How to Reconnect with a Spouse Who Is Cold and Distant

While talking certainly has it’s place, it often will not get your spouse to be warmer or closer. If you are one of the many who believe that the only way to fix problems is by talking, you will be stuck when it doesn’t work. Fortunately, there are many more things that we can do to improve your marriage besides talking.

Why talking alone won’t fix a cold and distant marriage

The premise of counseling is that talking about problems fixes problems. Which means if you can’t talk about it, you can’t fix it. There is a similar analogy with medicine. The idea there is that pills are for problems and if you don’t take the pills, you will not be healthy.

The problem with these beliefs is that when talking or the pills don’t work, people feel hopeless and give up. Maybe you find yourself coming to that conclusion, living day after day with a spouse who hardly wants anything to do with you.

Fortunately, people are waking up to the realization that counseling and medicine don’t hold all the answers. There are many things we can do for the health of our marriage and for the health of our body other than talking about problems and taking pills.

Why reconciliation coaching works better than counseling

Reconciliation coaching, which is what I do, has a different premise from counseling. The premise of reconciliation coaching is that while talking is necessary, it is insufficient, must be done in a loving way, and must be accompanied by behavioral changes. For more than 30 years I have been helping clients do this with good results.

Differing from traditional counseling, My clients need to take action steps between our sessions to create small and consistent changes. Small consistent changes are easier to do than big ones, are more likely to be maintained, and are better trusted by rejecting spouses. Many people are also making small consistent changes in their diets to improve their physical health, feel better, and be more attractive.

Practical ways to reconnect with a cold spouse

Let’s talk about some of the changes you can make to warm up your cold spouse.

Start with self-reflection before confrontation

If your spouse is cold and distant, I recommend you start by asking yourself questions rather than asking your spouse questions. This would be true if other people are being cold and distant with you. All relationships are based on the same principles.

Good self-questions would be:

• Am I interacting in an enjoyable way with my spouse?
• Am I being the kind of person my spouse is attracted to?
• Am I doing any annoying, critical, or controlling things that would make my spouse want to avoid me or not open up with me?
• Am I spending too much time with my spouse?
• Am I demonstrating that other things in my life are more important than my spouse?
• Have I improved things that my spouse has told me he or she doesn’t like?

Those questions can uncover reasonable reasons your spouse is cold and distant. It may be that working on those things won’t change your spouse, but you will never know unless you do work on them.

Identify whether the problem is within you or your spouse

If you have done a good job in all of these areas and your spouse is still cold and distant, then you need to ask yourself:

• Is my spouse cold and distant with most everyone?
• Has my spouse always been this way?
• Is my spouse having any significant problems with health, career, finances, or other family relationships?
• Is my spouse being secretive, making wardrobe changes, physical appearance changes, sleeping separately, stopped going to church, goes out more often, or other behaviors which may indicate an affair?

Just by asking yourself these questions and by being a good observer, you will learn much more than you will by asking your spouse questions. You will be able to discover if the distance is an interpersonal issue between you and your spouse or an intra-personal issue, within your spouse.

Change your behavior before asking questions

If you realize that you have been lax in behaving in a good way, the place to start is by behaving in a better way. It won’t do any good to ask your spouse why he or she doesn’t want to interact with you if you already know the reason. Once you pry something out of your spouse, whether it is an accurate answer or not, your spouse will be even more difficult to connect with.

For example, if you get your spouse to say that he or she is just not attracted to you anymore, it’s going to be harder to re-attract your spouse. Why? Because people try to be consistent with what they say and do. Sales people learn not to get any “no” responses from a prospect because, once they do, it is harder to make the sale.

This does not mean that you can’t ask any questions at all. However, I would hold off on the questions until you have made any necessary changes in yourself. Use the same principles with other people. If you are not friendly with people at church and they tend to ignore you, the best place to start is not by asking them why they ignore you. You will just get excuses from them AND they will like you even less. As it is with others, so it is with your spouse.

People are people, whether you are married to them or not. If it wouldn’t work with others, it’s not going to work with your spouse either.

How to ask questions without pushing your spouse away

If you really can’t identify any desirable changes to make in yourself, then go ahead and question your spouse. But, do it in a good way. If you are a very practical and logical person (as many of my clients are), you may have a tendency to be too direct. You need to learn to think of directness like diving into a pool without finding out how deep it is first. Sometimes you may get lucky, but it’s not worth the risk.

Direct questions sound like this:

• Why are you so cold and distant?

It’s what you want to know, but it comes off as accusatory and will create a defensive reaction.

Indirect questions are more like this:

• Honey, you seem to be a little distant recently. Is everything okay?

Notice that this is a very general question and does not contain any complaints or explanations. The more you say, the worse your inquiry will be. No matter how your spouse responds, do not interrogate, argue, or get defensive. If you do, then you will only reinforce the distance. Keep in mind that you will never fight your way to a better marriage.

There is a good chance that your spouse will say everything is fine. In that case, just say you are glad to hear that and drop it. Drop it. I know you won’t want to drop it because you know there is a problem and you think that prying it out of your spouse will be helpful. It won’t be. Get back to continuing to be relaxed and friendly and your spouse is likely to let you know, on his or her own, what is wrong before too long.

If your spouse opens up

If your spouse does say something is wrong, then you need to listen and validate if it is a problem with you, or listen and support if it is a problem with something else (like health, work, family, and so on).

Let’s look an example of this:

Use validation instead of defensiveness

Suppose your spouse says, “You always seem more interested in social media than you are in me, so why should I spend time with you?”

No matter how much you feel like defending or point out that recently you have cut down on social media a lot, validate instead by saying something like:

“I guess I would feel the same way if you were the one doing that.”

After you say that, you must close your mouth! Many people do validate, but then cancel out their validation by going on with explanations or by jumping into problem solving. You might think, “Well, how does this problem get solved then?” Actually you already started solving it by validating your spouse.

Validation is a wound healer. Apologies are not.

I’m not saying to never apologize, but too often people give apologies without validation. If you are only going to do one, then validation is the more important one. If you want to validate, apologize, and then make amends, that is a great 1-2-3 combination. But, never apologize for a behavior which you are not going to change.

When you are criticized or blamed, agree with what you can and let the rest go. Let it go. Make changes if they seem reasonable, without promising that you are going to do that. If you can behave this way, then the criticism and blame will decrease. If you are defensive instead, then the criticism and blame will increase.

Reactivity rewards criticism and blame. Validation without defensiveness does not.

Understanding why spouses become cold and distant

Most of the time, cold and distant behavior is either protective, punishing, or an attempt to get more love and affection. It’s not actually a good way to get love and affection, but many people don’t know positive ways to get more love and affection. They punish when they don’t get it, hoping that will make their spouse be more attentive. Kids can also be angry with their parents because they are not getting the love and attention that they want.

When and how to use a loving intervention

If you have truly worked on becoming a desirable and enjoyable spouse for three solid months, your husband or wife denies problems, and is behaving normally with everyone except you, then it is time for an intervention. This should NOT be your first recourse.

An intervention means that your spouse will need to change or there will be significant consequences. The reason we do interventions is because not doing them will result in something worse. For example, if your spouse’s coldness and distance are leading you to think about ending your marriage, you had better do an intervention while you still care.

What is an intervention? An intervention is simply giving a choice that has severe consequences.

“Come to work on time every day or we will let you go,” is an intervention designed to help someone to show up on time and to keep a business running smoothly.

“If you continue to have contact with the other man/woman, I will divorce you,” is also an intervention meant to save a marriage.

What makes for an effective intervention?

How well your intervention goes will depend on how much your spouse believes you and how much your spouse values your relationship. For the examples I just gave, if a person didn’t care about his job, he would likely continue to show up late. Then he would be fired (or not) depending on the security level of his employer. If the employer didn’t follow through, the situation would be worse.

The spouse that was cheating would give up the other person (or not) depending on how much he or she cared about the marriage and how much he or she believed the marriage would actually end. If the spouse continued to cheat and there was no follow through with separation or divorce action, the cheating would continue.

Because interventions in marriage should be because you love your spouse and want to preserve the relationship, I recommend you do it in a loving, yet firm way. Let’s tweak the previous examples to be more loving:

Late employee example:

“You are a good employee and we want you to stay, but if you keep showing up late, we will have to let you go.”

Cheating spouse example:

“I love you and want to have a close and adventurous marriage with you, but if you continue with this other person, then I will divorce you.”

And so it would be with coldness and distancing:

“I love you and want to have a close relationship with you. But, if you are going to continue to shut me out, then I will divorce you. I won’t live as your roommate.”

If you say this, you had better be prepared to act on it. You also need to make sure you have been as valuable as you could be to improve the chances that your spouse will change. Your other option is to learn to live with the distance and make the best of it. The choice is yours.

What will never be helpful though, is to criticize your spouse or treat your spouse poorly while remaining together. This will only exacerbate the problems without giving your marriage a chance. Your marriage will only worsen. When you eventually divorce, you will wish that you had done it much sooner.

What to do after the intervention

If your spouse reveals problems during your intervention, then go back into listening and validating mode. Don’t defend or argue. Your spouse may identify legitimate things you still need to work on. And, as much as you would like to blame your spouse, don’t! Your spouse may be 100 percent to blame, but your goal is not to justify yourself–it is to create a good relationship.

You can have love or you can have justice, but you can’t have both. God tells us to prioritize love.

If your spouse mentions things that you will not change, then validate, assert that will not be changing, and if that means continued distance from your spouse, then you will divorce. I need to stress that your reason for doing this is to try to save a marriage which would otherwise fail anyhow. If it wouldn’t otherwise fail, then do not do an intervention.

If you wait for your marriage to fail before you do an intervention, then it will not help. So, you must be able to look down the road at what will happen if you allow this behavior to continue. If marital collapse, then deal with it now. Change your route before you drive off the cliff.

Get help reconnecting with a cold or distant spouse

You don’t need to struggle with any of these things on your own. If you would like help to make sure you are doing all you can to be desirable and enjoyable, or if you want help with the intervention, then sign up for my Re-Connections Coaching Package. If you discover that your spouse is having an affair or is being unfaithful, then sign up for my Coaching Package for Ending a Spouse’s Affair.

The pattern for fixing the problem of a spouse being cold and distant is action-talking-action. Put action and talking in the right order to have marital success.

For further study:

Gottman JM. The roles of conflict engagement, escalation, and avoidance in marital interaction: a longitudinal view of five types of couples. J Consult Clin Psychol. 1993 Feb;61(1):6-15. doi: 10.1037//0022-006x.61.1.6. PMID: 8450108.