What do you do when your husband stops loving you; when he says “I’m not happy anymore”? I have come to a point in my life where I don’t talk much in the way of specifics about my first marriage that ended in divorce. The thing is, it took a lot of time for me to move past it emotionally, and now that I’ve finally found the healing I need I try not to pick at it. But some subjects, like the one of trust, require a little thoughtful contemplation. Call it a remembrance, if you will, not of what happened to me, but of what God did afterwards.
I was sitting on the couch watching television after a long day at work when my then husband walked in the door. Almost immediately he said with seriousness that we needed to talk, and after that conversation nothing was ever the same. Despite the poorly veiled attempt for him to call it a trial separation, it was immediately apparent that he wasn’t happy being married to me anymore. In fact he said, “I’m not happy anymore,” so you can’t really sugarcoat that kind of confession. My heart was broken. Which is normal when your husband stops loving you.
The thing was that I loved him and I didn’t want a divorce. Regardless of how my eyes became opened in the aftermath to how toxic our relationship had been, at that moment I felt pure rejection. I was broken, and there’s no quick mending for a woman’s heart. Even when I later found myself cautiously transversing through a new relationship, I was held back by my past pain. I was held back by my lack of confidence in myself, as it’s common to feel like you’re lacking in some way or another after you’ve been found unlovable. Just being honest.
We didn’t talk about it then, but my husband mentioned it to me the other day.
“I know that was a hard time for you,” he trailed off, after the subject of our first year of marriage had come up.
When Your Husband Stops Loving You There’s a Process of Healing
Indeed, I had been an injured woman trying to move on with a life of happiness, but when your husband stops loving you, healing is a process. In full disclosure it had taken years for me to completely let go of the hurt my heart tried to hold on to after the dissolution of my first marriage. It was hard to entrust my heart completely to another man. It was hard to completely see myself as someone worth being married to. Much like the grief experienced at the death of a loved one (though not comparable), I had gone through all the stages as I maneuvered through getting over my divorce. It’s not something as simple as you sign the papers and the emotions are gone. You have to learn to trust again, learn to love again, and most importantly learn to love yourself again.
