Love Is What You Do: Immutable Law of Marriage

• September 7, 2016
• Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D.
• no comments

“I just don’t feel it anymore,” she told me.

So I asked, “What are you not feeling?”

“Love.”  She told me she no longer loved her husband.

I asked, “What are you doing to be loving?”

She looked up, a bit surprised.  “What?  I just told you, I don’t love him.”

I challenged her, “I heard you say you don’t FEEL love, but I didn’t ask that.  I asked what you were DOING to be loving.”

She admitted she was doing nothing.  Because she didn’t feel anything.

I think she had the equation wrong.  She wasn’t feeling any love because she had stopped being loving.  To be fair, they both had stopped being loving.  No surprise that the feelings pretty much evaporated at that point.

Here’s the problem:  Love is a complicated word.  It has many meanings and many shades.  But when a marriage is in trouble, almost always, the default definition is the feeling of being in love.  Then, that is used as the yardstick of the relationship.

Unfortunately, those feelings are a result of acting lovingly.  But people keep waiting for the feeling to be there, so they would feel like acting.

Listen below on why this is the wrong move, wrong direction.  And how to change it.

Immutable Laws Of Marriage Series
#1 Marriage Is About Becoming A WE
#2 Marriage Is NOT A Vehicle for Happiness (Or Misery)
#3 We ALL Have Fear
#4 There Is NO Pause
#5 Connection Is The Lifeblood
#6 The Goal Of Conflict Is Progress

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