Your husband fell out of love and left, pulled the rug out from under your world and, in your stunned disbelief you can’t, for the life of you, figure what went wrong.
Many women are blinded sided by divorce, slapped in the emotions by a husband who says, “I’m not in love with you anymore.” Most, I’m afraid, fail to look inward and own the role they played in the lack of love now being shown them.
Happy marriages are difficult to maintain and, it is possible for a man to fall out of love with his wife. It’s difficult for a couple to maintain the level of excitement felt when they first met once they are sharing their lives day in and day out.
Add to the monotony of daily life, marriage stressors and a lack of skills for dealing with the stress and it is possible for a husband to lose those “loving feelings” toward his wife.
Wondering why it happened to you?
Below are 9 Reasons Your Husband Fell Out Of Love
1. You Missed the Mark When It Came to Communication
Not only is communication important in maintaining a bond with each other, how you communicate will determine how strong of a bond. The way a couple communicates is as important as the ability to communicate.
Below are four negative communication traits that may have killed his love for you.
Giving him the silent treatment
When you refuse to talk and discuss problems you slowly destroy the love that is the foundation of a marriage.
Refusing to communicate is a disrespectful manner of communicating how you are feeling. Did you give him the silent treatment when he pissed you off? If so, all you managed to do was push him away and build a wall that restricted intimacy.
Being on the defensive
If you viewed statements made by your husband as accusations, you probably responded in a defensive manner. Being defensive is not communication, it’s a game of who is right and who is wrong. When you start keeping score, love eventually pays the price.
Being overly critical
Constantly expressing how you feel about your husband’s negative traits isn’t communication, it is tearing down. Nothing kills feelings of love for a wife quicker than feeling like you can do no right. If your communication style causes your husband to feel worthless and depletes their self-esteem, don’t be surprised when you find the love has died.
Name calling
This is a no-brainer! If you tell someone who loves you they are an idiot, stupid, can’t do anything right, that person will eventually fall out of love with you. Name calling is a form of emotional abuse!
2. You Were a Clingy Wife
My 8th grade home economics teacher taught us that once couples marry they “became one.” She was wrong! Couples do not become one and believing so is a death sentence to autonomy and love.
For love to thrive a wife and husband should remain autonomous, fully individualized outside the relationship and marriage.
Wanting your husband to spend all his time with you because you believe it is an expression of how much he loves you is a sign of immaturity in you, not proof that he loves you.
If love is to grow, a husband and wife must continue to bring your own individuality to the relationship.
If you were clingy, insecure, jealous and possessive you weren’t feeding love, you were smothering it. Want to choke the love out of someone quickly, man or woman, keep a tight noose around their neck!
3. Your Marriage had a Bad Beginning
In order for a couple to weather the storms…the ups and downs of marital life, they need a strong, healthy beginning. Below are a few examples of poor relationship foundations. Beginnings that could cause either spouse to eventually lose loving feelings for the other.
A rush to marriage
You fell in love and had him standing at the alter two months later. True love takes time to grow, two months, isn’t enough time. If you rushed him toward the alter before he was ready to go there, your marriage was doomed from the beginning.
It was all about the engagement and wedding
Did you “fall in love” as a means to get married?
If you set out to find someone to marry you instead of someone to love, that is an immature foundation for love to grow on. If that is the case, most men soon realize they’ve been used and will begin to lose the desire to invest in you and the marriage.
Long-term relationships riddled with problems
We all know that couple. They dated for six years, broke up and got back together on a regular basis and were always in the middle of conflict. If you can’t hold a relationship together before you marry, you aren’t going to be able to after you marry.
Were you the drama queen while dating? Did you think marriage would put an end to the drama? Once a drama queen, always a drama queen and men will only feel affection for a wife like that for so long.
4. You Didn’t Meet His Needs
Forgive me for going all “Venus and Mars” on you but, as individuals, we have needs in romantic relationships. If those needs aren’t met, love dies.
And, I’m not talking about big needs either. If you lived, day in and day out taking care of the children, cooking, cleaning and doing laundry, meeting your girlfriends for lunch or hold up in your craft room with a hot glue gun you probably had very little time left over for him.
We women, like to talk about getting our needs met but, men in a relationship have needs also. If, as his wife, you weren’t tuned into his emotional and physical needs and putting effort into meeting them, he may have gotten to the point of finding someone who would.
Sexual fulfillment, support, and admiration are the basic needs of a man. Did you underestimate the importance of those things?
5. You Didn’t Put Enough Effort into Resolving Marital Conflict
Problems are common in all marriages. Both spouses need to have the ability to constructively work through those problems. When a wife avoids finding solutions to marital problems, leaving her husband holding the bag, love eventually dies.
Putting the onus on him to solve problems by refusing counseling or communicating about the problems causes resentment to grow toward you and the relationship.
Unresolved marital conflict, especially when a wife tries to sweep them under the rug, negatively impacts feelings of love her husband has for her.
6. You Stopped Caring About Your Appearance
You let yourself go. You gained 50 pounds with your first baby and never lost it, you started wearing nothing but sweat pants and just generally became someone no one would find attractive.
Physical attraction between spouses is important. If your husband looks at you and his motor doesn’t start humming love is doomed. Part of being in love with someone is feeling passionate and drawn to their physical appearance.
Just because a man has said, “I do” doesn’t mean his love will always be there regardless of how you look and how well you take care of yourself.
7. You Rejected Him Sexually
Sex in marriage is important because it brings a couple closer together. If a couple has a great sexual bond they can weather almost any storm. In a sexless marriage, there is no bond, storms are not weathered!
Sex is also an expression of love between two people. Few women understand that men bond with their partner via the act of sex. It’s true! Marital sex, for men, is a way to feel closer to their spouse.
It isn’t just sex for the sake of sex.
For love to continue and grow it’s important that a wife understands and respects her husband’s normal sexual needs. And, at times, give a spouse what they need (within reason) because you care about his needs being met.
8. Being a Mother Was First on Your List of Priorities
Without your husband, you wouldn’t have children to put first. For that reason, don’t be surprised when your husband falls out of love due to feeling ignored, unimportant and dismissed.
Mothering is rewarding and time-consuming and, it is also one of the biggest risk factors in causing a husband to feel kicked to the curb.
Many women focus on the children thinking the relationship with their husband will be there when they get the job of raising children behind them.
They mistakenly think they will pick up where they left off when the children are grown and gone. It doesn’t work that way! His love must be nurtured too.
9. You Were Impossible to Please
It didn’t matter what he did, you were never grateful. He washed the dishes and you bitched at him for not wiping down the counter tops. He worked overtime to take you on the vacation of your dreams and you whined the entire time you were on the trip.
Whatever he did, you took his efforts for granted and failed to show appreciation for his efforts.
10. You Changed After Marrying Him
Before marriage, you were up for anything. You enjoyed going out with him, doing things he was interested in. You were invested in your career, had a full and rewarding life. You were the total package!
After marriage, you turned into a boring, grumpy, uninteresting person who was in bed asleep by 8 in the evening and spent your weekends on Facebook or binge watching television on the couch. That interesting woman he fell in love with became a snooze fest he had no respect for and very little feelings of love toward.
Disclaimer: Some men are dogs. They may not have loved you from the beginning. More than likely, though, you were in a relationship with a fully emotionally functioning man and, it’s going to help you, in future relationships to understand your role in him falling out of love with you. So, I urge you to own your role in the demise of your relationship, learn from it and move ahead with your life.
I am guilty of many if the items on the list, but what if your ex was an alcoholic and serial adulterer for most your marriage. The serial adulteter part I found out when he left. From the beginning I never had a chance!
EJ, I believe the important thing is to take what you learn about yourself and work at not taking those same behaviors into a new relationship. There is nothing you can do about the person he was in the marriage. You only have control over the person you were and his alcoholism doesn’t negate your behaviors in the marriage. I wish you the best and hope you find a kind, loving man to share your new future with. Best to you!
I believe there are a lot of factors, in addition to age and experience: patience and the fact that we are VERY compatible in most other ways. I think that we both secretly felt that if addressed the subject it would be met with rejection and anger. I believe that we needed to learn how to communicate (in a marriage I believe that is incredibly important) plus there has to be a health amount of trust.
Not sure if this blog is even still active but…my husband told me last month he will file for a divorce and it has been a struggle for him to come to the conclusion through those lists of faults that it has worn him down. I know there are two sides , I still love him and was trying to figure things out about me to help us, he said last year he would go to counseling with me but never did, that out be back down into depression. We have been together fir twenty years and he wants the divorce I sooooo do not, he said he cares for me a lot but not in love anymore, he wants me to be happy and find myself again and not be sad, there isn’t another person involved. I am doing my best to set him free but I have to be honest, at 50 years old I hope he sees me happy and healthier again someday, is it possible for him to fall back in love? I have a hard time that he truly has no love. I wonder if it is buried with resentment and eventually as time heals us both if he will miss me at all and there be hope
This article is right on the mark.
I’m a middle aged man, once divorced and then remarried at 46 (for 10 years now). Numbers: 1, 7 & 10 (not necessarily in that order) almost killed my 2nd marriage (and could have easily if I let it). We were sexually active for the first 4 years, then without expalination (#10), she did an about face, started rejecting me (#7)…very reticent about the issue (#1). Until I initiated change in the form of counseling.. then after 2 years of practically begging her to communicate, and me being blamed for everything that wasn’t working, what was in her head we finally (kind of) got to the bottom of it. As it turns out, she’s never been sexually satisfied by me, so she just decided to stop. Had this happened 10 years earlier, the marriage would have ended.
Hi JC, so, what you are saying is, age and experience played a role in you two being able to work through the problems in your marriage?
I believe there are a lot of factors, in addition to age and experience: patience and the fact that we are VERY compatible in most other ways. I think that we both secretly felt that if addressed the subject it would be met with rejection and anger. I believe that we needed to learn how to communicate (in a marriage I believe that is incredibly important) plus there has to be a health amount of trust.
Boring; hate these one-sided blogs. She did did this and that or he did this and that. So much more complicated than this “guilty-list” towards women, (even if it was a reverse list about him). Behaviors have consequences, but they also emerge with reason. See a counselor and if your spouse won’t with you, see one anyway. Quit looking for anyone else to provide your happiness; find it yourself. marriage is a ridiculous idea anyway and serves no real purpose other then legal entanglement. Relationships on the other hand often have an expiration date.
Believe it or not, marital problems can be, at times, one-sided and uncomplicated. You may not like that idea. That idea may keep you from being able to play the victim but, that is the reality of some marital problems. You are free to believe whatever you want, though. You are, after all, the one who has to live with repercussions of your skewed belief system.
Cathy,
I’ve noticed in past posts that you don’t like criticism about your blogs. The way you responded to Adrienne’s comment about her “skewed” beliefs is frankly, rude. She obiously believes that way so to her they are not skewed. Maybe you should respect the comments of people who read your blogs a little more. As a side note, your article was a little harsh. Women come to this site to feel better about a difficult situation and don’t need to be lectured on how horrible a wife they might’ve been. (Even if that was the case). Just my skewed belief I guess
When commenters stop projecting they’re experiences off onto every situation that is written about, I’ll do my best to validate and respect their views. And, this site is for women to learn from. We aren’t here to coddle, we are here to impart knowledge. It isn’t my responsibility to help any woman who may have behaved badly in her marriage feel better. It’s my hope that such women learn from the mistakes they made and not carry them into their next relationship. If they were a “horrible wife” it would be negligent of DivorcedMoms to pat them on the back and hope they feel better. If you or anyone else was a horrible wife, you won’t find coddling here. We don’t affirm bad behavior, we point it out and give women the opportunity to grow and learn. If you’re not interested in that you don’t have to read me.
You really aren’t a very nice person are you? I don’t even know you but I can guess why your marriage didn’t work out.
I’m nice enough to NEVER say to someone, “I can guess why your marriage didn’t work out.”
So Miss “High and Mighty” it’s ok though to say “I’ll try my best to validate and respect their views”? Who are you to validate the way someone feels and/or believes? How arrogant! I stand by my previous comment. Did I hit a nerve?
@Robin, I think maybe the writer of this article hit a nerve, not the other way around. You are one angry woman and it looks ugly on you.
I was guilty of several things on this list. I treated my husband like dirt. I thought my marriage revolved around me and what I wanted and needed. Not once during our five year marriage did I give anything thought to whether or not he was happy in the marriage. I just took it for granted that if I was happy, he was too. How could he have been? I was critical, whiny, selfish. Nothing he did got praised by me. I would go months refusing to have sex with him. For my 30th birthday we surprised me with a new Volvo and I threw a fit because it was the wrong color. He wanted to live on a budget and I spent money like it grew on trees and told him he was stupid when he tried to explain to me that our money was limited. It’s taken me four years to understand why his love for me died. I’m working on forgiving myself for hurting him and hope like hell I’m a better wife if I ever get married again. You can only treat someone bad for so long. They will get enough and leave!
What did he do to earn better treatment by you? I bet you’ve brought into every complaint your husband had about you as a wife and are taking on all the blame. Shame on you! Hold your head high and never let a man make you feel bad about what kind of wife you were.
Jessica, what did he do to earn better treatment by me? He was a good husband. He didn’t MAKE me feel bad, he didn’t have complaints about me. I was the one complaining and never happy with anything he did. Shame on you for not thinking I’m a rational human being with the ability to identify the problem in my marriage and take responsibility for it. You know, there really are good men in the world and I had a good man who had a BAD wife.
wow! I am surprised to see a woman telling other women how it is in 10 steps that her husband “fell out of love” with her. I found this article to be belittling & also placing the “blame” on women. Disappointing.
I ddin’t find it belittling at all. It was an article about how some women are mean as hell to their husband’s. Are men the only one’s who can be jerks in a marriage? What is it with someone women who think no woman can do wrong? I’m amazed at the comments on this article and ashamed at how holier than thou some of you women are. Grow the heck up!!
I agree with you Ann. I believe any men and women can do this.
Okay now lets find the article where we blame the husband for why his wife fell out of love with him….Let’s give my 10 reasons:
1. He couldn’t keep his thing in his pants
2. He was lazy and uninvolved when it came to helping around the house
3. He was lazy and univolved when it came to helping with our daughters
4. He was obsessed with money and how he was preceived by others
5. He was a bad lover and expected that while he did nothing to help with the kids/house I should want to have sex with him….which became a chore and left me often times feeling sick
6. He is a narc….and blames women for all his failures–something friends warned me about at the start but I was too blind to see
7. He resented any friends I made and after while I stopped making them
8. He resented any time I spent with my family even though I had just spent almost 20 years overseas away from them
9. He snored, I never got a full nights sleep in 15 years
10. He never wanted to do anything and when asked he would act like he was doing us a great favor
This is one of the most breathtakingly awful articles I have ever read in my life. I’m not one to usually put others down, but why does this implicate women as being the reason a marriage failed? All of these factors could have come from men, and seem more like an excuse for their behavior. Men and woman want to be heard and appreciated. To blame either gender specifically for this is preposterous.
1. Communication is a two way street. What do you do if you try to communicate , but your partner just won’t listen? I’m not saying Women don’t communicate or Men don’t communicate. People don’t communicate, whether that is the Man or Woman is irrelevant.
Being on the defensive – could come from either. What if your husband is being defensive, or wife vice versa. Maybe there is a reason for it, such as constantly being belittled. Are you saying it’s not okay to defend yourself? Those “statements ” could possibly be passive aggressive and meant to accuse, but not admit it. So why let yourself be talked to like that. Communicating that you don’t appreciate it or defending yourself is wrong?
Being overly critical
“Constantly expressing how you feel about your husband’s negative traits isn’t communication” if you want your significant other to be better, shouldn’t you communicating this? I agree that this shoul dbe tread upon lightly because you don’t want your partner to feel attacked. Try using statements like “when you do this, I feel like this” or maybe not this specifically (as I’m no expert).
Name calling – never okay no matter if you are the husband or wife. Why belittle the person you supposedly love.
2. You were a clingy wife – what about clingy men? People in a relationship should be supportive of wanting their significant other to build better relationships outside of their little circle by expanding that circle. All we have in this life is the positive relationships we’ve built with others.
3. I appreciate that you were able to accept that this could come from either side, however the drama queen comment was clearly meant to describe a woman. Obviously either can be this, but if that’s who you married, and they were upfront about this, you are simply trying to change who they are and should not have gotten into a relationship with this person if it was gonna be that big an issue for you.
4. Needs being met. Men and women don’t always have the same libidos. If both partners are happy in the relationship, they are usually more receptive to meeting each others needs. If one person feels used or unappreciated, they are less likely to reciprocate romantically, because they are to emotionally drained.
I could keep going through the list, but I think I made the point I was setting out to make. Although this article may aply to some, I don;t think you realize the damage that women in abusive relationships might take from this. They have already been abused to the point to where they feel everything they do is wrong. This article only serves to convince themselves of this. It also aids men who have not made the effort to find an article that pretty much excuses any fault they may have had in the relationship ending. I write this not to tear you down, but in hope that you might see what kind of damage these statements might cause.
I think you missed the title of the article. The title itself implies the article is about WOMEN. Hence the list of things women can do to cause a spouse to fall out of love with them. How breathtakingly awful of you not to be able to comprehend that. Not all women are good communicators. Not all women put forth an iota of effort to be good communicators. In that case, it’s no surprise when her marriage fails. We don’t discuss clingy men because the article is about women. The drama queen comment was meant to describe women. Why? Because this is an article about women. That needs not being met one, you’re off the mark, it had nothing to do with libidos or sex. Go read that again. And, no, you didn’t make your point. All you did is show that you didn’t comprehend what you read and project your own situation off onto an article that isn’t even about you. Women in abusive relationships? Harm? If a woman in an abusive relationship reads this article and interprets it as me telling her that she should shut up and continue to be beaten, she has a reading comprehension level as low as yours.
I’m so sorry you felt attacked enough to insult me for trying to bring attention to something you might not be aware of. I hope one day you realize that words Can have unintended consequences from those we intend. This list may be based on your experiences and you might be projecting this into others. Try to show a little compassion for your readers. You put your article out there for others to read, so maybe take some responsibility for your own actions. I read it just fine. If I interpreted it the way I did, then maybe take my reply as feedback for what others might be interpreting it as and use that to change your approach so that you can relay the message you truly intended. I would have been upset at myself for not saying anything. Again I don’t normally reply to threads, but your words made me feel so strongly about this that I felt like I needed to. Did you write this to help others or to just hear yourself tear down women? If you didn’t write this to evoke a response then why are you writing? What are you putting forth into the world? Communication and respect go along way, if your readers are communicating to you, why not try to understand them instead of insulting them. You made a lot of assumptions based on my reply, but I’m perfectly happy with my life, trying to find the light for myself as well as others, because we should be lifting each other up, not writing articles ABOUT WHY WOMEN ARE BEING LEFT BY THEIR HUSBANDS. If you want to help others, maybe change the title to reason why your significant other might have left. That’s assuming you want to help others maybe your article was just meant to be clickbait by pissing people off. I hope you find your way to the light as well, because we all deserve too.