Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: If you’ve found this article, I have to assume that you sense that something is going very wrong in your marriage. Perhaps you feel that the closeness you used to enjoy with your spouse is slipping away. Or maybe your husband has been vocal about not being happy in the marriage anymore. Whatever the reason, it’s a safe bet that you’re looking for quick, easy, and effective ways to get your husband interested and invested and you and the marriage again. But you don’t want to look desperate or stoop to behaviors that you know are beneath you. So, in the following article, I’ll try to offer solutions that are straightforward and not too difficult. First, though, I’ll discuss what I learned is definitely the wrong approach.

Stooping Too Low Or Asking Too Much Without Doing The Work:  We all want immediate gratification. And I know firsthand that when you feel the most important person in the world to you slipping out of your life, your first inclination is to pull out all of the stops. You want to shut down this decline immediately. Who could blame you?

Unfortunately, this sense of urgency will often cause you to make very costly mistakes. It causes us to stoop to decisions that we otherwise wouldn’t make – that reek of desperation or manipulation. When we can’t talk our husbands out of his stance, we try to debate with him, or shame him, or guilt him. The result is that he will just push us further away to avoid these negative feelings and frustrations. 

And don’t get me started about what happens when we feel him pull away even more due to our desperation. That’s when the most destructive part of the cycle begins. When my husband did this, I would actually try to get him to engage with me about very petty things. I figured even negative attention was better than no attention. And these petty issues had nothing to do with what was truly dividing us. So all we did was circle around one another.

All this did was make my husband think that I was instigating and unstable, which, looking back, wasn’t that far off.

I can’t say this enough: You must act as calmly as you can manage. If you feel a distance between you, then you can bet that negative feelings are beginning to bubble and churn, perhaps just below the surface. But they are there. You can’t afford to pour gasoline on an already-smoldering pile of lumber. Instead, you want to put out the fire and make your husband very willingly want to come back toward positivity and fair play. Here’s how. 

You Must Replace The Negative With The Positive In A Playful, Nonthreatening, Unobvious Way: I don’t know you nor do I know any facts about your marriage. What I DO know, however, is that to get your marriage back to a loving, committed, and pleasurable place, you’ll need to begin creating positive feelings to replace the negative ones. We all have older relatives that advised us to “play it with playfulness,” or “kill them with kindness,” and sometimes, we ignore this sound advice because we think that these oldtimers know nothing about our modern marriages or real-life situations in the twenty-first century. But I promise you, when it comes to your marriage, this is actually cunning, and effective advice. 

It is so important that your husband’s changing, newly-positive perceptions about you and the marriage are his idea. You don’t want him to feel beaten down. You don’t want him to finally give in just to make you stop. You don’t need to feel that you have won and he has lost.

Instead, he needs to want to re-enter into a loving, reciprocal, and healthy marriage with you because he knows that it will make him happy and is in his best interest. It is going to be much easier for him to do this if you approach him with a loving, kind, and open heart.

Once You’ve Replaced The Negative With The Positive, You Must Encourage Spontaneous Loving Feelings From Your Husband: You might have gotten your husband to a place where he realizes he still likes you very much, but eventually, there needs to be no doubt that he loves you. It can feel nearly impossible to get back to this place right now, but I promise that you can do it if you shift your thinking.

I encourage wives in this situation to think back to their dating life with their husbands. I don’t do that because I think that they can recreate this time period. You likely can’t. Your circumstances are different. Years have passed.

But there is one aspect of this that you CAN recreate. Because something very important HAS changed and can CHANGE back. And that is your effort and the time that you put into your relationship. Part of the reason that you were deeply in love in the beginning is that you poured so much of yourself into the relationship. You gave up your spare time and energy to invest it into growing what you had. And you were rewarded with intense feelings and a strong bond. 

As a result, when conflict arose, you did everything in your power to brush it aside. After all, what could be more important than how you felt about each other? This perspective is everything. If you can get even a piece of it back, you will have a much easier time working through your marital issues.

And your husband will feel those strong, loving feelings again – which makes saving your marriage feel almost effortless. People feeling intense, loving feelings for each other generally won’t waste their time on petty arguments. That’s why it’s so important that you get back to this place.  

I know that this may sound like a tall order right now. But think about this: Who knows your husband, and his wants, needs, fears, and desires most besides himself? You, of course. In fact, you knew him so well once upon a time that you used this knowledge to meet his needs and make him happy. It worked. 

So, you have to repeat this process and do it again, with your current circumstances, right now and today. Yes, this may take a while longer and pose its own challenges, but I know it can be done.

Don’t Focus On Why It Can’t Work. Focus On How It Can: Many people already intuitively know some of what I’ve just written. But their own self-doubt and excuse-making get in the way. I know because I was the queen of self-doubt. You tell yourself that you aren’t that pretty young thing anymore. 

Well, I have an answer to that. Neither is your husband. And here’s a secret. Men eat out your hand more because of how you make them feel than because of how you look. An enthusiastic and attentive woman with an open heart is more alluring than a beautiful woman who is ice-cold and uninvested. 

Finally, one of the most common doubts I hear is something like, “I think I’m disqualified from all of this because my husband is ignoring me.” Or “there’s too much anger between us.”

These things may seem true, but if your husband is showing anger or frustration, he’s still feeling emotions. So your process is the same, but you may have to move at a more gradual pace, with each little success building upon another until you start to slowly rebuild affection, intimacy, and trust. Yes, you have to play it up with playfulness. But this is better than ruining it with rumination.

I know all about these non-working methods because I used them and then created a disaster that almost caused a divorce. I then  had to use the working methods to clean up my mess.  I was very luck that I was eventually able to save my marriage.  That story is at https://isavedmymarriage.com/