Emotionally or Sexually Rejected by Your Husband or Wife?

If feeling emotionally or sexually rejected by your husband or wife has stolen your joy and made you feel like less of a person, then you’re not crazy. And you’re also not alone.

But it’s not fun, which is why I’m going to share with you the next steps that you can do to start feeling like yourself again. And to help you realize that you do have worth, you do have value and you can turn your relationship around.

If you feel like you are being ignored sexually, emotionally, physically, what should you do?

If you ever think to yourself, “I don’t know why my husband/wife doesn’t want to connect with me sexually. I don’t know why they’re ignoring me. I don’t know why they’re not relationally and emotionally available to me. What have I done wrong? And what can I do?”

The best way that you can initiate a spark in your marriage is by beginning with you. Let me explain what that means. There was a research study that took 6,000 married couples and measured their self-esteem as a unit. Afterward, they had them work on themselves to become better. As a result, their self-esteem increased. They found there was a direct correlation between a person who would increase their own self-esteem, and the positive effect on the marriage.

When you start working on yourself and becoming the best that you can be, it has an amazingly positive effect on your relationship. Improving yourself is the best thing you can do to bring your spouse back around.

So what does that look like?

At Marriage Helper, what we found is that there is actually a process to improving yourself and falling in love (and sparking sexual attraction goes along with that). It’s a scientific process that has four stages–PIES of attraction.

PIES stands for physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual attraction.

The very first stage is physical attraction.

But it’s not attraction the way the media portrays it. It’s not about how much you weigh, how skinny you are or how muscular you are. It’s not about that. It’s about how confident you appear.

It’s about how you feel, not how you look. Do you feel good in your body for your age and situation in life? If the answer is yes, rock on.

If your answer is, “You know, I could feel a lot better…” Then start taking steps to do that.

The second stage is intellectual attraction.

The question to ask yourself here is, “Am I a fascinating person for people to talk to? Am I a person that my husband or wife would want to come home and have a conversation with?”

You may be hoping that your spouse will engage with you, but maybe it’s time for you to start engaging yourself first and then engaging your spouse. Start reading more books, watching documentaries, taking a class, taking on a new hobby so that you have fun things to talk about. And then also if your spouse comes home from work, or you have the chance to connect at the end of the day…Ask them things like, “How are you doing, what is it that you’re working on? What are the things you enjoyed today?”

It’s a great way to start connecting.

The third stage is emotional attraction.

This is a very important one. Emotional attraction has to do with, “Am I evoking emotions within the people in my life that they enjoy feeling? Do people feel good around me?”

And this is especially important when it comes to your spouse. So the question is, “Are you evoking emotions within your husband or wife that they enjoy feeling?” And if your answer to that is, “I don’t know. I want them to evoke emotions within me that I enjoy feeling.” I hear you, and we’re going to get there. But for now, the only thing you can control is yourself, not the way your spouse is acting towards you.

So ask yourself if you’re doing the best you can to evoke positive emotions within them. Because people go where they feel good.

The fourth part of attraction is the S, spiritual attraction.

This is all about living in line with your beliefs and values. Using all four of these together, it becomes a powerhouse of motivation and encouragement for you to continue to become the best that you can be. So it really gives you a new vision so that you’re not so focused on all of the ways your spouse isn’t meeting your needs, but you’re taking some of it back into your own hands. And becoming the best that you can be is a huge secondary benefit of that.

The hope is that it will pull your spouse closer to you, but right now we’re just going to start with the only thing you can control, which is yourself.

Honestly, if we were to boil it all down… every single area of attraction comes down to you feeling more confident as a human being. If you’re feeling emotionally or sexually rejected by your husband or wife, then I encourage you to first start by working on your PIES and go from there.

If you have good communication with your spouse, then it’s a great opportunity for you to tell them how you feel. But if you don’t know how your spouse will respond, then maybe you don’t need to have that conversation yet until the relationship gets a little bit better, or until you know how to handle that conversation in a better way.