Since I've begun writing about returning love to marriage, I often have wives who approach me and say they want to save their marriage, but their husbands have indicated that (or act as if) they no longer love or are in love with them. These wives don't know how in the world they can save or improve their marriage when their husbands are no longer receptive. This article will discuss ways that you can coax your husband's love back so that he's a more willing partner than a reluctant roommate.
What "Falling Out Of Love" Really Means When You Are Married. (It's A Mirror): You may not believe me when I say this (I didn't when a therapist first told it to me), but I now know this to be true. When your husband acts like or indicates that he's "fallen out of love" with you, what that usually really means is that he's fallen out of love with the marriage, not the people in it (at this time, not forever). In essence, he's lost the pleasurable feelings that your relationship and marriage used to elicit in him (as they relate to himself).
Note that I focused more on his feelings about himself than on his feelings about you. The truth is, a man's being "in love" has more to do with the feelings that the relationship brings about or contributes to his own self-esteem than it has to do with you. This may not make a lot of sense at first but bear with me, because understanding this puts you at a distinct advantage.
When a man is "in love," he feels attractive, fully alive, intelligent, powerful, and competent. Who doesn't want to feel this way for the long term? It doesn't matter how these feelings are lost. What matters is that when they are, men feel very let down and can sometimes fixate upon this until they feel abandoned and/or neglected. (No, this isn't fair, but it's how they feel.)
"Falling out of love," then, is often an attempt by a husband to look elsewhere or be willing to move on to obtain these lost positive feelings somewhere else or on his own.
Please understand that usually external factors (or even other people) don't make or force your husband to turn his attention elsewhere or fall out of love. Many women mistakenly assume that their husband is in love with someone else or that a crisis or stress took the husband away.
This is only part of the story. What really happened is that the mistress or other woman was able to bring out the lost positive feelings in the husband or the crisis or stress further effected his self-esteem so much that he's trying to flee the situation. No, this isn't fair, but again you can use this information to your advantage to make adjustments.
Adjusting The Circumstances To Get Your Husband's Love Back: We've already established that your husband's loss of positive feelings is one of the major contributing factors to his "checking out" of your marriage. We have to get the original positive feelings back. But, don't let this knowledge cause you to panic or act in a way that is unbecoming or only damages your marriage more. So many people fall into this trap and, in turn, act desperate. This only pushes the husband further away. (Unfortunately, this is what happened to me.
More here.)
Your job is really to reintroduce the two people who first fell in love in the first place. Here is where you have a distinct advantage. You probably know your husband better than anyone else in the world. You know what makes him tick and what it took to make him fall in love with you originally.
Be honest. When you first fell in love, you almost certainly presented the best version of yourself regularly. You lavished attention and praise upon him, listened intently as he talked, and put his well-being and happiness very high on your list of priorities. It's highly likely that the amount of work you put into the relationship was reflected back in the strength and intensity of it.
More than anything, you need for your husband to have positive feelings when he thinks of or interacts with you. So, resist doing anything that would achieve the opposite. This sounds so simple, but so many people miss this. It's so common. We all do it, but it can kill the intimacy in your marriage. Don't berate, repeatedly question, nag your husband, or push his buttons. Don't continue to do the things that push your husband away and don't neglect or ignore those things you know would make him happy.
Re-introducing The Woman Your Husband Likely Still Loves Somewhere Deep Down: I am going to suggest that without being overly obvious, you present the best version of yourself (the one he first fell in love with). Remember you're trying to return the positive feelings that you were initially able to elicit for your husband about himself. This doesn't require you to again be twenty years old or to look like Paris Hilton. It only requires a wife who cares about her appearance and genuinely and deeply cares about her husband's happiness.
This usually means a light, interested, and attentive woman with the open heart and easy laugh that first turned your husband's head and put the gleam in his eye. You already know this woman. She's you. And she's the one who first won your husband's heart. Embrace her, because she's the one who's going to win it back. You just need to find her and reintroduce her to yourself and then to your husband.
How do I know this? Because I lived it. I had to use this approach when I trying to get my husband to realize that he
still loved me. I made a lot of mistakes, but eventually, I pulled it off. You can that story on my blog at
http://isavedmymarriage.com