Valentine’s Day 2011 Started out a bit rough!! My boys didn’t want to get ready for school so they were late. My car started over­heat­ing going to work, had it towed to my favorite mechanic — Danny’s Import Ser­vice in Lewisville. Hop­ing for the best — and thank good­ness there was no major dam­age. Happy Valentine’s to me, my car was fixed. I didn’t have to go get the Odd­ysey I’ve been want­ing, yet…but I will much to my hus­bands dis­may. Luke and I ate at Fat Cows in Lewisville, it was my first time and the food was REALLY good! I fin­ished my home­work for class due next week. Always a plus to fin­ish the assign­ment on time. My pro­fes­sor gave me a GREAT WORK email. Need to start study­ing for the exam. Picked up my car and headed home to pick up the boys to watch Gnomeo and Juliet at Stu­dio Movie Grill. It was a great movie! My hus­band gave me a bread maker, he was told he should never buy any­thing that plugs in by the peo­ple at the store. But I LOVE it! I already made my first loaf and it was really good!! I bought him a pair of oak­leys. He seemed to like them. I guess Valentine’s is just another day when you don’t have some­one to spoil you. By all means I wasn’t spoiled and it almost felt like it could be just another day! I LOVE YOU are very strong words and hon­estly I haven’t heard those words in I’d say well over a year except from my chil­dren and my sis­ters. Just hard to know some­one loves you and they don’t tell you. Putting my feet in some­one else’s shoes is not very com­fort­able. For years I did not go out of my way to tell Luke I loved him and I am regret­ting it now. I have pushed the roman­tic side right out of him and now…really Valentine’s day whats the point…it’s just another day!

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for oth­ers than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on oth­ers,
Isn’t always “me first,“
Doesn’t fly off the han­dle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of oth­ers,
Doesn’t revel when oth­ers grovel,
Love
Takes plea­sure in the flow­er­ing of truth,
Puts up with any­thing,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
Love never dies.
[1 Corinthi­ans 13:4–8 THE MESSAGE]

After read­ing this…I needed to see that maybe I’ve been to con­cerned about “me”.…Just read­ing the words I know Luke truly loves me even if he NEVER tells me!

Just googled this to see what other peo­ple thought about this…
Here is what I found -
“That’s hard. That is really, really painful. But…you say “Good­bye.” You can’t make some­one love you again.“
“As much as it hurts, the other per­son is being hon­est with how they feel. More peo­ple should be that way but it doesn’t make the words less painful. Good­bye and good­luck are great things to say.”

Then I read this…so for any of you deal­ing with this.…Yes, there is HOPE!:

I often get emails from both hus­bands and wives who ask me if it makes sense to remain mar­ried when one or both of the par­ties are no longer in love. Often, the per­son who writes to me is the spouse who is still inter­ested in sav­ing the mar­riage, and is not the spouse who has “fallen out of love” and is ques­tion­ing whether they want to stay mar­ried or not. I some­times also get con­tacted by the spouses who tell me that they no longer feel as strongly as they once did and are look­ing for some­one to advise them or to val­i­date any deci­sion that they may have to leave a mar­riage that they no longer feel is as lov­ing as they would like it to be.

Com­mon ques­tions or com­ments related to this are things like: “I am just not in love with my spouse any­more and I don’t know how we can make it work when the feel­ings just aren’t there,” or “I love my chil­dren but I don’t love my spouse any­more. I don’t know how a mar­riage can sur­vive if all of the ingre­di­ents aren’t there.” I’ll address these con­cerns in the fol­low­ing article.

Is It That You’re Not In Love With Your Spouse Or That You’re Not In Love With Your Life?: When things just aren’t work­ing in our lives, we tend to blame those things which are close to us that are also con­ve­nient. And, our dis­con­tent bleeds into every other area and rela­tion­ship. For exam­ple, if we are grap­pling with our finances or are deeply wor­ried about being laid off and los­ing our home, then every­thing sur­round­ing these wor­ries is going to be tainted with the neg­a­tive feel­ings that go along with it. It’s very com­mon that our mar­riage and our spouse will start to look dif­fer­ently to us when we are look­ing at life through this neg­a­tive lens.

Another exam­ple is If we are dis­ap­pointed with our­selves or bored with our lives but can not face this because of self preser­va­tion. In these cases we will often project this worry, anx­i­ety, or dis­con­tent onto those around us, deservedly or not.

This doesn’t mean that your feel­ings for your spouse haven’t really changed. They may well have. But, often we are too quick to use phrases like “I’m not in love any­more,” when what we really mean is that the mar­riage just isn’t fir­ing on all cylin­ders or that there are some places in our lives where we just aren’t happy. Because it’s very pos­si­ble that your spouse still has the qual­i­ties that con­tributed to your falling in love with them in the first place, but it’s the cir­cum­stances of your life that has changed, and these changes are what is con­tribut­ing to your unhap­pi­ness — not only your spouse.

What Is Nec­es­sary In Order For A Per­son To Feel Like They Are “In Love?”: When I ask peo­ple this, they often have a hard time giv­ing me a really firm def­i­n­i­tion. They’ll use gen­eral phrases like “well, it’s just a feel­ing that you have that you’re in sync with the other per­son and you think about them all the time and want to be with them con­stantly because you feel really happy or con­nected to them,” or “I can’t define it, but it’s a spark, chem­istry, or elec­tric­ity that you feel when the other per­son is around.”

These descrip­tions all define the feel­ings that go along with this per­son, but I believe that often being “in love” is also based on the way that you feel about your­self when the rela­tion­ship is click­ing. When you feel deeply con­nected, you feel that you are worth­while because some­one feels so strongly for you. These things con­tribute to your feel­ing spe­cial, under­stood and val­ued and we all desire these things on a grand level. Every­one wants to feel appre­ci­ated, under­stood, and desired. This is just human nature. And, because we very much enjoy this give and take, we’ll often clear our cal­en­dars or work out our sched­ules so that we can spend a lot of time with this per­son who makes us feel so good.

But after we are mar­ried for a while, life can not help but change. We are try­ing to make a home, a future and pos­si­bil­ity to raise a fam­ily so our pri­or­i­ties and time must all accom­mo­date these things. The result is often that we can not longer put in quite as much time as we did. We think that this will be OK because our spouse knows how much we love them, how com­mit­ted we are, and that we have joint pri­or­i­ties now. But these good inten­tions and under­stand­ings do noth­ing to deepen your con­nec­tion or to keep those addic­tive feel­ings that you had in the begin­ning alive. I don’t deny that it’s nat­ural for your feel­ings to evolve but it should not be nat­ural for neglect to fol­low mar­riage. Unfor­tu­nately, in our soci­ety this is the norm and there are con­se­quences that go along with this.

I don’t tell you this to paint a neg­a­tive pic­ture. I tell you this because I want you to see that it’s very likely that there are many things at play and that it’s likely neglect and a lack of time and effort are the source of many of these things. I believe that most peo­ple who feel that they aren’t in love with their spouse most likely have things both­er­ing them in other areas of their lives (which have been fol­lowed by neglect) that need to be addressed. It’s so easy to project our dis­ap­point­ment in other areas onto our marriage.

But I can not tell you how many peo­ple tell me of their regret of jump­ing the gun here. They con­vince them­selves that get­ting a divorce is the only way to be happy again, but they don’t do any­thing to change their life other than omit­ting their spouse. And then they are very sur­prised that even when they are sin­gle they still feel the same empti­ness and dis­con­tent. The rea­son for this is that they didn’t really change the other fac­tors in their life. In short, they addressed the thing that they were pro­ject­ing their prob­lems onto, not their actual problems.

Set­ting Things Up So That You Can Become Happy In Your Mar­riage Again: Before you do any­thing dras­tic that is going to affect the lives of every­one in your fam­ily, ask your­self if you’ve been neglect­ing your mar­riage or pro­ject­ing other neg­a­tive areas of your life onto it. Because it’s a rare per­son who hasn’t done either. And I’ve seen peo­ple pretty quickly “fall back in love” when they changed their pri­or­i­ties and per­cep­tions, so I know that it can be done.

Often it takes focus­ing on what is right rather than on what is wrong. It takes putting in the same kind of effort and time com­mit­ment that you did when you were first dat­ing. You already know that this for­mula makes you feel val­ued, cher­ished, and under­stood and that these things in turn con­tribute towards your own lov­ing feel­ings toward your spouse, so why not try this com­bi­na­tion again to see if you can get the same results? Don’t look at this as “work” or drudgery. Chose a real­ity that you can both get excited about and begin to pri­or­i­tize spend­ing light hearted time together where you can both do things that you enjoy. The key is to leave with a smile on your face so that you will want to keep repeat­ing the process until you are both back to a place where you are feel­ing “in love.”