Over time, the perception which couples have about love tends to change. A lot of problematic couples don’t know when their previously happy marriages start to deteriorate; obviously, they must have overlooked some important changes that happened in their marital relationships. Probably, you or your spouse also starts to view the marital relationship from another angle that is different from before, or you and your spouse may have started to change the way to deal with marital issues, but you don’t pay attention to those changes in time.
And while you or your spouse is undergoing a series of thought changes and behavior changes, your love relationship may hit the rocks during the process. Surely, nobody wants their marriages to fail, and nobody wants to be stuck in a loveless marriage; and if you can promptly notice those subtle signs of a loveless marriage, you may have more chances of turning things around.
This post points out 5 loveless marriage signs that you may well miss:
1 Your spouse starts to treat you like an obligation:
When your spouse loves you, he/she always makes sure that you are a known priority in his/her individual life, and he/she consciously frees up as much time as possible to stay with you. However, when a marriage begins to become loveless, you may feel like you suddenly become not so important to him/her; in daily life, you may sense that interacting with you is no longer in his priority list. For example, your spouse would rather hang out with his/her friends or spend time with his/her original family than stay at home with you; maybe, when staying with you, your spouse still doesn’t want to directly say that he/she no longer gets the same feeling that he/she used to get from you; and now he/she just feels an obligation to maintain the relationship with you; surely, it can’t be said that he/she hates you now, but he may deliberately reduce the time of being with you alone.
Now you may have already sensed that he always seems to have an excuse for not being able to stay long with you. And when you ask him/her to spend more time with you, he/she seems kind of frustrated or annoyed. When you have felt that you are just being “scheduled” in his daily plan, I bet you also feel awkward to spend time with him/her.
2 Your spouse reciprocates your feelings less often:
Right now, does the marriage feel kind of one-sided? You believe that you give him/her much more than what he/she gives you in return. You may have felt that your spouse feels reluctant to show his/her love for you, if at all. And it is an institution where one spouse needs to regularly reciprocates loving feelings for the other one in a form of bonding, such as sexual behavior, physical touch, text communication, and phone contacts. For example, maybe you have felt that he has no longer reciprocated a strong desire for sex while you are both sleeping in bed; maybe you give him/her a little kiss and hug most days but he/she reciprocates less often, even he/she may push you away at the moment and say he/she is busy and tired.
Surely, sometimes your spouse may just not be in the mood to reciprocate your efforts at intimacy. But if you often realize that your spouse would not like to do anything to reciprocate your affection and feelings, it is very likely one of the early signs you are in a loveless marriage. Especially if you in a long-distance relationship, you are much more focused on emotional reciprocation instead of behavioral reciprocation, so you call your spouse regularly and chat online with him/her often, you have to seek comfort and reassurance from emotional reciprocation, and the lack of emotional reciprocation can make it hard to maintain the relationship in the long run.
3 You or your spouse becomes egoistic:
Ego is a common factor that contributes to the failure of a relationship. We all have an ego; it usually doesn’t rear its head; and in moderate amounts, it can help boost up our self-esteem. But if an excessive ego is left unchecked, it may cause turmoil in married life. If one of you has a giant ego (for example, your spouse thinks he is always better than you and you don’t deserve him/her), the relationship will suffer.
Ego is greatly different from attitude: in a marriage, attitude makes one spouse stand out from the other one in a positive sense; but an excessive ego just makes a person feel that he/she is left alone in the relationship, and hence he/she resents his/her partner.
And it is necessary to analyze the common traits of an egoistic spouse: he/she may be very adamant, self-centered, self-loving, and supremely self-confident; he/she may have an extraordinary level of pride; he/she may easily insult others; he/she may easily lose his/her temper… Understandably, in a long term relationship, an egotistic person does not allow himself/herself to be caring and loving to his/her partner.
4 It seems that the two of you hardly agree with each other:
Let’s talk about this issue from the following 2 aspects:
- The same arguments are played out over and over again:
If you and your spouse keep fighting about the same matters over and over again and always end up hating each other, this steady toxic flow tends to breed resentment towards each other. Maybe, you are sure that you are not a person that holds a grudge, and hence you choose to downplay those spats or arguments as “normal happenings in marriage”; in that case, probably you don’t exactly feel how resentful your spouse is of you, even though your spouse’s lips say that he/she will not bear you a grudge. However, such negative feelings quietly erode the marital relationship.
Repetitive fights not only breed resentment but also create unwanted communication barriers. Due to the previous failed attempts to discuss the same matters rationally, both you and your spouse may have got trapped in a vicious cycle – initially, the discussion is aimed at addressing a critical relationship issue; but after many attempts, the two of you become more and more emotional, and you have both been distracted by other tangential issues; gradually, you and your spouse are both not focused on the core issue.
- You realize that most of your conversations can easily turn into arguments:
When a lot of simple conversations turn into arguments, you and your spouse may sense that you two are just not being heard and understood by each other. Frequent disputes and arguments indicate the wide divergence on the concept of married life between you and your spouse; when a disagreement is always going in the wrong direction and you both fail to repair riffs, you and your spouse easily feel alone in the relationship ( when you and your spouse realize that conversations with each other can easily escalate into unnecessary arguments and even fights, you both feel like that you are walking on eggshells during conversations; you may both think it is better to go the separate ways); as a result, you or your spouse may consider withdrawing in the relationship (you see, so many couples choose not to fight at all after they intensely fought each other but nothing got resolved); meanwhile, you or your spouse may consider seeking validation from others outside of the relationship.
Therefore, if you realize that you and your spouse seem no longer to agree on more and more matters, it is probably one of the subtle signs you are in a loveless marriage.
5 You start to believe that decreased intimacy in marriage is normal:
Maybe you and your spouse have been married for years or even tens of years; long term relationships have to go through all kinds of changes; unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the intimacy between the two of you may have already vanished. For example, many times when you and your spouse are both lying in bed, you assume your partner is equally as exhausted as you, and hence you think that directly lying down to sleep is better off than doing intimate things in bed; you used to kiss each other goodbye when you part ways in the morning, but now the thought of kissing each other seems foreign or redundant.
Yes, intimate connection, especially sexual connection, can ebb and flow during the long journey of marriage. However, a serious lack of intimate connection is unhealthy. Even though couples inevitably experience a decline in sex drive and sex ability in the long term, emotional connection and other forms of physical connection still play an important role in maintaining the bond that keeps the relationship alive.
Most couples make a conscious effort to develop intimacy at the early stage of their relationships, but a lot of married couples don’t realize that it is also essential to continue to maintain intimacy throughout their entire married life; every spouse wants to be loved and accepted for who he/she is, and intimate connection is always an indispensable way to express love and respect.
Furthermore, in a marital relationship, intimacy brings a spouse a stable sense of security, this sense makes one spouse feel that the other is there for him/her. Hence when a marriage is struggling because of a lack of intimacy, especially a lack of emotional intimacy, neither spouse will feel secure or happy in the relationship. Due to the lack of security and happiness, the level of intimacy further decreases; then the vicious cycle continues.
In short, if you feel that the relationship lacks more and more intimacy whether it is emotional or physical intimacy, then that may be a sign that your relationship tends to grow loveless and stale over time.
How to find more possible signs you are in a loveless marriage:
Surely, if your marriage starts to become loveless, there should also be many other subtle signs. To recognize more signs, you should make a point of deciphering the voice that may be buried deep in your heart.
When your relationship is not working normally, your gut instincts often remind you first even though sometimes you can not prove that your suspicion is right. Surely, it does not mean that you should immediately doubt the relationship status once you sense something wrong with the relationship. However, if the gut feeling becomes more and more overwhelming, you might try to trust your gut because probably it fits with reality to some extent and it is not so intuitive.
We easily listen to our feelings that thrive on high drama. But more often than not, our inner voice is so calm and quiet that we ignore our gut. In modern society, we have been trained to trust logic as much as possible; but in the love relationship, trusting logic is not always more correct than trusting our gut. After all, we are not only creatures of logic but also creatures of emotion.
In a relationship, you can not figure out any relationship problem with purely logical explanation; for example, some people have a very happy marriage, but unexpectedly they betrayed their spouses. When a niggling feeling presents itself, you may not be able to prove it logically because of no rational reasons or hard facts; for example, often lately, you have an unpleasant, vague feeling that your spouse is pulling away emotionally, but it seems that he/she has always been busy with something recently, so you try to console yourself with the thought like “he/she is just way too busy, and things will get better soon”. When you just have a gut feeling that your marriage is having problems, you might drill down on the initial intuition, and then ask yourself more specific questions. For example, if you find that your feelings are like, “I just feel disrespected and unhappy when talking to him/her; now I feel insecure to express myself in his/her presence”, although you may also not be quite clear of why you feel that way about your spouse, that may be because your spouse has already ignored certain emotional needs that you care about; hence, you should not ignore the gut feeling.
Again, if you want to spot more possible signs you are in a loveless marriage, don’t ignore what your inner voice is telling you quietly.
If you are sure you are in a loveless marriage, it is imperative to take action to fix the failing marriage. To get more tips on how to survive a loveless marriage, you might go on to read the post below:
Should you stay in a loveless marriage – How to survive a loveless marriage.
Furthermore, if you want to follow a step-by-step marriage-saving guide on how to save a loveless marriage, you might go on to watch the video below to follow the comprehensive guidance that is offered by Brad Browning, a marriage coach who has 12+ years of experience helping couples survive and thrive in unhappy marriages:
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
What should you do when your marriage is on the rocks?
6 tips on how to survive in an unhappy marriage without divorce.
What a healthy marriage looks like – How to maintain a marriage.
What to do when your spouse wants to leave you – Save your marriage.
9 basic tips on how to deal with a dismissive-avoidant spouse.