship with your body, making the next intimate moment even harder to be present for.
The avoidance is not laziness or disinterest. It is a learned protective response. Your nervous system learned, from enough uncomfortable or unsafe experiences, in order to prevent you from ending up there again. The protection made sense at the time, and it is also keeping you from something you actually want and deserve: meaningful connection and pleasure.
Breaking that loop is possible, but it requires more than awareness. It requires doing the actual work in a space where the full context is already understood, so you are not spending the session explaining yourself and running out of time before you get to anything real.
For more on how relationship dynamics shape what becomes possible in sex and closeness, read our post on Heated Rivalry and Sexual Intimacy.
What Does Affirming Therapy for Body Image, Sex, and Relationships Actually Look Like?
Affirming therapy means therapy that starts from your actual life: your identity, your relationship structure, your body history, rather than asking you to translate yourself into a framework that was not built for you.
There is a version of therapy where you spend the first several sessions doing intake. But instead of getting to talk about the core of you you are, where your thoughts go when you’re alone, your dreams, your goals, your deepest fears, you spend the whole time correcting the therapist’s assumptions and explaining different parts of your identity.
Educating your therapist. Managing their learning curve. And somewhere in there, trying to find time for the actual thing you came. in to work on.
That version is exhausting.
And for far too many of us, it is the only version available.
Not here.
Affirming therapy is different. It does not mean a therapist who tolerates your identity. It means a clinician who understands it, who does not need the context explained because the context is already part of how they work. The work starts from where you actually are.
Two Ways to Work With Sophie Talmadge Silleck, LMSW
Sophie Talmadge Silleck, LMSW is a queer-identified therapist at Affirmative Therapy Collective specializing in sex therapy, eating disorders, substance use, and the intersections among body image, intimacy, and identity. She works with individuals and couples of all configurations, including those navigating polyamory, ethical non-monogamy, kink, BDSM, and relationship structures that don’t fit standard definitions. Her clinical approach is warm, holistic, and grounded in attachment-based, feminist, relational, and psychodynamic frameworks.
Sophie sees clients in person in Manhattan, New York City, and virtually throughout New York and New Jersey.
Join our Group Therapy Sessions as we explore Sex, Food, and Body Image
Baring It All: An Exploration of Sex, Food, and Body Image is Sophie’s virtual group offering for people navigating the intersection of body image, eating, and sexual intimacy. It is open to all genders, 18 and older, across the United States.
Group therapy does something that individual therapy cannot fully replicate. When you are in a room, even a virtual one, with people who are working through similar challenges, something shifts. You stop feeling like the only one. The shame that has been living in the silence starts to lose its grip. You start hearing your own experience reflected back in ways that make it easier to see clearly. You receive support not just from the facilitator but from the people around you who are doing the same hard thing in real time.
For people who have spent years feeling like nobody in their life gets it, that experience of being understood without having to explain is not a small thing. It is often the thing that makes the rest of the work possible.
The group is built for people who are done translating themselves. Done managing other people’s learning curves. Done starting from zero every time they try to talk about something real. In this group, the context is already in the room. The work starts from there.
The benefit of group therapy is community, perspective, and the specific kind of healing that only happens in relationship with others. Research consistently shows that for people with marginalized identities, connection with those who share their experience is one of the most powerful factors in reducing loneliness, improving wellbeing, and sustaining therapeutic progress over time.
Group session fee: $90 for a 90 minute session Screening session fee: $50 for a 30 minute session Open to all genders, 18+ Held virtually via Zoom Open to participants across the United States
Not sure which is the right fit?
That is what the screening session is for. A 30 minute screening session with Sophie gives you the chance to talk through where you are, what you are looking for, and which format makes the most sense for your specific situation. There is no pressure and no wrong answer.
Visit Sophie’s full profile at Affirmative Therapy Collective to learn more about her approach, her specialties, and how to get started.
Complete the screening form to get started at affirmativetherapycollective.com
Affirmative Therapy Collective offers body, sex, trauma, and LGBTQ+ affirming psychotherapy in NYC and via telehealth in NY, NJ, CO, CT, FL, MI, MN, PA, and WI.
⎯ References:
Michigan State University & University of Kentucky. (2025). Friendships between queer people can improve well-being — but there’s nuance. LGBTQ+ Family. https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2025/06/msu-study-friendships-between-queer-people-can-improve-well-being-but-there-is-nuance
Whitehead, J. et al. (2022). In their own words: Experiences of loneliness, isolation, and service utilization among LGBTQ+ older adults. PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11690498/
Tweedy, A. (2011). Cited in: Living outside protocol: Polyamorous orientations, bodies, and queer temporalities. Sexuality & Culture. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-019-09621-7
Kashubeck-West, S. et al. (2022). Associations between body dissatisfaction and relationship functioning among same-sex female couples: An actor-partner interdependence model. PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9651090/
Schmidt, M. et al. (2022). Body image disturbance and associated eating disorder and body dysmorphic disorder pathology in gay and heterosexual men. PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9725123/
Pinheiro, A.P. et al. Eating disorders disrupt healthy sexual function. Eating Disorders Review. https://edr.iaedpfoundation.com/eating-disorders-disrupt-healthy-sexual-function/
Gillen, M. & Markey, C. (2019). Cited in: Exploring the relationships between body image, sexual well-being, and community connectedness among gay, bisexual and queer+ men. Journal of Sex Research. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38836791/
Kor, A. et al. (2021). Eating disorders and sexual satisfaction: The mediating role of body image self-consciousness during physical intimacy and dissociation. PubMed. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34269636/
Castellini, G. et al. (2020). The relationship between eating disorder psychopathology and sexuality: Etiological factors and implications for treatment. PubMed. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32858598/
Daubenmier, J. et al. (2023). Sexual self-concept, functioning, and practices of women with binge eating episodes. PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10108796/
ScienceDirect. (2026). Embracing my queerness has actually been really healing for the way that I live in my body: An exploration of queer women’s body image and physical activity. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1740144526000446
