My Husband Says He No Longer Loves Me Because I Didn’t Change Enough For Him.
By: Leslie Cane: I sometimes hear from couples who admit that they were very different from one another from the start. Often, there is an expectation that they will gradually change a little to become more like the other. And, when this doesn’t happen there can be disappointment or even a belief that they are too incompatible to stay married.
I heard from a wife who said: “my husband and I have always been opposites who attracted. I am very free spirited. I have the same job I had in college because I feel at home there. I don’t need material things to be happy and I don’t need to pretend that I am someone that I am not. I don’t care about high society or my social status. I could live in a small, older home with the bare necessities and be very happy. But my husband is a social climber. Our economic status is very important to him. He always wants for things to be bigger and better. Lately, he has made huge strides in his job and he has started wanting to entertain to impress people at his work. This isn’t my idea of a good time but I try very hard to put on a brave face for him. Still, when he’s being a social climber while I’m being my down to earth self, we clash. Things become very awkward. The other day, we got in an argument because I didn’t want to give up yet another weekend due to his social climbing and trying to impress his higher ups at the office. He became furious with me and said that he was no longer in love with me. I told him that this was his anger talking and that he was completely overreacting. He said that he wasn’t acting out of anger because he has been thinking about our differences for a long time. He said that he assumed that when me married that I would eventually change. He thought that my laid back nature was due to my being so young. He assumed that I would eventually become ambitious and responsible just like him. He now says that we are incompatible and that he may want a divorce. I am not sure what to do with this information. Yes, we are different. But this isn’t a deal breaker for me. Frankly, I thought my husband would change too and mellow with age but he hasn’t changed either and you don’t see me wanting to leave him. Is there any hope for us when we’re so different and he doesn’t believe that I can change?”
I have a definite opinion on this. Both my husband and I had to give a little and compromise a lot to save our marriage. We are very different people and this can cause a lot of conflict. To work our way around this, we had to learn to embrace our differences rather than place a negative focus on them. I will discuss this more below.
Love Shouldn’t Require Drastic Change: One of the things that upset this wife the most was her husband’s claim that he didn’t love her or even like the person that she had always been. This confused her because early in their relationship, he’d actually been attracted to her easy attitude. So she was very upset that the one thing that he used to love the most was now being used against her.
I suspected that he wasn’t being truthful about no longer loving her, even if he believed this at the time. Often, what you are hearing is his frustration rather than the truth. We often think we no longer love our spouse when the marriage isn’t paying off as it once did. The good news is that if you can begin to repair and improve the marriage, the feelings of love will often return on its own.
Compromise Needs To Be Very Specific: As you might already suspect, compromise is going to be the key here. I strongly believed that there was a middle ground here that would make both people happy. We already knew that the husband could happily live with this couple’s differences. He had done so for many years. It was possible that he was feeling a great deal of stress at his job, where he was always expected to perform and to impress. And, he might have been projected that onto is wife or his marriage.
That’s why it was important for the wife to not panic and to offer to compromise. In cases like this, you need to be very specific. Entertaining had become a huge issue for this couple. So a good place to start would be to agree upon how often they would entertain and what would be expected when they did. If the wife knew that she wouldn’t have to put on airs every weekend and the husband knew that she would have a good attitude when they had guests, both people would likely feel some relief and would place less emphasis on this issue.
Finally, they needed to have experiences as a couple that actually celebrated their differences. Perhaps the husband could take the wife on a fancy night out where she could just enjoy herself without needed to perform. Perhaps the husband could learn to enjoy just kicking back and relaxing without any end goal in mind. Because frankly, sometimes when opposites attract you really do get the best of both worlds. You get to experience what you yourself lack and you get a nice balance since being married to a carbon copy of yourself would likely be very boring.
The differences that my husband initially loved about me became some of our biggest problems when our marriage fell apart. We had to work very hard in order to celebrate those differences once more without expecting unrealistic change. You can read the whole story on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com
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