Living with a partner who has gone quiet is a particular kind of lonely, because from the outside nothing is wrong. Nobody is shouting. There is simply less and less being said, and a growing suspicion that you are the only one who has noticed.
The first thing worth understanding is that withdrawal is almost never an absence of feeling. It is usually somebody managing too much of it, badly. When a conversation exceeds what a person can regulate, the nervous system does something quite physical — heart rate climbs, thinking narrows, and the capacity to hear anything accurately drops away. From the inside it feels like being cornered. Leaving the room is not indifference. It is damage control.
The second thing is that this becomes a partnership dance rather than one person's fault. The more one partner pursues — asks, explains, follows into the next room — the more the other retreats. And the more they retreat, the more urgent the pursuing becomes. Each of you is doing the thing that makes the other's behaviour worse, and both of you are convinced you are responding rather than causing.
So the work is not to get them to open up. It is to lower the cost of speaking.
Give notice instead of ambushing. There is something I want to talk about — is tonight or tomorrow better? gives someone the chance to arrive prepared rather than cornered. Keep it short and say so: twenty minutes, then we stop. A conversation with a visible end is far easier to enter than one that might go anywhere.
Change the geometry. A great many men in particular talk more freely side by side than face to face — driving, walking, doing something with their hands. Full eye contact across a table reads as an interrogation to a person who is already braced.
Ask smaller questions. What is going on with you is too large to answer. What was the hardest part of today has an actual answer. And when you get one, resist the urge to immediately do something with it. If every disclosure produces a discussion, disclosure starts to feel expensive.
When they do shut down, stop. Not as punishment — as protocol. Agree in advance that either of you can call a pause, on the condition that whoever calls it names when you will come back to it. A timeout without a return time is just an exit, and it teaches the other person that the subject can be escaped rather than finished.
One honest caveat. Sustained withdrawal, flatness and loss of interest can also be depression rather than a communication pattern, and no amount of better conversation will fix that. If what you are describing looks more like the lights going out than a wall going up, the right first step is a clinician, not a coach. I say the same to clients in the room.