How to look at the lack of affection in marriage?
The lack of affection in marriage is a clear sign that something goes wrong in your relationship, and it is usually a very prominent problem when a marriage hits the rocks or after a child was born.
No one does not long for affection in a relationship. Affection in marriage can involve specific expressions that promote feelings of passion, security, closeness, and so forth. It acts as an important role in connecting with each other emotionally.
As time goes by, a huge number of couples gradually lose the passion for affection and sexual union in marriage. The affection ever caused both of you to love for one another, but after the two of you are lulled into marital complacency, it is squashed flat by the enhanced sense of comfort with one another.
No doubt, in case a couple is suffering from a lack of affection in marriage, the couple’s emotional bond becomes weak.
If you are frustrated with this problem, you need to take action to get affection back to keep your marriage alive and vibrant.
Before talking about how to restore affection, it is better to gain an in-depth understanding of the importance of affection in marriage:
Showing affection is a simple way to make a spouse feel secure and wanted by the other one; especially when something goes wrong with the relationship, the strong need for affection arises. Affection is like the glue that can hold couples together.
Showing affection is a simple way to make a spouse feel secure and wanted by the other one; affection is like the glue that can hold couples together. Especially when a marriage hit the rocks and the husband-wife relationship is in urgent need of repairing, usually both spouses crave for more affection from each other.
In married life, the need for affection solidifies your desire to know that you are compatible with your spouse, and this is an intimate sense of harmony that helps maintain your marriage.
To some extent, giving and receiving affection means understanding each other’s emotional boundaries – how far a spouse is willing to go out on a limb and put himself/herself at risk for being emotionally hurt by the other one. Fulfilling the need for affection in marriage is a way to solidify a commitment, and it requires both of you to go deep into each other’s minds.
The lack of affection in marriage can take a heavy toll on any family members who witness it… Anyway, don’t despair, you are not alone. Numerous couples have been troubled by the lack of affection in marriage, but eventually, most of them go through this marital crisis successfully. So, as long as you want to get your relationship back on track, first, you should have confidence in yourself. Fretting about the loss of affection is of no avail, now start to take action and work hard.
Here are some practical tips on how to deal with a lack of affection in marriage:
(1) Get the spark back by trying out new experiences:
Stir the spark and affection in your marriage by trying out a new experience. Share your experiences, thoughts, and feelings in a way that may give him/her new insights. Show care and concern about your own appearance and how to treat your spouse, incorporate emotional vulnerability and intimacy into your interaction, just like when you started dating your spouse. After you have lived together for a long time, probably something interesting or passionate has already got lost in the shuffle. To keep your spouse interested in you, you need to learn to maintain individuality in the relationship, for example, you may try to cultivate and keep separate interests.
And a key point to get the spark back is to break your daily routine and introduce variety into your married life. Why? Because of a permanent routine, you may hardly sink your teeth into the pleasure you once enjoyed with your spouse. So you might try to do something passionate that you used to do together, or something sharply different that you were eager to try but you never tried. Surely, this does not require you to do grandiose things; you just need to try to do something to reignite the passion in your marriage.
(2) Consider affection from different genders:
In addition to the willingness to bring affection back into the marriage, you need to figure out what actions can convey affection according to the difference in perspective between men and women.
Generally, in a woman’s mind, affection means a simple expression of protection, concern, approval, comfort, and a simple sense of security her man offers; and she thinks that there is no correlation between sexual intimacy and affection. But a man views affection in marriage as access to sex, and he naturally believes that he needs to give a woman affection to get sex; but if he feels that he has to get affection by giving sex, he will also feel resentful. In a man’s mind, sex is a good way to show affection, but sex will probably be “just sex” if his woman doesn’t feel his love for her.
Every person wants his/her beloved to be affectionate towards him/her, and a spouse will become affectionate only if his/her basic emotional needs are fulfilled in the relationship, but obviously, those basic emotional needs differ between women and men, here is a brief explanation:
In a marriage, a woman usually wants ardent communication with her man, she wants to have him take enough time to participate in her world, she wants to feel his strong support; when she feels that her man is working hard to fulfill those needs for her, she is happy to express plenty of affection to her man. But to get a husband to be affectionate towards his wife, his woman should let him feel that she has been concerned about his deep emotional needs: he needs to be respected and sexually satisfied, he needs to feel comfortable in sharing his fears and dreams with his woman, and he needs to affirm that his woman roots for him when he encounters various challenges.
Therefore, to get your spouse to be affectionate towards you, you should also try to look at this issue from your spouse’s angle.
By the way, the 2 posts below respectively give a detailed description of major emotional needs of a husband and a wife:
The 5 most important emotional needs of a man – Meet his needs.
A wife’s emotional needs – what a wife wants from a husband.
(3) Pay attention to small, random acts of affection:
You know you could show affection to your spouse by handholding, kissing, and hugging, but small or random acts of affection that you can perform are far more than these. When you write a love note, give a gift, send a love text, give a pretty gift, and listen attentively to your spouse, you also communicate affection to your spouse. Random acts of kindness are easy to overlook, such as serving your spouse a warm drink on a cold day, providing your spouse with a perfectly prepared cup of coffee when he/she gets up, and taking your spouse to dinner occasionally. These small, random acts are the most natural outpouring of affection in marriage, but the pity is that these acts are often neglected by the majority of couples who lack affection in marriage.
(4) Fan the romantic flame again:
It is often seen that sexual desire fades gradually in a long term relationship. When feeling the loss of sexual desire, you may need to develop a certain sense of distance, mystery, and novelty to spark the feelings of sexual passion again. For example, you may allow your spouse to have a fantasy date with you in a brand new location by doing something that he/she hasn’t done for you; if possible, maintain the mystery till the end of the date; when dating with your spouse, be relaxed and flexible according to your definition of sexual intimacy and affection in marriage, and give your spouse a hug or kiss casually to further instigate a passionate interaction.
(5) Don’t think too badly of your spouse:
Affection indeed requires you both to be compassionate, gentle, caring, and calm. And understandably, you might harbor resentment towards your spouse due to the lack of affection in the relationship. However, if you always think badly of your spouse, sooner or later he/she will feel the resentment that radiates from you; after all, it is impossible to cover up your true feelings all the time; no doubt, resentment will only cause your spouse to further drift away from you.
So when your marriage lacks affection and you want to bring affection back into the marriage, you might make the first move: first and foremost, you should stop thinking too badly of your spouse. For example, take a moment to think about your spouse and find the sweet side that you loved about him/her, or recall the happy moment with your spouse; when you truly treasure those memories, you may notice you can’t help smiling to yourself sometimes; in doing so, you will naturally change how you view your spouse.
(6) Gain trust back from your spouse:
Surely, to get affection back in marriage, you must avoid any behavior that tends to destroy mutual trust, such as cheating, lying, affairs, stealing, and so on. Besides that, you should be faithful to your spouse and be thoughtful of him/her by avoiding behavior that may annoy him/her. Try your best to respect your spouse by prioritizing your spouse’s needs above your own. No matter how you feel about your spouse at any given time, choose to act in a more loving and respectful way toward your spouse. Do you still remember the serious vows that you exchanged at the wedding? Although those vows are very hard to fulfill completely, you need to give your best to your spouse; in so doing, at least you can gain more trust from your spouse.
If you are a husband who has lost your wife’s trust, you might go on to read the posts below:
How to gain your wife’s trust back – Regain your lost trust.
How to get your wife to forgive you after cheating – Restore trust in you.
(7) Don’t ignore sexual intimacy:
Mutually fulfilling sexual intimacy is essential for having an affectionate marriage. Surely, a mutually satisfying sex life must come from both sides’ hard work. To be the best version of yourself in this field, you should not only open up and reveal your sexual desire to your spouse but also listen attentively to the desire that he/she shares. By the way, probably now you marriage has become sexless due to the lack of affection in marriage, for the time being, you should still focus on the expression of non-sexual affection; and if your spouse has abstained from sex for a period of time and you wonder how to get the sexual intimacy back, the 2 posts provide some basic suggestions based on gender:
How to rekindle sexual intimacy when your wife becomes a roommate.
What to do when your husband rejects you sexually – What does it mean?
Remember, sex is much more about a special time of lovemaking instead of extensive pornographic episodes. The main purpose of having sex in marriage should be to go for the emotional connection more than the orgasm.
(8) Be compassionate and understanding:
Now that your spouse isn’t as affectionate as before, you should allow your spouse enough time to warm up to you. You may have difficulties in understanding why your spouse becomes not affectionate, and maybe you have taken it personally. However, as long as you see your spouse making an effort to improve the relationship, even though it is just a tiny bit, express to your spouse how much that act will mean to you, and make sure to stick to being affectionate back. Whenever your spouse is trying to make a positive shift in his/her behavior, remember to use positive reinforcement to encourage your spouse to keep trying. When your spouse senses how understanding you are, the chances are that he/she will be more willing to show you more affection.
(9) Don’t ask him/her to be affectionate:
There is no need to grumble to your spouse, ”You are no longer affectionate to me! Can’t you be more affectionate?”, even though you just occasionally ask your spouse to be more affectionate. Whether you joke, demand, or beg, it will only backfire.
Surely, when you ask your spouse to show affection, he/she may do it as per your request, but the affection towards you is not what you want, and you can sense your spouse’s reluctance.
If you are upset with the lack of affection in marriage, you will naturally feel lonely, ignored, unloved, and unimportant; understandably, you are longing to be desired, and you want your spouse to exactly understand your innermost feelings; but directly asking for affection may only cause the two of you to drift apart from each other. On the other side, your spouse’s lack of affection towards you suggests that he/she is not feeling loved either. As regards how to get your spouse to be more affectionate, you can not force him/her and you only can lead him/her to change.
(10) No masturbation and pornography:
Among those couples who are lack of affection in marriage, most of them (men and women are both included) are reported to struggle with pornography. Pornography can be a movie plot, an image, a video, a book, a magazine or anything else that triggers sexual arousal. However, at this stage, pornography only can sexually arouse yourself instead of both of you.
And no one can list all the negative effects and damage of pornography. Generally, it causes unhealthy and unrealistic viewpoints on sex, especially addiction to sexual fantasy; it objectifies women and men; worst of all, pornography makes it hard for a spouse to be fully aroused by the other spouse in a marriage, and under the stimuli of pornography, a person may be tempted do some deeds that pose a hazard to other people, such as infidelity, and rape.
As regards masturbation, it is always a self-serving practice. It is solely about you and your pleasure; in a relationship, sex is designed for enhancing the affectionate, unifying intimacy; a person who masturbates constantly is inclined to have an inappropriate view on sex. If you indulge in such activities, you will hardly have faithful thoughts on your spouse, and instead, it will greatly diminish sexual intimacy in the relationship by portraying sex as something that is just meant for personal release and self-gratification.
When you feel the lack of affection in marriage, you must be aware that it is also time to make efforts to increase intimacy between you and your spouse, and hence, make sure to avoid pornography and masturbation.
The final word:
Every marriage is full of emotional ups and downs; at some point, a couple feels disconnected and connection-starved because they no longer feel comfortable being fully authentic or sharing their authenticity. The lack of affection affects the quality and stability of marriage. And understandably, it is struggling for you to live in the affection-starved marriage; now you desire a return of closeness and emotional intimacy; surely, it also takes a lot of determination and commitment to get affection back in your marriage.
For more valuable tips on how to rekindle affection in your marriage, you might go on to watch the video below to follow the comprehensive guidance that is offered by Brad Browning, a world-renowned marriage coach who has 12+ years of experience working with problematic couples to repair and improve their marriages:
Maybe, you are also interested in the posts below:
How to survive an emotionally disconnected marriage.
7 tips on how to get back emotional intimacy in marriage.
What a healthy marriage looks like – How to maintain a marriage.
Should you stay in a loveless marriage – How to survive a loveless marriage.
How to keep intimacy in your marriage – Improve marital intimacy.
What to do when your husband is not affectionate towards you?