How to Be More Attractive to Your Spouse

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 you how to figure out if you should continue to wear your wedding ring and gives advice on starting the reconciling process.

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

• How to rebuild your marriage in seven steps.
• Limerence: when your spouse is attracted to someone else and what to do about it.
• Get Coach Jack's book, Connecting through Yes!.
• Work with Coach Jack to re-attract and re-connect with a rejecting spouse.

Transcript

How to Be More Attractive to Your Spouse 

(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: Being more attractive will help your spouse to desire you more. That can mean more enjoyable time together and less temptation for your spouse to cheat. 

Many relationships suffer from a lack of attraction and a lack of connection. Both of these are as necessary to maintaining a relationship as they were to creating one in the first place.

Most people think of attraction only in terms of physical appearance. While appearance is an important component in attraction, there is a lot more to it than that.

(0:58) 

Attraction is the desire to be with one person rather than another. Or to have one thing over another, or to go someplace rather than another. Attraction is the great motivator for new purchases, new actions, and new relationships.

Connection, on the other hand, is a feeling of similarity. We emotionally connect based on perceived similarity. We can attract based on differences, but we can’t connect based on differences. This is why very different people may attract each other, but are not able to keep the relationship going in the long term. Long term relationships only last if people feel they are similar to each other in important ways.

You might say that attraction creates desire and romance, while connection creates friendship. Both are essential components of a lasting marriage.

Let’s take a simple example of a pizza shop. Suppose you open a new pizza shop. There are lots of other pizza shops around so you will need to do something to make people want to try your pizza shop.

(2:04)

Here are some reasons that people might choose to visit your pizza shop over another:

• Some people might want to visit your pizza shop because it is near to where they live (proximity). 
• Some might want to try your pizza shop because of the way it is decorated (appearance). 
• Some might want to try your pizza shop because of coupon you made available to them (low cost/low risk). 
• Some might want to try your pizza shop because someone else said that you have good pizza (social endorsement). 
• Some might want to try your pizza shop because you are offering something the other pizza shops don’t have (novelty). 
• Some might want to visit your shop because it seems to be successful (success). 

(2:56)

Other factors are possible as well, though less important to most people. Different people will be attracted to your pizza shop for different reasons. That gets them in the door. 

The more and stronger you have each of these attraction features, the more customers you will get. 

Once people try your pizza, how much it meets their expectations, and how much they enjoy it compared to other pizzas that are available is going to determine whether they visit your pizza shop again. This is the connection aspect of your shop. You have to match what the customer wants or they will go elsewhere.

The same factors apply to attraction in relationships. And the more and stronger you have each of these factors for yourself, the more desirable you will be for others, including your spouse. When I help people who are having relationship difficulty, one of the first things I assess is whether they need attraction skills, connection skills, or both. Then we can focus in on what will most help them to improve their marriage.

(4:01)

Let’s consider again the reason people would decide to use your pizza shop and see how the same factors apply to continuing to create desire for you, over another, in your spouse.

As a reminder…

The attraction features to consider are: 

• proximity
• appearance
• novelty
• cost/risk
• social endorsement
• success
• other factors 

In some relationships, none of these are at play and yet people enjoy being together. Relationships based on connection only are called friendships. Many marriages become friendship-only, when the attractive features are lost and only connection remains. Nowadays it’s hard to maintain a friendship-only marriage for a lifetime because of the availability and ease of access to other people.

(4:56)

If the connection in a relationship is poor because a couple have become very different, and also no attraction remains, then they have a roommate type of relationship. No matter how stable roommate style relationships may seem, they are hanging by an emotional thread which can suddenly break. Many of my clients have this situation when starting coaching. I work with them to rebuild both connection and attraction.

Fortunately, there is a lot we can do to increase both attraction and connection and strengthen our marriage.

A good way to do that is to…

Work on the different aspects of being attractive

What condition is your pizza shop in? Has it become a run down and unattractive place, with lousy service. that is only accessible for fifteen minutes a day? It’s easy to let things run down when we don’t do regular maintenance, but you can start today to gradually make it the best shop in town.

(5:57)

The ideal situation would be to be more attractive in every area than your competitors. Who are your competitors? Anyone who is potentially available to your spouse. The less desirable your spouse is, the fewer competitors you have. The more desirable your spouse is, the more competitive you need to be.

Even though your spouse may not be looking for someone else, your spouse can and will compare you to others. That will make you either seem like a better deal or a worse one.

The next best strategy to being better at everything is to be really good in one or two areas. People want to have what they can’t easily obtain elsewhere. This is true for both men and women. Excelling in one area, even if you are not so good in others, is better than being average in many. Just as men’s gaze will gravitate toward a woman with the best appearance, so will women gravitate toward men with an outstanding quality other men don’t have–even if he is worse in other areas.

(7:06)

Attraction is not impacted by logic or values. It is more primitive and beyond our level of control. No one ever decides to be attracted to someone based on logic.

We can use willpower not to become involved with someone or something attractive, but we can’t use willpower not to be attracted in the first place. Though your spouse could avoid you, he or she can’t help but be attracted to you if you are being attractive. I have been helping people to re-attract their rejecting spouses for many years.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but there are common characteristics to beauty.

Attraction categories to consider working on

There are a lot of things that you can do to work on being more attractive to your spouse. Working on the factors of proximity, appearance, cost/risk, social endorsement, and success will give you the most return for your time investment.

(8:08)

Let’s consider them one by one:

Proximity

How available and accessible are you? People often become more attracted to their coworkers than to their spouses because they see them more. My wife and I both work at home and our free time overlaps. This gives us a lot of access to each other. People who work different shifts and have different days off may lose their relationship simply because they don’t have enough time for connecting. However, limited time also makes people less attractive. Too much or too little time together both negatively impact attractiveness and connection.

Appearance

For appearance, think healthy first of all. Anything which suggests bad health, from being overweight, to having skin blemishes, should be improved.

(9:01)

$25,000 of plastic surgery cannot enhance your attractiveness as much as having a nice smile and using it regularly.

Also for appearance, think capability. Do you look old, out of shape, and worn out? Fix your posture, move more energetically, get into shape.

No amount of Botox will make you look younger than having a good posture and being more energetic.

One more important area for appearance is looking friendly, agreeable, and interested. If you are not coming across this way to your spouse, then all that time in the gym may be canceled out. There are websites to help you to have a more pleasant facial expression if you don’t have one naturally. You can’t use makeup to put on a good facial expression.

(9:51)

Novelty

Men in particular, like the feature of novelty and that is not something wives can compete with. In recent years, women are also becoming more interested in novelty–trying someone new. I have found in my work with clients that married women who have little experience dating men other than their husband prior to marriage are the most interested in being with another man. 

The good news is, for both wives and husbands, that by being otherwise attractive, having a good connection, and good boundaries, spouses have less desire to try someone new and are far less likely to risk their marriage doing that.

Cost/risk

How approachable are you? Do you bite? Being consistently relaxed and friendly will help your spouse to feel you are approachable. So too will showing interest and putting other things aside when your spouse talks to you. If you were single and gave off the same vibes to others that you do to your spouse, would you make others more or less likely to want to approach you? 

(11:02)

People hate rejection whether they are single or married. It feels like being bitten. Make sure you make your spouse feel accepted, liked, and welcomed consistently.

Social endorsement

Strive to be liked by the people your spouse likes. Then they will like you and help your spouse to feel like you are valuable. When you are with your spouse’s friends, remember to make your spouse feel like the most important person in the room. That will help to prevent inappropriate advances by the friends and will help to prevent jealousies. 

Treat your spouse’s friends well, but treat your spouse even better in front of his or her friends. And, make sure not to say bad things to your spouse about his or her friends.

Success

No one was ever was attracted to someone’s lack of success. Everyone needs to have something that motivates them in a productive way each day and be good at it. It could be your job, caring for your kids, working for a cause, or anything that contributes to the well being of others. 

(12:11)

The better you do at this major purpose, the better you will feel about yourself and the more attractive you will be to your spouse. You can measure success in comparison to others, in comparison to what you did before, or in regard to your ability to be pleasing to God and those with good values. Work to have all four of those success factors and it will enhance your attractiveness and self esteem.

Other factors

Just as some people may go to a particular pizza shop because they use cloth napkins or give a prize with every meal, these idiosyncratic changes are not as important as the other factors. Cloth napkins and prizes are not going to compensate for poor quality and high prices. Perhaps you have been to restaurants like that–I know I have.

(13:06)

Your hairstyle is not going to keep your spouse attracted if you don’t do well with other appearance, personality, and success factors. I’ve never heard of anyone being in love with their spouse solely for their hairstyle. 

People tend to want what they perceive as valuable and don’t have. That’s why you need to stop relying on your income to compensate for friendliness, or your friendliness to compensate for your appearance, or your appearance to compensate for your lack of success.

When working on any personal characteristics, whether attraction, connection, or personality, I recommend working on your weakest area first because that will make the biggest difference.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

(13:53)

Strengthen your attractiveness in that area, before moving on to your next weakest link. Do you know right now which area would make the biggest difference in your attractiveness to your spouse if you improved it? Write down some ways you could get to work on it, choose one and schedule your first action step.

Planning to change, identifying an action step, scheduling it, and following through is what separates achievement from wishful thinking.

What if you don’t know what action to take?

It’s okay not to know how, as long as you learn from people who do

Books are a better source of information than the internet for self-development skills due to their comprehensiveness. Look for books which are specific to the changes you want to make. For example, if you need to work on being more likeable, a book such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, is going to be more helpful than a book on being generally successful, which will have very little, if any information on improving the specific thing you need to work on.

(15:03)

The more specifically you can identify what to work on and the more specifically you work on it, the more you will improve. Proficiency is in the basics; excellence is in the details.

Coaches can help people to make faster progress by focusing on just what to work on and the steps you need to take. There are coaches for just about anything. Get a gym coach or trainer if you need to get into shape, a business coach if you need to work on financial or career success, a life coach if you need help in making personal goals, and a relationship coach if you need to get your marriage moving in a positive direction.

(15:44)

 [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.