A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Here’s something I hear every so often during marriage therapy sessions: “I love him, but I’m not in love with him.” Typically this is said during the very first marital therapy session, after I ask both the husband and the wife to tell me if they still love one another.
The first few times I heard that statement, I didn’t understand what the wife was trying to tell me. In fact, the statement struck me as a contradiction. Here’s what I mean: if someone said to you something like, “I’m happy, but I’m not happy,” or “I’m Jennifer, but I’m not Jennifer,” wouldn’t you would start to question whether or not that person was even thinking clearly?
But then I realized that I was thinking about the statement logically, as a software engineer (which I used to be) would analyze it. So I decided to dig a little deeper in an effort to determine the true meaning; what information is she trying to convey to me? After all, my job as a marriage therapist is to understand exactly how both the husband and the wife feel.
Here’s what I have concluded. In the first part of the sentence, the “I love him” part, the wife is saying several things. She still respects and admires (perhaps even deeply) her husband. She appreciates many things that he has done and may still be doing for her and for their children (if they have any). She fondly remembers much of their history together. She considers him a very good friend. She wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to him.
However, she’s no longer “in love with him.” She doesn’t have the romantic feelings for him that she once had. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him. She doesn’t feel excited to be with him anymore. She may not care whether he loves her or not. She may think she made a bad decision in marrying him.
And of course, they have decided to begin marriage therapy in an effort to rekindle the old feelings, the “in love with him” feelings.
So that’s what I’ve decided. If you disagree, shoot me an email and set me straight!
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 4:25 pm and is filed under How to Confuse a Marriage Therapist.
5 Responses to “Marriage Therapists Shouldn’t Always Think Analytically!”
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May 27th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Hi Jay, you were a software engineer then now a marriage therapist. What a 360 turn of career change. Anyhow, I have not been into a real marriage therapy session but have observed one. And I heared the exact phrase but from the husband saying that line, “I love her, but I’m not in love with her.” What the therapist told them was to share the good memories first to bring back the in love feeling they once felt for each other. Raising a family must be built with love and commitment from the husband and wife. This brings the success in marriage and family as well. Great article!
Merideth
October 19th, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Jay,
You have a nice blog, which I particularly like due to your Gottman and Hendrix influences, which particularly attract me towards finding and continuing solutions within my own marriage.
Now, “ILY, BIANILWY”, I Love You, But I Am Not In Love With You, to me now means that my spouse had found someone else to become romantically entranced by due to her own lack of self-esteem and by choosing to seek Happiness and Love outside of herself, rather than from inside.
The reply comment should be, “Well then, who are you in love with?”
But, the answer will typically be defensively swept away, with an individual like that, in that influential stage of romantic secrecy not being able to release and divulge their true feelings, so more than likely, they will state some undecided and irrelevant response to blow past the question that should dig deeper into the root of their own internal lacking of self-love and esteem.
I hope that their is an auto responder to let me know if their are any follow up posts on this subject on your blog.
Regards,
Ed
November 11th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
What she means is that yes, she does love him but it doesn’t feel like it right now because, “In Love,” is 100% emotional and 100% physical connection.
When couples get busy with life, kids, and jobs the time they spend with each other is crowded out and the romantic attention and extra effort to make each other feel important and loved gets ignored.
Couples that stay together continually fall back in love by focusing on each other and spending time investing the extra effort that they did when they first met.
December 8th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
I think that you are right. It is not ok when someone spends most of his or her time feeling sorry for himself of herself. However, I also think that marriage counseling can do wonders for a relationship. My wife and I have been marriage for 8 year. After five years living together we were fighting, arguing a lot, and we almost got separate. We tried almost everything marriage counseling, marriage therapy. I have many single and married friends who are always felling sorry for themselves too. All I can say is that if you cannot find a way out alone get help from friends and professionals. There are many support group counseling services, individual therapy, medication and marriage counseling services who can help you turn the tide around. I know it is hard to find energy to seek help but trust me when I say this, professional help from a therapist can make wonders, my wife and I feel much better today. I am sure that when couples seek help they too can find a way out.
Best of luck to all.
Anthony
July 20th, 2011 at 9:10 am
When I read the title, I was curious. I am not sure I have ever confused a therapist, as they seem better able to tell ME what I am really saying, lol. However, the “I love him…but” quote didn’t confuse me much because I have felt that way. That kind of conflicted emotion seems like something a therapist would hear quite often. Possibly, it To me, the “I love him” part refers to an action (love as a verb) where the wife intellectually chooses to love this person who she believes has many wonderful qualities. She is saying that she has not written him off as somebody without merit, and that she has invested herself in the act of loving him despite the problems at hand. However the being “in love” to me implies some sort of emotional benefit of the loving. She is not enjoying the FEELINGS such as feeling support, acceptance, and safe and open exchange of self that makes a partner feel connected and floods the CNS with all of those feel-good chemicals. In a tense environment where there is conflict in the marriage, that safe place of feeling mutual acceptance and love isn’t there, and she doesn’t try to go there anymore. The love fountain is not flowing. Just my two cents. And thanks so much for this Wonderful website and for your commitment to supporting the wonderful sacrament of marriage!