Common Mistakes That Kill Attraction in Marriage (and How to Rebuild Desire)
Are you losing your spouse’s attraction? Maintaining attractiveness in marriage is essential to being more than just friends with your husband or wife. Let’s talk about how to make sure your spouse keeps being attracted to you.
The most common mistake that people make in maintaining attraction is not purposefully maintaining it.
Most people assume that because they are married that they no longer need to put any effort into continuing to be attractive. Because of this they were generally more attractive before they were married. They become progressively less attractive as the years go by.
Although in a good relationship this can go unnoticed for the most part, if the relationship starts to have problems, there can be a sudden realization that one’s spouse is unattractive. A person in love can find beauty in what repulses everyone else. But if that person falls out of love, they are likely to be as repulsed as everyone else. Their rose-colored glasses suddenly become very clear.
Most married people assume two things: 1) that their spouse will always be in love with them, and 2) that their spouse will always be attracted to them. These assumptions often lead to complacency in maintaining emotional connection, and in maintaining personal desirability (i.e. attraction). Many people are surprised or even shocked when their spouse says things like “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” or “I just want to friends.”
When that happens, their relationship gets downgraded to a friendship.
Usually they didn’t see it coming because they weren’t careful to make sure that the signs of connection and desirability were still there. It’s like assuming your car will always run well because it always has. So, you don’ t bother to maintain it. Then, one day your car engine dies on the highway and you feel stranded, helpless, and perhaps betrayed by your car.
Most of the people I work with, who feel betrayed by their spouse, admit that they did not maintain their desirability or emotional connection.
Of course, becoming unattractive doesn’t happen out of maliciousness. No one deliberately becomes unattractive, unappealing, undesirable. What generally happens is they de-prioritize their relationship by overly focusing on other things. For some young people, this may mean they shift to playing a lot of video games or spending a lot of time on social media.
However, people of all ages are prone to giving up friendships, social connections, and activities that used to be part of their appeal. A man who once attracted his wife because of his love for playing the guitar may give it up entirely and focus solely on his career. A woman also may throw herself into her career or raising children, losing all semblance of the vibrant woman that she used to be.
Physical self-care is an important part of staying attractive to your spouse
On a physical level, people may gain a lot of weight, stop wearing fashionable clothing, reserve makeup for everyone except their spouse, and walk around with body language that looks more like an elderly person than a young one. Looking old or out of shape is not appealing to anyone, though feelings of love and connection can mitigate that.
The more you want to let yourself go, the more you need to help your spouse to feel well connected or she or he will wake up one day, look at you and go “yikes!” From that day on they will look at you less often. People prefer to look at what attracts them, what appeals to them, and what is connected with their goals.
Maintaining attraction and restoring attraction
Maintaining attraction means continuing to do those things that your spouse finds attractive. Restoring attraction means getting back to those things. Because people are very consistent in what they find attractive, we usually need to get back to the kinds of things we did before we were married–when our spouse found us the most attractive.
We may not be able to play on a soccer team anymore, but we can still be physically active and involved with others. Those are the aspects of attractiveness that used to be accomplished by playing soccer. We can work to look younger than our age, which will give us the overall appearance of looking young, even if we can’t look like what we used to.
A fifty year old man or woman who looks forty can be more attractive than a thirty year old man or woman who looks forty. Our attractiveness is partly a result of how we compare with our peers. Getting out without your spouse and child once a week, to socialize with friends on your own, is much more attractive than spending all of your time with your husband, wife, and/or child.
Three approaches to figuring out what is attractive to your spouse
There are different approaches to figuring out what a spouse finds attractive and these approaches can be combined. One approach is to look at who your spouse enjoys associating with and finding what it is about them that helps your spouse to enjoy being with them. Do they have particular interests, beliefs, or values? Are there clues in what your spouse watches on TV or the internet?
Another approach is to look back to what drew your spouse to you in the first place. Why was it you, rather than someone else? What have you given up doing that used to make your more desirable. If you were single again, what would you need to do to attract people for dating?
Yet another approach is to think about the kind of person your spouse would naturally be drawn to if your relationship were to end for some reason.
Many times, there will be a common theme from these three perspectives. That would be the best area to focus on. If you really have no idea, then get to work on what would make most people of the opposite sex be more interested in you. Doing that is bound to also increase your husband’s or wife’s desire for you.
Attraction comes before connection when rebuilding marriages
Attraction is part of what I work on with every client who wants to reconnect with their spouse. This because being desirable is a step on the path to being connected, even though attraction and connection are two different things. Skipping important steps, like being more desirable, can block people from being able to get to emotional connection.
Yvonne’s husband had lost his desire for her
Consider my client Yvonne, who was trying to re-interest a husband in the throws of a midlife crisis. He was no longer interested in the same-old-same-old. Trying to convince her spouse to do more of the same would be a sure way for her to create more distance in her relationship rather than re-attract her husband.
With my help, she worked on becoming more of the person she hadn’t been in many years. She became more of the the kind of person her husband was likely to be attracted to if he divorced her. To to that, Yvonne shifted her focus from focusing on being a good homemaker to being more like her younger and more vibrant self.
She arranged sitters so that she could go out socially, as her husband was also doing. She revamped her wardrobe and worked to get into shape. She talked to her husband more as a woman who was interested in him rather than as a business partner or critic.
Re-attracting a spouse in a mid-life crisis
The best way to connect with a spouse in a midlife crisis is to join him or her in it. That is what I helped her to do. As a result, she was able to stay both connected with and attractive two her husband as they got out of their old routine and created a new life together.
Most of the time people have midlife crisis, there is a good reason to.
The two major mistakes to avoid when working to re-attract
The two biggest mistakes people make when trying to re-attract their spouse is: 1) telling their spouse they are going to do that, and 2) making too many changes, too quickly. When people do these two things, their changes don’t appear to be genuine. Instead, their changes feel manipulative. Also, there is an assumption by the rejecting spouse that the changes will not last because they are not sincere.
To prevent that insincere, manipulative feeling, changes should not be announced and they need to be made gradually. Your spouse should feel more attracted to you without being able to know why he or she is more attracted to you. It’s kind of like the idea of women using makeup to be more attractive, without using so much that the makeup become obvious.
Pointing out how you are using wrinkle cream is going to make you less attractive rather than more. If you are working on becoming more social, do it gradually.
Change is more attractive when it seems natural
The more time passes before the changes you are making are discovered, the more genuine they will appear to be. When working on becoming more desirable, don’t try to convince your spouse that you are desirable. Instead, turn on their natural subconscious attraction to the changes you are making.
Most people find that when they work on becoming more attractive, appearing younger, and behaving more like their previously attractive self, that they enjoy their life more. They often had become unattractive to themselves. They had stopped living their life and instead were just enduring it.
Everything that we do that makes us more desirable to others makes us enjoy our lives and relationships more.
If people only make minimal changes that they don’t really want to make, life will seem even worse. Those effects will be short lived, the new attractiveness will soon be gone. Then, it will be much harder for them to re-attract their spouse the second time around.
Changes not kept are even harder to trust the second time around. Make sure this doesn’t happen by doing more than you have to. Make yourself, your life, more attractive in every way you can. Get to the life you enjoy so that you are less likely to want to slack off.
Connection and attraction are not the same thing, though they are both necessary. In new relationships, attraction is what gets people the opportunity to talk or go out on a date. Then, how much they connect on the date determines whether they will get a second date, a third, and so on. The same is true for jobs. You must be a desirable candidate to get hired. Then you must perform well in order to keep your job.
Once you are married, it is possible to have connection without attraction.
The connection will help you and your spouse to be friends, but without attraction, the romance element will be missing and you will be friend-zoned.
On the other hand, attraction-only marriages result in sexual relationships which are lacking in connection. Since everyone needs emotional connection as well as physical, these relationships are prone to emotional affairs. Both emotional connection and attraction/desirability help us to maintain a romantic, loving marriage.
What do you think of this saying, “If you love me, you will accept me as I am?” Just like the saying, “If it feels good, do it,” it leads to a lot of damaged lives and relationships. The fact is that other people, including your spouse, will not love you just as you are if you are is very different from them, and very undesirable. All of the people who get rejected by their spouses have learned that.
The important factors in attraction probably aren’t what you think they are
People are biologically and culturally predisposed to be attracted to certain physical, social, emotional, and personality characteristics. The further you are from these characteristics, the less you will desired by most people. The good news is that the more of these characteristics you develop, the less the other ones will matter.
Most people who get plastic surgery would be much better off working on their personality, posture, and staying healthy. In fact, getting plastic surgery without working on these things will only be attractive to people who don’t know you and only temporarily. Do not get hung up on features you can’t change. Work on the ones you can and those negative features won’t matter anymore.
Do an attractiveness self assessment of the whole you.
Assess your physical appearance, your social skills and activities, your health and energy level, your productivity, and your actions to help others, even when you don’t have to. Which one of these areas, if improved, would make the biggest difference for your marriage? That is the place to start.
I can’t help you with physical changes, but I would be happy to work with you in other ways to help you to re-attract and re-connect with your spouse. it’s not rocket science, but it can be a lot of steps depending on how distant your marriage has become. Both of these skills areas are covered in my Re-Connections Coaching Package.
Like everything else, becoming more desirable is a matter of doing the right steps, in the right order, at the right pace, until you reach your goal.
For further study:
Meltzer, A. L., McNulty, J. K., Jackson, G. L., & Karney, B. R. (2014). Sex differences in the implications of partner physical attractiveness for the trajectory of marital satisfaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(3), 418–428.
