You have this nagging feeling that your husband is no longer in love with you. Learn what to do next
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If you’re feeling like you aren’t loved the way you’d like to be it can be really painful. Especially if the love had been there once and is now gone. So, it's understandable to want to know how you can make someone love you and get the pain to stop.
But making someone love you is a tough task. There’s no magic formula -- falling in love is so much more complicated than 1, 2, 3. And there are particular considerations if it’s a matter of falling back in love. So, what does it take to make someone love you?
Before we start exploring the ways you might make someone love you, let's look at some excerpts from one of my Google Hangouts to see what we can learn.
The question is, can we make someone love us? More specifically, how do we make someone love us? Commonly when we’re struggling with these questions, we really want to focus on the reasons why somebody doesn’t love us.
As it turns out there are multiple parts that we need to consider. We need to look at our our part as well as well as our partner's part, and then both of our parts together.
In a previous Hangout on loving someone who doesn’t love you, I discussed some of the reasons why somebody doesn’t love us. You might want to go back and look at that hangout to get a better idea of some of the reasons more specifically. Here, we’re going to focus on the part that we play in it and what we can do about it.
That is a really important piece to remember: we have a part in this. Often we are focused on the other person and looking at what they’re doing or not doing as far as loving us. We want to see what we can control to make them love us instead of focusing on what we really have control over which is ourselves.
This is an important point -- the answer to how to make someone love you starts with us, not them.
Let’s begin by looking at the question of how. Before we can answer how to make someone love you, we need to answer the question, “Can we?” The real answer about being able to make someone love you is that we really can’t. We’re looking to have control over someone else, but we often can’t. We can influence them, and we’ll look at ways that we can influence our partner and how they might love us more the way we are looking to be loved.
We need to understand the difference in the control -- that we can influence our partner but we can’t control them and actually make them love us. What can you do? How can you make someone love you?
First, we need to look at ourselves and see how we can be more loving. A common complaint I hear from a lot of people in counseling is that they just don’t feel like the other person is meeting their needs. Yet often times they’re not willing to look at themselves and see how they might be contributing to that.
Let’s focus first on ourselves and look at how we might be able to be more loving to our partner. This can be difficult because when we feel like we’re not being loved back we oftentimes don’t want to give the love, but a relationship needs to be fed. It requires that we don’t make our love conditional. Oftentimes people will do that -- they’ll withhold their love until they are getting the love back. This creates a catch-22, because the other person is oftentimes doing the same thing. The first thing we need to do is look at ourselves and see how we might be able to be more loving.
This is a tough one -- loving someone who doesn't love you. But it's the first step in how to make someone love you. If we don't make our love unconditional, how can we expect the person we want to love us to do that?
The second thing we can do is look at how we might be able to be more lovable. A lot of times this is a difficult thing to do -- to actually look at ourselves in the mirror and see how we might actually be contributing to the problem. Often we really want to focus on the other person, but if we look at ourselves and really give an honest assessment of what we are doing in the relationship and how we might be able to change some things to be a bit more lovable, oftentimes we will find some things.
One of the things that people bring up in counseling is their partner being critical. Sometimes it’s how the person is taking care of himself or herself that can be something that makes the partner feel that they are not lovable, or they can be more considerate. Oftentimes thinking about the other person’s needs can make a big difference in making ourselves more lovable.
If we're in a relationship with the person we want the love from, or have been in one with them, then most likely we've gotten feedback from them at some point about how we could love them better. If nothing is coming to mind, think harder. How to make someone love you has to include changes we can take to make ourselves more lovable.
So first, we can work on being more loving; second, we can work on being more lovable. The third thing we need to do is to not accept not being loved. This is a real tricky one because a lot of people mistakenly accept not being loved and stay in a relationship when they really should not. We’re going to focus on this because that is really the part that we can influence some control over and have some power in the relationship in our refusal to accept not being loved.
How to make someone love you starts with beginning to not accept not getting the love. We need to recognize that we deserve to be loved and expect that in the relationship from a partner. Some negotiation has to take place so that we figure out how to meet each other’s needs, but just that underlying idea that we deserve the love is really an important thing that we need to believe.
I explain more about how not to accept not being loved in the above video at the 4:33 time mark. Take a listen and also hear what the other Hangout participants had to say. The most important point of this post is that how to make someone love you has to begin with our focusing on us before we focus on them.
Once you’ve spent some time evaluating your own behavior and have begun making the needed changes within yourself, you can focus on creating love between you and that someone else. But it can be hard to know where to start. To help you begin, check out these tips.
If you really want to make someone love you it’s important to remember that although it may sound contrived, it’s actually true that you first need to love yourself. Being comfortable with, and feeling positive about, yourself will allow you more easily follow the tips above and offer the best possible version of you.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published November 30, 2013 and has been updated with new information for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
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Hi, My husband says he fancies me but doesn't love me anymore, is there any hope of our future or is it over?
please advise i love him so so much and have been with him 28 years, what did i do wrong?
Lesley
Lesley, marriages go through a variety of phases. There are also two people in any relationship, so don't assume you have done something wrong. There are likely issues on both sides. 28 years is a long time and it is worth it to invest the time in getting to the root of your problems. If you cannot do this on your own, seek a qualified marriage counselor or therapist to assist. Sometimes an objective third party is what it takes to help you both see more clearly.
-Dr. Kurt
Hi thank you for your reply, I have asked and he has refused he had a thing for a girl at his work but said he doesn't any more. Have you any other advice I agree with you and I want our marriage to survive and think he maybe going through a life crisis himself . How can I help him to sort his head out even if I do end up losing him ? Thank you.
Thank you for sharing such a beautiful article. I loved it.
But the thing is, he is very critical. Infact he is always critical. I would not say that I do not trust him. But if I ask any question be it related to anything. He just loses it, he loses control over his language over his ettiquetes. I mean, damn it. I am your wife, I think I have a right to know about anything or every thing. Or just a question about little thing - I am not questioning his manhood. Anyways I am giving my best to make it work, yeah sometimes by thinking about his rude behaviour I also nest a negative Aura around myself and then one thought after another and leads to whole ball of negativity.