Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: I often hear from folks who suspect that their spouse is no longer in love with them. Sometimes, this suspicion isn’t really something that they can define. It isn’t any one particular behavior that they are seeing from their spouse. In fact, this assumption is often based on a vague feeling that they have. And this can make you question if what you are seeing is real of if you are just imagining things.

Common comments are things like: “I don’t think that my husband is in love with me anymore. It isn’t that he is cruel or says the wrong things. He is present and he is a good father. I do think that he loves me and by that I mean that he thinks that I am a good person and he feels love for me because I am part of his family. But I don’t feel as if he has romantic love for me anymore. He doesn’t look at me with love in his eyes. He doesn’t look like he desires me anymore. He never goes out of his way to be nice to me. Am I just imagining this? How can you tell when your spouse is no longer in love with you, although he may love you as a person?” I will try to address this concern in the following article.

Some Behaviors You Might See If Your Spouse Thinks That They Are No Longer In Love With You: Notice that I said “thinks” that he no longer loves you. I firmly believe that the circumstances that surround your marriage can make one or both of you think that the love is gone when in fact this might not be the case. I will get to that later. But for right now, here are some signs to look for.

Often when your spouse suspects that the love is leaving your marriage, you will notice him distancing himself from you on many levels. Very often, he will spend more time at work or he will go out of his way to spend more time with his friends or coworkers. He may pick up an old hobby or start a new one so that he can spend more time out of the house.

He may start to forget special occasions or things that are important to you. He might look right through you instead of really looking at you. Often, you feel as if he sees you as his roommate or his partner in parenting rather than his lover or his soul mate. Your sex life will often take a hit although it’s not out of the question for there to be sparks or improvement or normalcy as your spouse is trying to rekindle the passion to prove to themselves that the love is still there.

He might start to make little insensitive digs at you or exhibit passive aggressive behavior where he is criticizing you in a round about way that is still obvious to you. Sometimes, when you ask him about this, he will deny that anything is wrong. But no matter what he says, you can feel that something significant has changed between you. Now that I have talked about how to recognize some of the signs, I will talk about what to do about it.

You Don’t Need An Admission In Order To Act: It’s very normal in this situation to want a confirmation. In other words, many wives in this situation would demand for their husband to confirm or deny that he is no longer in love with them. Much of the time, the husband will deny this even if he believes that it is true because he doesn’t want to hurt his wife or he doesn’t want to deal with the fall out of this.

And sometimes when the wife doesn’t get this confirmation, she will give up and just hope for the best. The thing is, I believe that you don’t need a confirmation to act. In my experience, you don’t need a firm confirmation in order to try to drastically improve your marriage. After all, there are not many marriages that can not use or benefit from a little improvement. At the worst case, you will have improved your marriage when it didn’t really desperately need it. And honestly, there’s not much downside to that.

So it would be my suggestion that even if your husband is denying that anything is wrong, listen to your gut. Examine your lives and your marriage and see if there is any recent stressor that might be contributing to this. Often, when your life or your marriage is under pressure, your marriage will weaken and this leads to your spouse thinking that the love has left or diminished, when in reality all that has happened is that your circumstances have changed.

I find that it’s very common for people to think that they don’t have any new stressor. Frankly, stressors are all around us. I hope that you don’t take this in the wrong way, but becoming parents and raising children can be one of the biggest stressors. Changes in your job can create stress without your even realizing it.

Often, there are things that you can do to lessen the fall out from the stressor even if you can’t completely eliminate it. For example, you obviously can not change the fact that you are a parent and that parenting takes up a great deal of your time and emotional resources (nor would you ever want to change this.) But, you can prioritize your marriage and make sure that you have enough time for yourself, for your spouse, and for your marriage despite the challenges. I know that this seems to be common sense, but so many people fully realize this and yet they take no action.

People tend to think that they will pay attention or take action when their children are a little older or when they have more money or become more secure in their jobs. But what if it is too late then? People often tell me that they feel so frustrated that they can’t control the way that their spouse feels about them. I know this feeling.  But I also know that what you can control are the circumstances in your marriage. Lessen your stressors and increase that precious quality time together. Honestly, you just can’t expect for your marriage to thrive without it. And often, you will find that when you place your focus here, you will be greatly rewarded when the romantic feelings intensify or return.

There was a time when my husband believed that he was no longer in love with me and we separated as a result.  This was a difficult time in our lives.  But once I was able to change the circumstances, the feelings changed as well.  And I was able to rebuild.  If it helps, you can read the whole story on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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