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My Husband Doesn’t Appreciate Me

3 Ways to Get More Love on Wife Appreciation Day

When your husband is on the couch watching TV or staring at his phone while you’re doing the zillionth load of laundry, shuttling your kids around for the fifth time that day or putting in long work hours, it can rub you the wrong way.

Especially if he doesn’t even seem to know how clean underwear magically appear in his drawer.

It would go a long way to know that he sees how hard you work and that he values it.

But it appears he has no idea. He’s not even aware of all it takes to keep your household running smoothly, which makes you feel lonely and taken for granted.

You could tell him, but what would that accomplish? He’d only nod and listen as long as he thought he had to before he could get back to the TV or phone.

Then you’d feel even lonelier and less appreciated.

At least that’s how it went around here back in the bad old days.

Fortunately, there is a much better way to get some recognition from your husband, which all humans need at times.

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Will the Intimacy Skills™ Work for You?

7 Ways Women Say They Knew They’d Turned a Corner

If your relationship feels unbearably hard and hopeless right now, that tells me you’re probably very hurt, and you’ve been getting hurt for a long time now.

You just want that to stop–the way you’d want to stop hitting your head with a hammer.

When you’re feeling that hurt, it’s hard to see possibilities. The only rational thing to do is raise the drawbridge and put on your armor for battle.

If all your recent interactions with your significant other have been antagonistic, then it seems logical to expect the bloodshed to continue.

But past performance is no indication of future results in relationships, especially if you get the element of surprise on your side.

Here’s what happened when real women like you surprised their husbands:

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How to Make Kids Listen

6 Ways to Want to Be Around Your Children Again
Stefanie Herron
Laura Doyle Certified Relationship Coach and mother of two

Being a parent is maddening. One minute your little angels are so adorable you’re overcome with gratitude for being lucky enough to have them.

The next, they’re possessed by demons, and you wish you could run away from home.

So how do you get the adorable kids to stick around longer?

The ones you not only love but like.

The ones who listen.

Here’s how I exorcised my kids’ bad behavior:

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Stop Silent Treatment

How to End the Suffering When Your Husband Won’t Speak to You

When your husband is giving you the silent treatment, it hurts. A lot.

I still remember how lonely it was when we had cold wars in my house.

Your brain goes into an endless loop of thinking about how to get him to talk to you again. It gnaws at you and colors everything else in your world.

You’ve already tried begging and pleading and confronting. None of that works. And giving him the silent treatment right back just creates a cold war.

So how can you ever connect again?

How do you stop these endless hostilities?

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How to Know if You Should Get a Divorce

Is Marriage to an Addict, Abuser or Adulterer Tolerable or Terminal?

I hate hearing about anyone getting divorced.

But as a relationship coach, almost every day I hear from a woman who is in excruciating pain and on the verge of divorce because her husband is having an affair and refuses to end it.

Or his chronic, excessive drinking has put her over the edge and she is afraid of what the kids are seeing.

Or her self-esteem is gone because of the physical abuse in their home or because he engages prostitutes.

There was a time when I would have urged these women to leave such heartbreaking situations. I wrote exactly that in my first book and more recently in blogs like this one.

I presumed I knew what a woman in such a difficult situation should do.

As if I were the expert on her life.

Which I’m not.

Recently I’ve been confronted with something even worse about what I’ve written for all these years, and I’m embarrassed to say I was too afraid to admit it.

Until now.

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Demystifying Men

What He Secretly Thinks about Seduction, Controlling His Temper, Opening Up to You, and More

If you’ve ever wondered what motivates your man or why he’s acting the way he is, you’re not alone.

Men can be hard to understand.

They laugh at things that aren’t that funny, enjoy movies that aren’t that interesting, and react to harmless comments like they’re insults.

At least, that’s how it seemed to me for a long time.

You may feel the same way.

So at the Cherished for Life Weekend, we gather five men, put them on stage and anonymously ask them any question we want.

Anything at all.

We ask for seduction tips, how to get him to open up or what made him decide to choose his wife.

And they answer very authentically–and thoroughly.

But the women had so many burning questions that the last Man Panel didn’t get to them all. So for today’s blog, I decided to ask questions submitted at the Cherished for Life Weekend to a Man Panel of one: my husband, John Doyle.

He agreed to pull back the curtain and answer eight anonymous questions candidly.

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My Husband Doesn’t Listen to Me

4 Ways to Speak the Language Husbands Like and Understand

Having the same conversation again and again, the one that turns into an argument or a cold war every time, gets old fast.

But when your husband isn’t holding up his end of the parenting, finances or household maintenance, you end up stuck holding the bag, which is exhausting.

You’re likely to get resentful if you don’t say something, but what if he gets irritable whenever you mention a particular topic?

Or, what if every time you bring it up, it isn’t a good time? What if he just won’t listen?

If he’ll never talk about it, how will things ever get better?

It can make you feel hopeless.

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3 Ways Vulnerability Can Actually Attract Your Man

By Stefanie Herron, Laura Doyle Certified Relationship Coach

When you’re raised to be strong and resilient and, most of all, equal, the idea of becoming vulnerable is low on your to-do list.

Why be weepy when it can make you look “touched”–like a nut job with a screw loose?

Crying seems like something to avoid in favor of being rational.

Who wants to be sensitive and soft when what’s rewarded in the world is being undemonstrative and competent?

That’s what I thought too. Everyone knows boys don’t cry, and that includes girls.

Plus, whenever I did turn on the waterworks, my man would locate the nearest exit. Then I really had something to cry about.

But then I learned something that reversed this trend for good.

These days my husband loves to see me cry–for all the right reasons.

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Is My Relationship Normal?

How to Know if What You’re Going Through Is Typical or Out There

When there’s a breakdown in your relationship, it can trigger shame.

You don’t want other people to know what he just called you, or how you’ve been sleeping separately, or that he punched a wall or shook one of the kids or isn’t coming home at night.

When you’re scared like that, it’s normal to want to protect yourself from judgment.

That means you can’t compare notes with others to see if that happens at their house too. You’re left feeling alone.

If you did talk about what’s really going on at your house, the person you share it with may tell you that you shouldn’t tolerate that behavior. They might urge you to leave and question your judgment if you don’t.

The shame keeps you isolated in the worst way. Most of us will go a long way to avoid that feeling of shame because it feels like life or death.

That’s why I didn’t want anyone to know about the struggles in my marriage. I wanted to keep my status in the tribe.

So I suffered silently, but it wasn’t necessary.

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How to Cope with the Threat of Divorce

3 Ways to to Heal Your Hurt, Restore Your Dignity and Revive Your Faith in Love

When I was on the brink of divorcing my husband, I was desperate to end the pain of constantly feeling rejected and lonely. I also hoped to escape the financial chaos we were stuck in and dreamed of finding a man who would better match me than the Loser Pants I had married.

Convinced it was my husband’s fault that I was so unhappy, I managed to avoid looking at my own contributions to the tension, hostility and pain in my marriage. I was sure I was the “good” spouse–the marriage counselor even said so.

I didn’t realize I was avoiding the door marked “Reflect on Your Shortcomings,” and I would have gone on my self-righteous way if my marriage hadn’t been failing.

Looking back, I realize that I not only contributed to the breakdown in my marriage, I was chipping away at the intimacy and connection on a daily basis.

Nobody had ever taught me the Six Intimacy Skills™ critical to having a playful, passionate relationship. My parents are divorced, so I was following a failed recipe. Maybe nobody has ever taught you either.

The good news is that the aching heartbreak in my marriage led to an incredible, transformative journey that I never would have taken any other way.

Today I’m deeply grateful for the breakdown and for the woman I’ve become as a result.

That’s why I’m so passionate about ending world divorce and why I started an international coaching company, writing several books to make sure every woman knows how to prevent a divorce by making her marriage amazing.

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