What To Do If You Feel Like Your Husband Loves You But Isn't 'In Love' With You
One spouse’s loss of desire can be the canary in the coal mine for severe marital issue.
Cast Of Thousands | Shutterstock I see a lot of couples in my practice who struggle with insecurity in their primary relationship. This occurs across genders and for a range of reasons. In this post, I will focus on women who are insecure about their husband’s interest in them.
There is a subset of women who think their husbands may love them but may not be in love with them.
In these relationships, the man loves his wife, but she just doesn't feel it. She may know intellectually that he feels love for her, and that he doesn't want to leave (at least yet), but she is concerned that there is distance in the relationship. As in that post, the woman usually feels that her husband’s desire for her has also dwindled or is more about intimacy than about her. There are a few potential explanations for this dynamic.
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The first explanation is that the woman is a Highly Sensitive Person.
She wants a level of emotional intimacy that her non-Highly Sensitive Partner is just not usually able to match. When the couple first met, the man’s honeymoon stage behaviors were more romantic than his current ones, which are biologically driven and normal. Now, he has reverted to whatever his innate baseline level of emotional expression is, and she feels lonely and bereft.
The second explanation is that the man is actually not attracted to his wife anymore.
For some people of both genders, aging and weight gain are very important determinants of how attracted they are to their partner. If you couple this with an age-related or health-related decrease in testosterone, you get a man who just really doesn’t feel much desire for his wife. He may try to protest this, but she picks up on it.
A 2013 study found that husbands were more satisfied at the beginning of the marriage and remained that way over the first four years of marriage to the extent that they had a more attractive wife, wives were no more or less satisfied initially or over time to the extent that they had a more attractive husband.
Most importantly, the significant effect of wives’ attractiveness on husbands’ satisfaction was significantly stronger than the non-significant effect of husbands’ attractiveness on wives’ satisfaction, indicating that partner physical attractiveness played a more significant role in predicting husbands’ marital satisfaction than it did in predicting wives’ marital satisfaction.
Another explanation is that there is infidelity or another significant problem that the husband is not admitting.
It is certainly hard to feel or express a desire for your wife when you have another secret partner or are suffering from depression or a hidden problem with addiction. If a woman senses that there is some really big issue going on that is being hidden from her, she may be correct.
Infidelity may not only have a destructive impact on the relationship, leading to separation or divorce; it can also negatively affect one’s emotional well-being by enhancing depressive symptoms, highlighting low self-esteem, and promoting remorse in the unfaithful party. The impact of this life-altering event challenges the person’s sense of self, safety, and trust in another who is supposed to be their “secure base” for love and adoration, a 2023 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found.
A last explanation is that the woman is depressed, dealing with unresolved childhood attachment issues, and unable to recognize love and desire because she has such severe self-esteem issues.
This isn’t a standalone issue; it can compound any of the others that I’ve already covered. For example, a woman whose husband has low testosterone may still feel, on a deep core level, that if she were only more desirable, he would still be able to perform, even though intellectually she knows this is irrational.
No matter which of these issues are at play, it is essential to bring this problem out into the open if a couple wants to work on it. The first step is for the woman to try to express her feelings non-defensively and non-attackingly.
Something like, “I feel like you’re just not that into me anymore, since January or so. Did anything change then?” If something like you gaining 25 pounds happened in January, be open to hearing that. Think deeply about whether this would impact your levels of attraction, as well. (A lot of people who attack more visually-driven people don’t own and recognize how much they are driven by similarly “superficial” variables themselves.)
If there are larger issues, push yourself to confront them. Ignoring that your partner’s drinking has ramped up for the past year does nobody any good. Ignoring that they get texts from a woman at work is also not helpful. If you tend to be a problem-minimizer, it is likely you saw this in your parents’ relationship.
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Deeply think about how this affected your own ability to deal with problems proactively. Tell your partner that you want to work on things before it is too late.
Couples counseling can be invaluable in helping partners understand their problems in a new and different way. A wider perspective, and situating your issues in a larger and more objective context can give people the space to work on them non-defensively. Sweeping one partner’s sadness and loneliness under the rug is not the answer, unless you just want to kick the divorce can a couple of years down the road.
Always pay attention to your feelings of loneliness within your marriage. Do not ignore them; they are a sign of something you and/or your partner need to work on. The longer you ignore deep marital dissatisfaction, the harder it is to turn around.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice Best Life Behavioral Health.