Help! I'm Not Attracted to My Spouse!

Conversations with Dr. Jennifer

Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife

Self-improvement, Education, Mental Health, Sexuality, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2024

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this NEW episode, Dr. Finlayson-Fife takes questions from her Facebook Group members on the nuanced and delicate topic of loss of attraction in marriage. In the discussion, Dr. Finlayson-Fife discusses how habituation, boredom, and resentment can undermine attraction, and how gratitude, appreciation, and novelty can foster it. She also expertly responds to questions like: * What can I do if I was never attracted to my spouse? * My spouse has developed self-destructive habits that are impacting my attraction, how can I address this? * I am disappointed by certain aspects of my spouse's appearance, what can I do? * I am physically attracted to my spouse, but their personality is unappealing, what can I do? * My spouse is apathetic about their health / hygeine, how can I address this? * Can I rekindle the attraction for my spouse that I once had? You can watch the recording of this conversation HERE!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Conversations with Dr. Jennifer, a collection of interviews on the topics of relationships, sexuality, and more, all featuring Dr Finlason Fife.
0:30.0	Welcome everybody. We're here to talk about loss of attraction. This is obviously a topic that's really important to a lot of people.
0:33.4	I think it's a charged topic in part because there's so many factors that have to do with something
0:40.3	as nuanced and delicate as attraction. Attraction is something. as in a marriage that's thriving and intimate and happy.
0:55.0	And so I want to talk about just some sort of foundational ideas
1:02.0	before I take up any of the question and you know
1:07.0	acknowledging that some of these may relate to your situation and others will not and
1:17.0	again it can be a little bit sensitive on both sides of this. So let me just start with the first idea which is that we're not
1:21.0	that all of this are not attracted some of the time to our partners right so
1:27.7	it's just true that in a long-term marriage you're going to have moments where you do not feel attracted what your spouse is doing is actually
1:36.2	killing desire.
1:38.2	Again that kind of delicate energy that can get destroyed with the wrong comment, with the bad smell, with the annoying
1:46.1	behavior that you hate so much. And so, you know, in any honest marriage, absence of attraction is going to be a part of it some of the time.
1:58.0	And so even if your spouse is very attractive in some conventional sense, if you're paying attention,
2:07.0	there's going to be, this is why movie stars can get divorced, this is why supermodels are not necessarily with someone that's
2:15.1	attracted to them because who you are as a person has a lot to do with attraction and
2:21.6	also habituation has a lot to do with attraction. So when we get bored, when we start to take the other person for granted, right?
2:32.0	attraction goes down.
2:34.7	Novelty pushes attraction up.
2:37.3	So even if the very same spouse that you're married to,
2:39.7	you were to meet again now, you know, having not known them at all and you were single, you would very
2:46.6	likely find them appealing or compelling. Now, some of you would be like, no, I wouldn't, and
	...

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