Your marriage is not what you thought it would be.
You never imagined you would feel so alone in your relationship.
Why?
Does your partner ask how your day was? Or how you’re feeling? Or does it feel like they’ve taken less of an interest in you over time? We all live busy lives, but does it seem like your partner just doesn’t have time for you anymore?
All of these questions can leave you feeling like everything is more important to your partner than your relationship.
You’ve tried talking…you’ve tried the silent treatment…you’ve tried everything, and nothing seems to work.
The good news is that you came to the right place: our relationship expert, Dr. Pat Love (yes, that’s her real name!) shares invaluable insights to help you get your partner to open up, so you’ll be able to reconnect and stop feeling so lonely in your marriage.
How Feeling Unheard Or Unseen Can Lead To Resentment, Loneliness, And Pain
Often we don’t realize where our pain comes from. For many, it stems from feeling unheard, and simply needing someone to listen.
As a therapist, Dr. Love has worked with a multitude of couples who feel so utterly disconnected from one another, they don’t know how to listen to each other anymore. Their lives get busy…and their relationship gets lonely.
The key, she teaches, is to learn how to Tune In.
According to Pat, when you tune into someone, it means that you’re truly connected. What you say matters to them, and you see their effort in trying to understand your deepest wants and desires. When that happens, it means your partner has taken a renewed interest in you.
Seems simple enough. So why aren’t couples able to do it? It’s because we’re so focused on the belief that we’re not being heard, we don’t even notice when our partner is making an effort to get closer. We are hurt, we give up, and the cycle continues.
Attunement is the true key to a happy, long-lasting marriage.
The more out of tune we are to each other, the more we don’t notice any good efforts and intentions in the relationship, and the more distant we become, perpetuating the feeling of being married and lonely.
So how do we break that cycle?
Pat advises that we start with ourselves. This is good news, because we need not wait for our partner to change, or even to talk about it with them.
We can’t make anyone do anything, but we can control our own actions and inspire our partner to be more attuned by making positive changes to our own behaviors.
Do Pat’s 5 simple steps to show your partner you’re tuning into him or her, and watch the transformation begin:
5 Simple Ways To Tune In To Your Partner And Inspire A Change In Their Behavior
- Stay off your phone, and look up – Noticing when your partner enters a room, joins you on the couch, or helps you with chores can do wonders for both of you.
- Connect through eye contact – Noticing your partner isn’t enough. Eye contact is an important part of connecting with someone. Eye contact can help you understand what they’re feeling without them having to express their feelings. You can hear them without them speaking a word by looking into their eyes.
- When they do open up, listen – Nothing is worse than feeling like someone wasn’t listening to you. It disempowers you and makes you feel like you’re less important. Listening to your partner can make them feel valued and important.
- Listen and acknowledge – Showing you’re a good listener comes from acknowledging what you’ve just heard. Offering acknowledgement validates that you’ve heard what they had to say and that you’re interested in them.
- Offer a response – Offering a response will make your partner feel like you’re genuinely interested in what they’ve shared.
These 5 simple steps are behavioral changes that can inspire real transformation in your relationship. You’ll no longer be married and lonely when you tune in and get connected with your partner.
Dr. Pat Love has spent her decades-long career guiding couples on how to connect in order to make their relationship more loving, resilient, and satisfactory.
And now she’s partnered with Flourish, so she can extend that guidance to as many people as possible, since all couples can benefit from her research-driven, clinically-proven principles that have helped so many heal their marriage.
When you subscribe to our FREE Relationship Advice Newsletter, you get access to an accomplished community of carefully selected experts (like Dr. Pat Love) giving you their best insights and strategies to make your relationship happier. You’ll learn:
- The 5 skills of happy couples and the specific behaviors, attitudes, and actions you can take to turn any relationship problem into an opportunity to get close and stay close
- What a study on negative and positive thoughts reveals about the influence your private thoughts, moods, and attitudes can have on your partner, even when you’re not saying a word
- The single, most powerful catalyst for happiness and healing in life and love that you’ve never considered, and how embracing this can help you tap into one of the greatest generators of love on the planet
- The #1 reason for relationship failure and how to keep from repeating painful dynamics from one partner to another
- The often subtle ways fear of rejection and fear of intimacy show up and create painful consequences in relationships
- And much more!
Dr. Pat Love’s philosophy is that small, subtle shifts in your own behavior can make a world of difference in your relationship. There’s no reason to be married and lonely, because there is expert advice on how to feel more connected, every day. And the best part? You can start right now, whether your partner is onboard or not.