On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.
On today's episode, Coach Jack teaches why your wife may have fallen out of love and how to help her fall in love with you again.
After listening to today's episode, you may want to:
On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.
On today's episode, Coach Jack teaches why your wife may have fallen out of love and how to help her fall in love with you again.
After listening to today's episode, you may want to:
Is My Wife REALLY Not in Love with Me Anymore?
(Podcast Transcript)
(0:00)
[Introduction to the podcast]
Announcer: On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.
(0:29)
Coach Jack: She said it, but is she really not in love with you anymore? Are her feelings just blocked? What can you do in this situation to move toward reconciling?
People can and do fall out of love. Love is not some fixed quality like having an arm or a head. It can come and go. When it goes it can come back again if the right conditions are present.
Knowing the factors that lead to falling in and out of love can help you to: 1) make sure your wife does not fall out of love with you, and 2) help her to fall in love with you again, if she has already lost that feeling.
(1:08)
One of the most frequent things I do as a coach is to help clients to get their spouse to fall in love with them again. Just because she has said she is not in love with you does not mean your relationship is over. But it will be if you don’t handle things correctly.
If you are to help her to fall in love with you, you will have to:
None of those things will lead to her being in love with you again.
To reconcile, you must accept reality
She means what she says. It’s not an intervention.
An intervention is something that women do to try to improve their marriages. Women must do interventions when their husbands don’t take them seriously. They have to shock their husbands into improving. Interventions are one of the reasons women separate.
(2:06)
But, they don’t say they don’t love their husbands when it is an intervention. In 30 years of reconciling relationships, I have yet to find a woman tell her husband that she is not in love with him in order to get him to do anything but give up on their relationship.
Why do you have to accept what she says in order to reconcile?
Accepting the reality of what she is saying can help you to avoid making relationship mistakes. For example, pursuing her at this point, will lead to more rejection. That would not be true if she were doing an intervention. A woman doing an intervention wants you to pursue her because she wants to have a better relationship with you.
Pursuing a woman who has little interest in you goes over about as well as trying to feed broccoli to cats.
The time to pursue a woman is after she is attracted to you, not before. There is nothing about pursuit that creates attraction.
(3:03)
You may have learned differently from watching movies. You can no more learn how to have a good relationship from watching movies than you can learn to be a pilot that way. In either situation you will crash and burn. Although most people have watched many movies, relationships are not better off for it. If anything, they are worse.
You must have a way of detecting false teaching from true teaching. There are only two good ways to do this: reading the Bible, and learning from experience.
Any behavior you have that makes your wife want to have space from you is a bad behavior for reconciling.
Use this as a reality check for how helpful your behavior is and how good is the advice you have received.
There are some famous self help books that encourage people to shower their wives with love in order to win them back. They don’t work any better than books that promise to make you rich in thirty days. Their titles sell, but their methods stink. They only work for people whose wives are doing interventions. For everyone else they will fail.
(4:12)
If you are doing a reality check you won’t have to pursue your wife long before you figure out if pursuit is the way to go.
You don’t need to give up on your relationship
I have helped many thousands of men to reconcile, by working with only them. If I had worked with them and their wives together, they would not have reconciled. In my opinion couples work is only helpful when both people have the same agenda and want the same outcome. Otherwise, it is a divisive process which does not teach people how to re-connect. Taking a wife to counseling who is not interested in reconciling will not rebuild attraction, connection, or love. The counseling typically ends by working on amicable divorce and co-parenting.
(5:03)
I never recommend going to couple’s counseling when only one person wants to reconcile. It will only create more division.
Talking your wife into going to counseling is not the same as creating a desire in her to reconcile. In counseling, you will talk about differences and problems, which won’t help her to connect with you. Talking with her about your differences in private won’t help either.
The men I help reconcile never do so by convincing or by talking with their wives about problems. Instead, they learn a three step approach involving relaxing their wives, connecting with their wives, and attracting their wives. Single men may be able to attract women before connecting, but when you are reconciling, connection usually happens before attraction. And, connection can’t happen with a woman who is not relaxed with you.
Success involves not only doing the right steps, but doing them in the right order.
(5:59)
People who try to reconcile by convincing are trying to accomplish in one step what actually takes several. It is like a single man trying to convince a disinterested woman to marry him. Reconciling involves the same steps as when you are single, though the pace is slower.
Before you can get your wife to be in love with you again, she is going to have to:
These can’t all happen at the same time. Nothing will prevent reconciling like trying to move too fast, trying to do multiple steps at the same time, or doing the steps in the wrong order. The more desperate a man is to reconcile, the less likely he is to reconcile. He is highly motivated, but stressful to be with and unattractive.
Helping your wife to relax involves you being relaxed, agreeing and empathizing, being friendly, and decreasing how much you interact with her. Being stressed, pursuing, arguing, and spending a lot of time with her will make her want to get away from you. In fact, it will make anyone want to get away from you.
(7:14)
Once she is relaxed and comfortable again, you will have managed to get to square zero (you started with a negative). You can then start to build from there using other skills that single men use to build relationships with women. The goal is never to get her to agree to reconcile or to go to marriage counseling.
The goal is to reconnect, reattract, and help her to fall in love again. That does not happen by working together any more than it does when you are single. You can totally derail progress by shifting a developing relationship into a problem solving one.
While you are working on helping your wife to relax, you can also work on being more attractive and secure. That’s because these are things you do on your own. For example, some men need to work on having a friend, some need to get into shape, and some need to be more successful at earning money.
(8:10)
Whatever would handicap you in attracting women as a single man are things that you can work on without saying a word to your wife about it. How attractive do you think it would be to put in a dating profile that you are working on getting into shape, working on being trustworthy, and working on making enough money to pay all the bills?
Impress people with your success–not your plans to be successful.
Warning: The faster you change, the more your wife will feel you are being fake and pursuing her. The best rate of personal change is slowly enough that your wife doesn’t consciously notice it. It’s the difference between gradually growing a beard and suddenly shaving one off. Sudden changes create suspicion and work against helping her to relax.
(9:03)
Never point out personal change as that is a convincing approach that will increase resistance.
Why she is not in love with you at this time
Most of the time, men look for single causes for why women do what they do. The reason that women are so hard to understand is that there are multiple reasons for what they do. And, do you know what? This is true for everybody.
There are various levels of explanation for almost everything that happens and almost everything people do. Critical thinkers do not just find one reason for anything.
Your wife may say that the reason she is not in love with you is because of something you did five years ago. Noncritical thinkers will spend a lot of time apologizing for that thing they did five years ago. Or, commonly a wife might say she has been unhappy for years and that is why she is now not in love.
(10:03)
As a critical thinker, my first question (to myself) is:
Why now? If something happened years ago, or has been going on for years, then why is she not in love now? Or if she says she was not in love for years, then why is she just deciding to do something about it now? The answers to those questions are the main reason she is saying it now. There is truth in what she told you, but it is not the main reason.
This is why even if she accepted your apology or you do everything she wanted before, she still won’t be in love with you. You are only dealing with one of the reasons. Rebuilding a relationship is never as simple as getting a list of complaints from your wife and then fixing everything on the list. Because after you do that, she still won’t be in love with you.
Don’t make the mistake of interrogating your wife for the other reasons. Interrogation is one of the needy behaviors which damages relationships.
(11:05)
Let’s go over some of the common reasons women and men fall out of love.
Reason 1: The two of you became emotionally disconnected
Most often, couples become emotionally disconnected because they don’t make their relationship a priority as they did before they got married or before they had children. They become focused on their careers, raising the children, making money, and so on.
They neglect the basic components of a good relationship:
When just one of these three activities is missing, the relationship slowly degrades. If two are missing, the relationship quickly degrades. And when all three are gone, you are either roommates or business partners–the core emotional connection of your relationship has been lost. You are now living together for a practical reason rather than a romantic one.
(12:12)
When that reason no longer exists (e.g. the children are grown), there will be no more reason to stay together. Most of the time, when women say they are not in love with their husbands, their husbands also did not feel in love until their wives said this.
Reason 2: You stopped being the attractive man you once were
Think about the man your wife fell in love with long ago. Are you still that man? Many times what attracted a woman to her husband the most has not been present for years. It may have been the way he made her a priority, or it may have been characteristics like his being social, successful, more active, and in better shape.
(12:57)
Many men have lost their wives’ attraction either by treating their wives like mothers, daughters, or counselors. One particularly common mistake is venting all of your complaints and frustrations to your wife. Married women don’t enjoy that any more than single women do.
This is yet another example of why being open and honest is damaging to relationships. We must strive to be loving with our words and actions–not open with negativity and criticism.
If you were single and treated a woman you were dating the same way you had treated your wife, how long would she stay with you? Marriage is a committed dating relationship. If at any time you stop treating your wife like your girlfriend, she will eventually miss that and gradually disconnect from you. Some other man will be happy to do what you did not.
Marriage is a lifetime, committed, dating relationship. If that goes, the marriage goes with it.
(14:00)
Reason 3: She lost hope in your relationship ever being better
Most of the time, women do let their husbands know they are unhappy or there are problems, long before they are looking to end the relationship. If no improvement results, they may complain a few times, but then will stop complaining.
She didn’t stop complaining because she became happy with a disconnected marriage. It was because she gave up on it. Typically when people give up they go through a period of depression. When hope for something better comes along, the depression lifts. With a dissatisfied wife, that hope will be the main reason she is leaving you.
People don’t leave relationships because of problems. They leave relationships because of the hope of something better. Even if you fix all the problems, it won’t take away her hope for that better thing.
(14:55)
When she says that she is not in love with you anymore, she is not just leaving you–she is moving toward what she sees as a better choice. Your suddenly making changes is not going to make that choice any less appealing to her.
Some possible things she may be looking forward to are:
There are many possibilities and she is likely to have multiple things she is looking forward to.
Reconciling is a competition
You are in a competition with all the of the things she is desiring about separating or divorcing. And, even if she tells you she has no interest in a relationship with another man, she soon will be in one anyway. How easy or difficult will it be for her to find someone better than you?
(15:57)
The only way to reconcile
The only way is for you to create the conditions that will lead her there, step by step. To remind you, those steps are to help her to:
If you have all those things and your wife wants to divorce and be friends, then you will need to also have good boundaries to prevent that from happening. People commit in order not to lose someone or something important to them. Becoming important again and having good boundaries is what results in reconciling. And, it will help her to fall in love with you again, too.
Just as love can be destroyed, it can also be created. There was a time earlier on in your life when your wife did not love you because she didn’t even know you. Then you dated her and created the conditions for her to fall in love with you. She not only did that, but she married you as well. If you would like help creating the conditions for getting your wife to fall in love with you again, I would be happy to help.
(17:08)
[Podcast wrap-up]
Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your spouse and restoring your marriage.