Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack

Why We Fall Out of Love with Our Spouse and How to Fix It

• Jack Ito PhD, Psychologist, Author, and Relationship Coach • Season 3 • Episode 53

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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 how to restart your feelings of love for your spouse and how to revive your spouse's loving feelings at the same time.

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

Why We Fall Out of Love with Our Spouse and How to Fix It

(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: Sometimes people lose their love for their spouse, causing them to doubt their relationship. The good news is that there is much we can do to fall in love with our spouse again.

Do you know why people fall in love?

Falling in love is an aid to creating committed relationships. If single people didn’t fall in love, they wouldn’t be as careful to behave well. When we fall in love, it motivates us to be on our best behavior. 

When we are single, feeling in love motivates us to do whatever is necessary in order to get commitment from the person we are in love with.

(1:03)

When we are married, feeling in love motivates us to treat our spouse well and helps to create continued commitment–both for us and our spouse. When feelings of love weaken, loving behaviors diminish. Then our spouse’s love for us diminishes as well.

Staying in love with our spouse is one of the most important things we can do for our marriage. It’s not what our spouse does that maintains that feeling. It is how we think about our spouse, and how we behave toward our spouse. 

Everyone can learn to love better, but it starts by learning about how love works.

There are two primary factors for feeling in love throughout marriage

One of these factors begins before marriage.

Who do single people fall in love with? The answer is they fall in love with the best partner they have had up to that point. It is very common to fall in love with a first romance because he or she is the best partner up to that point. Many people marry their first girlfriend or boyfriend though it is almost always a mistake.

(2:07)

If our relationship doesn’t go well and we are rejected, the feeling of being in love may persist until we find someone better, even if that takes years. Many people however, find someone they think is better, all too quickly. They are in love again very quickly, commit quickly, and suffer another broken relationship before too long.

One reason there are so many bad marriages is because people fall in love with someone they don’t really know well, and are thus in love with their image of the other person. After marriage, they will get to see the other person clearly and he or she may be far from the ideal first imagined.

Although it is natural to fall in love with the best partner we have ever had, it doesn’t ensure they are the best partner we could have. Dating many good, potential matches before marriage is one of the best aids to maintaining our love after marriage. 

(3:04)

This is because:

  1. We will be a better match for the person we marry, and
  2. even after years of marriage we will be more sure that we have the best person we could have.

The love factor after getting married

The second most important thing people can do to maintain love is to continue to be a match after getting married. The more similar people are to begin with, the less effort this involves. People who were not well matched to begin with must use a lot of effort to continue to validate and be similar to their spouse.

People who are different in interests, personality, and values don’t enjoy spending time together as much. Their time together usually ends up being work related. As the marriage becomes more routine they will tend to spend less time together. They will prefer to spend more time with others or even alone.

(3:59)

A preference for being with others or alone is a major blow to feelings of love for a spouse.

Not loving our spouse creates reciprocal interactions

When we stop feeling loved, prioritized, or cared for, we often stop caring back. Our spouse then feels uncared for and cares even less for us. This is a vicious cycle that often happens between needy partners. Needy partners are characterized by people who tend to be critical, blaming, or controlling. Although their motivation is to get more love, time, affection, and attention, their behavior actually leads to loss of love for both spouses. 

(4:56)

Many people are needy though they have never realized it. Needy behaviors occur when we try to make our spouses desire or love us more instead of becoming more desirable or lovable. All controlling and critical people are needy. They repel others with their behavior rather than attract them. 

One of the best self assessment questions you can ask is whether your behaviors make your spouse want to be with you more or less. Regardless of how hard you try, or what your motivation is, if your behaviors are repelling rather than attracting, working on neediness is a priority for your marriage. I recommend my book, Overcome Neediness and Get the Love You Want as a good place to start.

Loving our spouse creates reciprocal interactions, too.

(5:56)

Being the first to give undeserved loving kindness can break a vicious cycle before it gets out of hand. Undeserved loving kindness, patiently and persistently applied, will result in an increase in love and affection from our spouse. Boundaries may still be needed for bad behaviors, but we don’t use boundaries in order to get more love. We love in order to get love.

As God teaches in Galatians 6:7, we reap what we sow. If you sow corn seeds, corn will grow. If you sow pumpkin seeds, pumpkins will grow. It’s the same for our relationships. If you sow unloving behavior, you will get unloving behavior back. If you sow loving behavior, you will get loving behavior back.

(7:01)

People who succeed with this concept understand that just as corn and pumpkins don’t grow quickly, neither will love in our spouse. We must have a good deal of patience as well as proper nurturing to get a good harvest of love and affection.

One of the ways that we nurture our spouse is to provide plenty of validation.

Lack of loving validation results in loss of love

The way to maintain love in marriage is the same way that we maintain love before marriage. By being our best, suppressing our damaging impulses, and showing and expressing our love in multiple ways, including validation.

Validating your spouse will help your spouse to feel the two of you think and feel similarly–maintaining a loving connection.

Those who stop putting effort into their relationship with their spouse often believe it isn’t necessary. They often believe they will be loved just by virtue of being married, being a husband, or a wife. They may validate very little or not at all. The reality is that we must put the same effort into our relationship after marriage as before.

(8:11)

Just as no one gets rich on welfare, passively waiting for love will get you very little.

Marriage is a job, with job requirements that include loving and prioritizing our spouse. When we fail to do those job requirements, just like a business partner, our spouse will no longer want to be with us. Parenting also has job requirements. Many parents have been surprised to be abandoned by their kids once the kids were able to get away from them.

We can only keep what we prioritize and take care of.

Validation is a job requirement for all relationships

Whether you want a good relationship with your friends, your kids, your spouse, or to make new friends, you will only do that to the degree that you can validate, without also invalidating.

(9:00)

Validation involves using our words and behavior to make our spouse feel:

  • Right for what they do,
  • right for how they think,
  • normal for how they feel,
  • loved,
  • important,
  • desirable,
  • appreciated, and
  • admired.

The way we validate is by frequently agreeing, empathizing, complimenting, praising, showing appreciation, making time, admiring, following through on time with promises, prioritizing our spouse, and saying I love you in both actions and words.

Our behavior must match our words and both have to say, “I love you.” Loving words without loving behavior cancel each other out. 

Your spouse will feel validated to the degree to which he or she feels the two of you are similar. Your spouse will feel similar to the degree to which he or she feels validated. 

But we are talking about building your feelings of love, right? Well remember that love is reciprocal. The more you create loving feelings in your spouse, the more you feel loved by your spouse and the more you will love your spouse. It is an upward spiral.

(10:12)

The more you validate (without invalidating), the more you will be loved, and the more you will feel love.

Telling our spouse, “I love you.”

What makes it so hard for many people to say these three little words? Well, they’re not little words at all. They are words that make us feel vulnerable. They touch close to our fear that maybe our spouse doesn’t love us anymore. Perhaps we don’t feel that we can say them sincerely. Can our spouses tell when they look in our eyes if our love is true? Sometimes they can; sometimes they can’t.

Women often place more importance on words, while men place more importance on behavior. What that means is that if you are a man, you need to say “I love you” more often than you feel like it. Imagine your wife had sex with you only as often as you told her “I love you.” How satisfied would you be? 

(11:07)

Wives should not have to adjust to less verbal assurance any more than husbands should adjust to less physical assurance (and by the way, physical assurance includes all kinds of touching and not just sex). If you are stumped for how to show love, I have an article on 10 ways you can show love in your marriage.

Don’t pressure your spouse to make you feel love.

It usually isn’t helpful to tell our spouse we are not feeling love for him or her. Imagine saying, “I’m just not sure I love you anymore.” What can our spouse say to that? Our spouse is not likely to react by doing anything that increases our love. In fact, we are likely to get negative, reactive behavior, that comes from the insecurity we triggered.

(11:53)

If you are feeling less love for your spouse, get to work on those job requirements. Behaving in a loving way will make you love more and will get more love from your spouse. Don’t expect to get more love from your spouse first. Success only comes when we do the right steps in the right order.

Criticizing our spouse, waiting for more love and affection, and then returning love and affection are both the wrong steps and the wrong order.

The right steps and order for restoring your love and your spouse’s love are:

  1. Stop all needy behavior,
  2. gradually increase validation while talking,
  3. persist as trust grows in your spouse,
  4. increase shared activities, and
  5. maintain validation while avoiding needy behaviors.

By the way, this is how single people build relationships as well. Things should go well as long as there is no return to needy behavior.

(12:56)

In a badly disconnected relationship, it may take a few months before you get to do shared activities. This is because it takes time and consistency to develop trust.

Doing little things will build your love and your spouse’s love

At one time, you were good at making your spouse feel loved. How did you do it? Most likely it was a lot of small behaviors. Little gifts, tickles, always looking and sounding happy to see your spouse, love notes, bringing a coffee from the coffee shop, planning a special night out, doing some chore your spouse doesn’t like, texting random love messages just because.

Making these small efforts not only helps our spouse to stay in love with us, they also help us to stay in love with our spouse. If you are rebuilding your relationship, these are mainly going to come during step 5, the maintenance phase. If your relationship is still okay, then gradually reintroduce these behaviors now.

(14:09)

Don’t try to grown corn or love overnight.

Why can’t you just start doing lots of loving things now?

The best rate of personal change in relationship development is one that our spouse likes, but does not get suspicious about. If you make sudden large changes or many small changes, you won’t create the right reaction. You will come across as manipulative and your spouse will wonder why you have this sudden change in behavior.

No matter how much we love someone, we must not move faster than their feelings can grow or we will encounter resistance or rejection. I help many people to reconcile by helping them to gradually improve their connection with their spouse. Those who try to fix bad relationships quickly usually can’t fix them at all. The right steps, the right order, and the right pace. Those three things, always, are what will help anyone to reconcile.

(15:08)

Not using boundaries can keep us from loving our spouse

The way to fix any relationship is to work first on our own behavior. Stopping our needy behaviors, gradually reintroducing validation, becoming more desirable–these are all essential first steps. They are bound to result in an increase in desire and affection from your spouse. Even so, your spouse may still continue to have behaviors which interfere with your ability to feel love for him or her.

There are more examples than I can possibly think of, but here are a few: mismanaging money, bad parenting, lack of sexuality or physical affection, lack of nonphysical or verbal affection, affairs, failing to do his or her share of the work, verbal abuse, and lack of respect.

(16:01)

These behaviors may not stop without your using some boundaries to stop them. Boundaries always do damage, but the idea is that we use them to prevent ongoing damage that would be more severe than any damage caused by the boundary. People who refuse to use boundaries typically cause more damage by being critical and/or distancing. These needy behaviors, over time, result in two people who don’t love each other.

If you allow your spouse to continue to do things which are damaging for your relationship, you will be sabotaging your feelings of love for your spouse. And, if you try to use criticism, blaming, arguing, and complaining (all needy behaviors) to change your spouse, you will sabotage your spouse’s love for you.

Just as with parenting, we must love our spouse and use boundaries when needed–in that order. It is part of the job of being a good parent or a good spouse. A good friend, too, for that matter. Boundaries, just like parenting, are skills that can be learned and practiced.

(17:08)

Let me tell you about…

How one of my clients did it

One of my clients, who I will call Jessica, was struggling with whether to divorce her husband. She knew he was a good provider who had given her a nice home and the things she thought would make her happy. But, she longed for the feelings of love that she had not had for a long time. Her repeated attempts to talk to her husband about improving their relationship had failed. 

Jessica came to me as a last ditch effort to revive her marriage. She wanted to feel that she had done everything she could do to improve things before she filed for divorce. One of the first things I helped Jessica with was to take the pressure off of herself to feel something she did not. I told her that when we try to feel something, it actually prevents us from having that feeling. 

(17:57)

Instead, I encouraged her to just take a step-by-step approach and to see her relationship with her husband as a good chance to practice relationship skills that would be useful whether she stayed married to her husband or moved on to someone else. Because she wasn’t focused on fixing her husband or getting him to do anything, it wasn’t so hard for her to stop talking to him about their problems. 

She just let him go about his business while she practiced being more relaxed and friendly. It was not long before her husband started to respond positively to her relaxed approach. As you can imagine, this in turn rekindled the spark of hope in Jessica that had gone out. Her loss of loving feelings had not been the problem as much as her approach to rekindling them. 

Jessica had to resist returning to her desire to talk to her husband about their problems and just to keep on building the relationship as she had started. She also needed to learn how to deal with her husband’s occasional critical behavior, although it had improved since she became more relaxed and friendly. 

(19:02)

She needed a little help with her dating skills as it had been many years since she was single, but she was well on the way to restoring a close relationship with her husband.

Coaching helps with the missing skills

Some people need help with all relationship skills and need to rebuild their relationship from square one. Many others are just missing the few skills that would help them to get their relationship, their feelings, and their spouse’s feelings, growing in the right direction again. 

If you would like to learn the skills to get your relationship moving forward again, just visit coachjackito.com and sign up for the Re-Connections Relationship Coaching Package.

(19:44)

 [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.