It's like the kiss of death. It's when your spouse comes to you and says, "I love you, but I'm not in love with you." Is it time to panic when you hear that? Actually it may be. I'm not trying to instill fear in you, but we talk about reality, and how you can really face life as it is. If you want to get where you need to go, you have to accept where you're starting from.
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Hi. I'm Dr. Joe Beam. I'm with Marriage Helper. As a matter of fact, we have a lot of videos and are making more all the time, and if you'd like to subscribe, we'd love to have you. Just right down there, see that button? You click that and subscribe, and then you'll know about every video we put up. Some are about affairs. Some are about marriage. Some are just about relationships. As a matter of fact, everything you can imagine about relationships, and we'd love to have you as a subscriber.
(0:47) But what about this? My spouse said, "I love you, but I'm not in love with you." What does that mean? It typically means "I have an emotion for you, but it's not what I want." Why would a person say that? For some people, and these are relatively rare, these are people who have finally decided, "I don't want any relationship. I wanna be alone." You've heard me say they're relatively rare, and they are. And that could be happening with your spouse. It's not likely, but it's definitely possible that he or she just wants to go off and be by themselves. Typically when that happens, it's somebody who's been hurt so many times in life by parents, siblings, friends, maybe even by you, although I'm not trying to blame this on you at all-- please don't hear that. And they finally reached the point of thinking, "I shouldn't be in any relationship because all relationships wind up hurting me at some point." That's one possibility, not the most likely possibility, but one possibility.
Another is, you know, I feel this emotion with you, but I feel like there's something more I can have and I wanna go looking for it out there. And so “I love you, but I'm not in love with you” means that I've heard other people describe what they feel, I've watched the things on the TV, I've seen the things in the movies, and I want to go see if I can find that for me. That might be what they're saying.
(2:03) Or, unfortunately, they may be saying, I do feel this "in love" feeling with somebody else. I'm not blaming you, I'm not angry with you. As a matter of fact there's still part of me that has positive emotions about you, therefore, I love you, but I'm in love with him. I'm in love with her." And so “I love you, but I'm not in love with you" is basically setting up a situation where it's like, but I am in love. Now, they may not be ready to admit that right now. They may not wanna tell you that it's going on in their lives in this particular moment. They may be very deceitful.
Now, if you're gonna deal with this, if you really wanna save the marriage and your spouse has told you, "I love you but I'm not in love with you anymore," if you really wanna fix this, then you need to accept what he or she feels, even if you don't like it. Because if you come back, "Oh no, you do love me," and you start trying to explain to him or convince him or her that indeed, love is there, the "in love" kind of love is there, it's not gonna do you any good. As a matter of fact, it makes you look desperate. And it certainly makes the other person convinced, you don't get me, you don't understand me, you don't know who and what I am.
You see, if you look at the reasons that people divorce, if you look at the research about that, by far the most common reasons that people divorce are:
I don't feel like you love me.
I don't feel like you like me.
I don't feel that you respect me.
Read the accompanying post at marriagehelper.com/i-love-you...
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