One Thing I Wish My Husband Asked While We Were Married
I didn’t feel loved and I wonder if this would’ve made a difference.
It’s such a simple thing to ask.
But my husband never asked it
To be fair, neither did I.
My husband and I were in a routine that worked for me until it didn’t. Age has a funny way of exposing what’s wrong with a marriage. You wake up and suddenly your relationship feels empty.
At least for some of us.
That’s what happened to me.
I was happy with our overly social life. I was content being the good time Charlotte to his good time Charlie. But then I turned 40 and I wanted more. The parties and dinners were still fun.
But maturity was knocking.
The marital relationship dust was settling.
I can’t blame my husband. I was right there with him. Until I began growing up. Who knew, it would take me that long to realize something so critical was absent.
I wanted more out of him.
I wanted more out of our relationship.
“It feels lonely being married to you,” I say to my husband.
This angers him.
It starts a war.
I don’t realize what I’m truly trying to articulate.
I haven’t yet spent more than a decade in the counseling and research of love, relationships, and divorce. I haven’t transitioned from a marketing/PR consultant, freelance journalist, and business columnist to a relationship columnist.
The more accurate interpretation of my words?
We lack emotional intimacy.
It’s a critical deficit in a relationship.
It can make a person feel lonely, unheard, unsatisfied, frustrated, unfulfilled, and unhappy. It can make an individual feel discontent and disconnected with their spouse.
Emotional intimacy is vastly different than physical intimacy.
It’s sharing your heart and soul with another person. It’s telling them your deepest thoughts, your worst worries, your greatest dreams, and everything in between.
It’s sharing in the most open and vulnerable manner.
It connects two people.
It’s can mean the difference between marital roommates and marital bliss. The aforementioned is simply two people who parallel play like toddlers in the same home.
They exist around one another not within one another.
The latter is a fulfilling relationship with an enviable connection.
This was our deficit.
It’s not the same for every troubled marriage. We all suffer from different relationship maladies if we are unhappily married. Only we can answer the one thing I wish my husband had asked me.
Only we can determine what it means to us.
And to our marriage.
“Do I make you feel loved?”
It’s the one thing I wish my husband had asked me.
I wish I had asked it of him.
He wasn’t unhappy or dissatisfied with our relationship. He didn’t require emotional intimacy. Men and women can differ in degrees of emotional intimacy.
But my husband wasn’t the average man. He was diagnosed as lacking empathy and therefore, he didn’t miss it, nor was he capable of it.
Regardless, I wish I had asked him that question.
Do I make you feel loved?
It’s such a simple question. It’s funny we never think to ask it. But I think it would make a difference in many of our relationships. I think every human being should ask it.
Not only with our romantic partners.
But with other people we love most in our lives.
Do I make you feel loved?
We place such a value on saying, ‘I love you.’
Why then, do we not place the significance on asking if we’re doing it well?
Not to mention, I think it could reverse a negative dynamic that revolves around our marital conflict. We demand to be heard because we don’t feel like we’re being listened to.
We don’t always feel validated, appreciated, and noticed.
The result?
We ‘speak at’ or ‘complain to’ our spouses.
“It feels lonely being married to you,” I say.
My husband isn’t receptive to hearing my words. He takes them personally. He takes them as an insult. They are about him. At least, in his eyes. They never ended up being about me.
And they were my feelings.
My husband didn’t make me feel loved.
It ended our marriage.
I wonder if it would have made a difference if my husband had asked me that question. If he had cared enough about how I would answer it. I wonder if it would have reversed a negative marital dynamic.
Would it have been a conversation?
Would he not have viewed it as an attack?
Would he not have said I started a war?
In my case, it probably wouldn’t have made a significant difference. Because my marriage didn’t only suffer from a severe deficit, my husband did. You can’t place empathy back into a person.
It’s an entire developmental stage that’s missing.
But my marriage was an extreme.
A lot of other love can thrive and survive.
I’ve written about love, relationships, and divorce for more than a decade. I hear from people all over the world. Their marriages may end for different reasons.
The catalysts may be different.
But there’s a universal thread.
They didn’t feel loved.
At least, one of them didn’t feel loved.
It’s such a simple question. It’s funny we never think to ask it. It could make a difference in many of our relationships. Every human being should ask it, and every human being should be asked.
Do I make you feel loved?