Each week i asks expert Lucy Cavendish to answer readers’ questions about love, sex and relationships
My wife and I have been married for 10 years and we have two children who are under the age of 10. I love her and I think she is wonderful but ever since her mother died two years ago we’ve basically stopped having any form of physical intimacy. I don’t know what’s going on.
I tried to talk to her but she won’t talk about it and I feel increasingly frozen out. The other day she told me she wasn’t sure what her feelings were towards me anymore and it made me so anxious I actually threw up. I can’t bear the idea of life without her.
I tried to raise it with her today and she accused me of asking more for her than she can give. She says that I pester her all the time and that I need to give us some time in space but from where I’m sitting it looks like she’s just done with this marriage.
I don’t want to split up but I don’t know how to help the situation. What do I do?
The first thing I’m going to let you know – and it’s not easy – is that you need to truly listen to what your wife is saying. I know it is not what you want to hear, and I’m not saying that things need to remain the way they are but when one person says “I need some time and space” then the other person needs to respect their wish and desire for that.
That doesn’t mean to say that the relationship is going to stay this way. The lack of intimacy is not emotionally or physically sustainable long term. In long-term relationships we need to have intimacy or else things fall apart. By intimacy I don’t just mean sex. It needs to involve physical touch, spiritual and mental connection – a meeting of the minds or a shared value system.
This is of course what we deeply desire in our relationships. Consciously or unconsciously we are desperately hoping that the person we fall in love with heals all the parts of us that we haven’t managed to do for ourselves. More than that, we might not even know what those parts are.
So, if we turn our attention to your relationship, there are a few clues here. You say had a good marriage and you have two children. I’m making assumption that that obviously puts strain on the family. Children are amazing, beautiful, warm and loving beings but the existence of them in our lives inevitably changes our relationships with our partner.
Here is the first thing you can do; have you actually talked to your partner or asked her how she feels about being a mother and giving birth and her body changes and all the things that women go through when they have children? If not, I suggest you do.
The next thing is that she lost her mother so she’s deep in grief. She may or may not want to talk about her mother. But you could gently ask her and you could also do some research on grief yourself. A great place to start is the work of Julia Samuel and her books This Too Shall Pass and On Grief and Grieving.
Grief is very complex and complicated and emanates in many different ways in our behaviour and in our bodies. I think if you try and get an understanding of this and the way she is experiencing her grief she may find she can open up a bit more. You are in the role of the person in the relationship who’s emanating empathy. You love this woman, remember, so it’s your job to deeply try to understand.
The final thing is to look at your own reactions. Whether you are pestering her or not, that is how she feels so there’s information in this. There’s also information in the fact that when you imagine the relationship being over, you’re so distraught you throw up. So I imagine that this deep fear of being abandoned manifests in you continually trying to get evidence from your wife that she loves you and wants to be with you.
But here’s the rub; the more you try and get evidence from her that she loves you – men often equate sex with love as in ‘if she wants to have sex with me it means she loves me and if she doesn’t want to have sex with me she doesn’t love me’ – the less you are going to get it. And the less you get it, and the more she pushes you away, the more you’re going to pester her, desperately trying to look for any signs that she wants you and desires you.
So this is what you’re going to do; you’re going to get curious about her, you’re going to learn about grief and then you are going to sit back and then get curious about yourself. This might be difficult and it might be a bit of a deep dive but if you can name your fears – your deepest fear – which is probably something like ‘my wife is doesn’t love me anymore and she’s going to leave me and my whole world is going to fall apart’ and then understand that you actually would survive that, you will find an emotional freedom and confidence that you don’t seem to currently have.
Once you have that – and remember that this is daily work and daily commitment to healing your own wounds and dealing with your own pain – I think you’ll find the ability to sit back a bit and let your wife go through whatever she’s going through and then bring your marriage back into joyful aliveness.
Lucy Cavendish is the author of How to Have Extraordinary Relationships. Sign up to her newsletter and receive a free e-book of 7 easy steps to improve your relationships here
