How to Get Your Wife to Love You Again

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 tells men how he helps his male client to reconcile with a wife who is rejecting, no longer in love, and wants to end the marriage.

After listening to today's episode, you may want to:

• Get Coach Jack's book on learning how to agree and end conflict.
• Discover separation boundaries which help to promote reconciling.
• Learn how to respond when your wife says she just wants to be friends.
• Work with Coach Jack to re-attract and re-connect with your wife.

Transcript

How to Get Your Wife to Love You Again

(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: Would you like to know how you can get your wife to fall in love with you again, even if she says “it’s over?” Let me help you by telling you about the no convincing, no conflict approach to rebuilding a relationship.

When wives tell their husband they are no longer in love, they are usually desiring to end the marriage. Their husbands typically try to convince them to work on the marriage and to have feelings they don’t have. 

They want to convince their wives to stay in a marriage they don’t like. That is like trying to sweet talk someone into getting their tooth pulled. 

(1:01)

The problem isn’t that husbands want to convince their wives to stay, the problem is how they go about it. They are going for the sale long before they re-interest their wives in the product. 

If you want to have success with your wife, or any woman for that matter, you need to consider what she wants rather than what you want. Whether women want to reconcile or not is going to depend on their stage of letting go.

Let me tell you about…

The three stages of letting go for a wife no longer in love with her husband

For sure there are many women, not in love with their husbands, who are not doing or saying anything. Even for them, they emotionally let go and move on and they show that by having less interaction with their husbands.

In a marriage where emotional connection and desirability are not maintained…

Women typically go through three stages of letting go:

(1:56)

1. Hoping things will get better and staying in the marriage.
2. Having no hope things will get better and staying in the marriage.
3. Hope for something better by leaving the marriage.

If you wanted to work on fixing things together with her, it should have come back in the hoping things will get better in the marriage stage. That’s when she was motivated to have a better marriage, still believed it could get better, and was not burned out on the marriage.

In the second, no hope stage, she would have had no motivation to work with you, feeling it was useless. She would be pessimistic and disinterested in working with you. You would have needed to do connecting and desire rebuilding to earn her trust and give her a little hope. That would help her to get her back to the first stage.

(2:53)

In the third stage, she has once again become hopeful. Perhaps because of the influence of friends or social media. Her positivity is returning. Her thoughts are shifting forward rather than dwelling on the past. She may start preparing for the big adventure that awaits her ahead as she ends her marriage. The last thing she wants to do at this point is to work on reconciling.

Once people decide to get a new car, they stop waxing the old one.

This is the point most men come to me to help them reconcile with their wives. And, I help them do it. How do I do that? 

By helping men to…

Get out of the convincing mode and follow the relationship progression.

When you are single, relationships have to progress to a certain point before a woman will want to marry you. That requires multiple steps. Walking up to random women and asking them to marry you will work for women who are desperately wanting to get married. These tend to not be the best women to marry.

(3:59)

For most women, there is a progression of relationship development that has to happen first. This includes things like attracting her, making small talk, personal sharing, going out on dates, physical touch, and so on. Most likely you went through this progression with your wife at the beginning of your relationship.

There are two things to understand about this progression:

1. It is fluid, and
2. Moving too fast creates rejection.

It is fluid means that even though you may have made it all the way to the top of the progression before, you may be back toward the bottom again. Asking your wife to reconcile with you when your relationship has fallen back to the bottom is like asking a woman who is not even attracted to you to marry you. You’ve got to work your way back up the progression first.

When a woman resists or rejects you, it doesn’t mean there is no hope. It just means you are moving too fast. You have ground work to do first.

(5:02)

So, don’t give up just because she says she’s not in love with you, wants to separate, say’s it’s over, or wants to divorce. Don’t say the hell with it or fight with her and don’t start trying to convince her of anything. Trying to convince women to do what they don’t want to do has never been a good strategy for developing relationships.

Your relationship is not over if she says she just wants to be friends. It just means you slid half way down the progression. You can work on yourself to attract her back (a lot of things go into that besides your appearance, by the way).

Even if your relationship has slid all the way back to the point where she is not attracted to you, and is not connected to you. It just means you have more work to do starting with just helping her to relax with you.

Where a man’s relationship is now tells me more about what he has to do than his whole history of experience with his wife.

(5:59)

So, what do you do now that she says she doesn’t love you and wants out? Well, you start with…

Step 1: Empathize with her lack of loving feelings or desire to leave.

Many men don’t want to do this because they think it will encourage their wives to leave them. Actually, just the opposite is true. The better you can empathize with her, the more relaxed she will feel with you and the more she will interact with you. This gives your relationship a chance to start growing again. Arguing with her or trying to convince her will never do that.

What you say when you empathize is important. I help men to create a custom empathy message during their first session. This typically creates immediate improvement in the relationship, though of course their wives have not changed their mind. You can’t sow grass seeds today and then mow your lawn tomorrow.

(6:58)

Once you have empathized, you go on to…

Step 2: Cooperate with her plans while you also help her to enjoy you.

This isn’t a trick. It’s loving behavior. You are not manipulating her into doing something she doesn’t want to do. On the contrary, you are helping her to get what she wants while also helping her to enjoy you more. If you can’t, then she still leaves you and you haven’t been an obstacle to her. But, if you take advantage of your contact, she can begin to enjoy you more.

My male clients start to notice their wives becoming more ambivalent about divorcing the more they help their wives to enjoy them. This is natural. If you met a woman in your city who was planning to move out of state, she might start to wonder if she should, the more her relationship with you grew.

(7:55)

Of course if you reassured her that even if she moved, you would visit her all the time, her plan to move wouldn’t change. So, you never do that.

And, that’s why you must follow…

Step 3: Have good separation or divorce boundaries

As your wife enjoys you and becomes attracted to you again, she will still want to separate or divorce, if that was her plan. If not, your work is done! But, if she still wants to separate or divorce you will need to put her in the position to lose you. You will use good separation boundaries and not agree to be friends after divorce.

These are the two conditions you create to get your wife to be in love with you again–becoming a great partner and helping her to feel your relationship is coming to an end and that she will lose you. Although it may seem manipulative, it is what a secure man would do naturally.

(8:56)

The insecure man says, I will always be here for you and you will never lose me. The secure man simply says, next. Which one do you think women fall in love with? It is the secure man.

Commitment is the enemy of falling in love. You should only commit to a woman after she is in love with you. Men who reassure they will always be friends, have no separation boundaries, and appear to be sad and miserable without women get friended by women. 

There are many steps in the relationship progression. Would you like my help with them?

If you are good with single relationships, the change in mindset I helped you with today may be all that you need to start rebuilding your relationship. Remember to take a step by step approach, following the same progression you would if you were single, while still cooperating with your wife. This will create conflict free, enjoyable time together.

(9:59)

If you are rusty in your relationship building skills, are getting resistance, or get stuck, I would be happy to help you start from wherever you are and get you working up the relationship progression ladder to the point your wife is ready to recommit her life to you. You will want to choose the Re-Connections Marriage Coaching package on my website. If you are feeling like this time in your life is a tragedy, don’t. This is an opportunity to make your relationship better than it has been in a long time–for both of you.

(10:35)

 [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.