What to Do if He Doesn’t Want You Anymore

By

Laura Doyle

By Laura Doyle

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Laura Doyle is a New York Times Bestselling Author, Relationship Expert, Host of The Empowered Wife Podcast at Laura Doyle Connect.

| Updated: 04/19/2023

Medically reviewed by Dr. Liz Hale

Medically reviewed by Dr. Liz Hale

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Dr. Liz Hale is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist specializing in Marriage Therapy and Discernment Counseling.

If he doesn’t want you anymore, it does hurt—really bad.

Whether his actions are speaking louder than words and he’s too busy to spend time with you or he’s saying he doesn’t want you and making plans to leave you, or has already left, it can leave you with the excruciating impression that you’re unlovable.

There’s no lonelier feeling than that.

Well-meaning friends can make it even worse by telling you to stop loving him or to stop trying to make him love you. You’ll hear things like, “Then he doesn’t deserve you! You’ll find someone better.” They might advise you to cut off all ties with him.

Sure, you could do that. You could become defensive and focus all your energy on walking away and starting again. But what if that’s not what your heart is telling you to do?

As the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”

Maybe there’s a good reason you still love someone who doesn’t seem to be loving you back right now. Maybe this is just the beginning of your thrilling come-from-behind-and-win-the-game story.

While you might wish that things could go back to the way they were before this happened, maybe there’s something even better waiting for you.

At least, that’s what I see happen with students of the Six Intimacy Skills™ who use the Connection Framework. They’ve gone through this crushing experience of feeling completely rejected and unloved and come out the other side saying their marriage is better than ever.

But how did they do that? More importantly, how can YOU do that too?

Here are three 3 things you can do right now to save your marriage.

1. Become Your Best Self

If you’re anything like I was when my husband didn’t want me anymore and I was very hurt, you keep asking yourself how this happened. You want to know why he changed his mind, especially when things were so romantic and wonderful before.

When my husband didn’t want to spend time with me or even make love to me anymore, one thing had eluded me…

There was very little resemblance between the woman I was when he fell in love with me and the woman I had become early in our marriage.

When we were falling in love, I was always smiling, laughing, dancing and singing. I was happy. As time went on—because of his actions, I believed–I became dreadfully unhappy. I was resentful, stressed, and unpleasable. I flew into rages and blamed him for our problems. I was no longer myself, my best self. But since I was just reacting to all the disappointment and hurt that I was feeling from him, I didn’t think it was something I could change.

But I was wrong. It was possible for me to make myself happy. I was just afraid to do it because I thought I would be teaching him to keep neglecting me and the other responsibilities I wanted him to take on.

In other words, my misery was a form of control.

And it was super ineffective. He never did get motivated or inspired by my misery. I was just chronically unhappy and we were stuck there. But deciding to make myself happy and finding my dignity as a result of feeling filled up so I could respond better worked wonders in making me an irresistible magnet that drew him close to me.

It may seem like a strange time to get happy when your husband doesn’t want you anymore, but it’s interesting to think about what might happen for you if you did, right?

You’d be happier, for one thing. And that will make you more attractive to him too, in my experience.

2. Get Reassurance, But Not From Him

Of course feeling unwanted makes you feel scared, sad and hurt. Naturally, you want reassurance that he’s going to want you again at some point, or that he still does deep down, so it’s incredibly tempting to ask him. Like chocolate-chip-cookies-hot-from-the oven tempting. You’re a mere mortal woman, after all.

But it’s incredibly demoralizing if he can’t give it to you. Yet.

Plus, part of you already knows the answer to that question because it’s what has you reeling in pain.

Instead, consider getting the reassurance that you’re still lovable and that you can come out of this breakdown with a breakthrough from someone else. Just the way plants need light, soil and air to thrive, you require that encouragement and hope, and you can get it from people other than your husband. Maybe you can get that from your parents or your sister or a friend or an aunt.

You can get it from the coaches and students on the Laura Doyle Connect campus, who are all 100% standing for your greatness and the success of your marriage. That’s a great place to go when you need reassurance, as all humans do.

3. Try Some Experiments

President John F. Kennedy said that  “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.” Reaching a point where your husband doesn’t want you anymore is a crisis, and it hurts, and you’re well aware of the danger.

But you’re also at the threshold of an opportunity.

This is exactly how many women, including me, come to experiment with Six Intimacy Skills: through the urgency and opportunity of a marital crisis. I hear them say things like, “I had nothing to lose, so I decided to try apologizing for being disrespectful or sharing three gratitudes a day.”

You can get a high-level overview of the Intimacy Skills in the free Adored Wife Roadmap or a detailed description in the book The Empowered Wife and in the modules in the programs on our campus.

If you try the Skills and they don’t work for you, then you can always go back to the way you’re doing things now.

But if you try them and they work for you like they have for thousands of women before you who used them to make their marriages last and thrive, then you’ll find out that you were lovable all along, but that nobody had ever taught you the skills you need to make your marriage playful and passionate.

They’ll also help you become your best self, the one your husband was madly, deeply in love with.

What do you have to lose?

By Laura Doyle

Hi! I'm Laura.

New York Times Bestselling Author

I was the perfect wife--until I actually got married. When I tried to tell my husband how to be more romantic, more ambitious, and tidier, he avoided me. I dragged him to marriage counseling and nearly divorced him. I then started talking to women who had what I wanted in their marriages and that’s when I got my miracle. The man who wooed me returned.

I wrote a few books about what I learned and accidentally started a worldwide movement of women who practice The Six Intimacy Skills™ that lead to having amazing, vibrant relationships. The thing I’m most proud of is my playful, passionate relationship with my hilarious husband John–who has been dressing himself since before I was born.

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