Falling out of Love

[Paul P]

Is it normal after 15 + years of marriage to love your spouse like a best friend and not have butterflies in your stomach when you see them, you remember the IN LOVE days? My wife and I waited 8 yrs to have a child because we wanted to do our thing. Our child is 7 now and we have for the last 7 years settled into the family life. My wife 36 yrs old now says she does not know if she loves me the way she should and that she is afraid she is messing out on things. Is this a crude defination of midlife crisis? Opinions please.

[Helen]

Paul,

I would not describe your wife's feelings as a mid life crisis. I suspect that these feelings she is experiencing are occurring because she (and possibly you) married young. I got together with my ex husband when I was 19 and experienced similar feelings after we had been together for 12 or so years. Eventually, I asked myself what I thought I was missing out on. As it turned out, I couldn't really put a finger on it, although I now know that my feelings arose because the marriage wasn't really working for a number of reasons. We stayed married until earlier this year and finally parted when I was almost 40. Our reasons for parting were (ironically) not about the fact that we married too young. We had grown apart over the years and, rather than working with me to regain our former closeness, he chose to stray. So I guess he was the one who felt he was missing out...

It's great that your wife has been honest with you about what she is feeling and experiencing. My ex husband wasn't one to communicate, which made everything incredibly frustrating because I knew we were having problems but I could not get him to see that we had problems or agree to work with me to resolve them. And, as stated, he ended up cheating and, because our marriage was shaky anyway, we ended up parting.

Would I say it is normal not to experience butterflies after 15 years of marriage? Yes. And no. For some people, the butterflies are always there. For others, the butterflies are replaced with something else. I guess I would call it familiarity and comfort (rather than boredom or anything negative). But the fact that your wife is not experiencing butterflies doesn't mean that she doesn't love you and she should not view it as such. She probably doesn't realise it but I suspect she still does love you. Sometimes people think the grass is greener elsewhere, hence the feelings of missing out. But I suspect she will be disappointed if she thinks a) there is a man out there who is going to set her on fire and b) if she thinks those feelings will last forever. There seldom is such and man and any feeings seldom last. And then one day, belatedly, the partner who thinks they can find great love elsewhere realises what they threw away. A spouse who was there for them, who was supportive and who really was their best friend.

What to do? If you don't do it any more, I would suggest you start romancing her and wooing her, much as you did in your early days. If you have let your appearance slip a bit, do what you can to improve things. The aim of the latter exercise is to make yourself as physically appealing to her as possible. And listen to her - really listen to what she is saying and take your cues from the conversation. It may seem that what I am suggesting is a tad one-sided but I suspect you will reap rewards over time and any effort you make now will be returned in spades. At least I hope it will.

I think it is promising that she is only telling you how she feels and isn't talking about separation, divorce or leaving. Taking action now to address any areas where you may have been relaxed (or where, perhaps, she has indicated you are taking her for granted in some way) may mean that she never talks about leaving and it never actually happens. I hope so.

Do take care and please accept my apologies if I have got hold of the wrong end of the stick with this.


Helen

[OutsideCentre]

Hi Paul,
not sure whether its an age/mid life crisis thing or what but from what ive seen & experienced (see my post "struggling to make sense of it all") its a situation that seems all too common for people of "our" age who have been married around 15 ish years & I personally think the key to the way forward depends very much on whether you both have the same views regarding how you want to deal with the underlying issues and both want the same outcome.

I've been going though a very similar situation with my Wife since April and have now resorted to a 4 week trial separation to try and see if absence truly does make the heart grow fonder and revive the feelings that my Wife says she thinks she has lost - I have no idea at this moment how things will pan out for us but would offer a word of caution based on my own mistakes....be careful to strike a balance when trying to romance & woo her as you may have done in the early days as "trying too hard" can smack of desperation & cause more problems than it cures. I tried so hard to show my wife how much I loved her that I simply, inadvertantly, made things worse!

Remember that old saying about having the wisdom to change the things that you can change & recognise those that you cant? All I think people like us can do in this situation is to look at ourselves and make personal changes to improve the way we are perceived by those around us in the hope that our wives will see the changes and accept them as permanent (rather than a knee jerk reaction to the situation). At the end of the day our wives are the only ones who know how and what they feel and a change to this is something we cannot force. It will either happen, or it wont! So, change yourself for your benefit & if in the end it makes no difference to the way your wife feels about you, you will still end up a better person for the experience.

Above all, even though its hard when you've been told something like this. Try to be & appear as happy as possible. Happy people are a hell of a lot more fun to be around than quiet depressed ones!

Best of luck with your situation. I hope you can work it out together!

Regards,

Rob.