Why Women Fall Out of Love...

Ok, first of all, I am drawing on my 30 years of experience as a divorce lawyer, but this also tracks in my own personal experience.  

Sometimes it is about someone else.  But the someone else isn’t necessarily an affair.  It is the kindness of someone else’s spouse paying attention to their wife in a way that her own husband does not.  It is a moment in time that is forever suspended in her mind because this one moment underscores everything her love and marriage is not.

It can be a compliment from a stranger that feels like she is being seen in ways that her own lover or husband does not see her.  Again, it isn’t the compliment that causes the rift, it is the compliment that highlights all the things that are wrong in her relationship that she cannot now avoid.

Sometimes, it is about another person.  Someone else comes along and pays attention to her in ways that her partner has long since forgotten or just allowed to be eroded over time.  It is this need to be seen, wanted, desired, needed that causes her to, perhaps, begin something that she shouldn’t.  I don’t think this is different for men, I think they experience the same thing.  But I will write about why men fall out of love on another day.

I know for me it was the slow seeping of trust.  An erosion of my husband’s partnerability.  It was the broken promises (small and large), all the things I did for him and the family that went unnoticed, unappreciated and were just ignored.  It was the failure of effort on the rare occasion I asked for it.  It was the abandonment of balance in the relationship and the allowance that I would just “take care of everything.”  It was the insistence that I wanted it that way.  It was the begging for help on matters that should have been a joint effort.

It was all empathy I needed and the receipt of silence, or withdrawal, instead.  It was a request for connection and the receipt of distance.

Sometimes it is because another person pays attention to us in a way our spouse or partner does not.  But more often it is being left alone in the relationship to fend for ourselves.  It is the failure of our beloved to chose us in ways that matter.  It is the absence of compliments and desire and true interest in who we are as people.  All of the times our love, our effort and our bodily offerings are taken for granted.  It is all these slights and neglects that pile up and on, until one day, we realize that there is absolutely nothing for us in this relationship anymore.  Except more of what we already don’t want.

In the end, it isn’t about finding someone else.  It is about being lost to ourselves in a relationship that fails to support, see or appreciate us as individuals instead of the roles we serve.  Our worth is overlooked so many times that we begin to doubt we have any at all.  And then one day, something happens that allows us to see that we are lost in someone who cannot or will not see our worth.  And so, we begin to leave.

The leaving happens in little moments.  It happens in tiny ways that we begin to see that this marriage, this relationship, this “love” offers up so very little while consuming all of who and what we are.  We are valued for what we give not who we are.  And often, we are not valued at all.  Sometimes appreciated but true value is something that seems to get lost in the shuffle of life and relational unfolding.

Women can love through a great deal.  Affairs, death, cancer, loss of financial stability.  They will ride with you through all of it but not if they are not appreciated, valued, helped, cared for, and seen. Women fall out of love because they are left alone in the relationship to do a great deal, sometimes all, of the heavy lifting.  They becomes slaves to the family and its needs while losing themselves as people, as individuals, a little each and every day.

Then one day, they wake up and see that they can do all the work alone and have the freedom to not be tied or chained to someone who turns a deaf ear to their pleas for help and love and assistance.  Women decide they can and would rather do it all on their own then have to continue to fight to be seen, heard, appreciated and noticed.  They would rather take on all the tasks of mothering, working, living solo than to go another day with their needs as individuals being either lodged against them in defiant complaint OR ignored completely.

We leave because the thought of going it alone feels easier than to continue to have to fight for love that is very rarely given.   Our worth becomes something that screams at us for attention, expression, acknowledgment and every day we do not get it, the voice gets louder and madder until we must leave or become unable to look ourselves in the mirror anymore.  It is one thing to be emotionally abandoned by your partner, it is another thing entirely to see that you are actively, on the daily, abandoning yourself.

And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.  And that is the day a woman falls out of love with her partner, and begins, to love herself instead.

I have seen this happen hundreds and thousands of times.  It is never different, it is always the same.  Women leave because the fact of staying costs them too much emotionally, physically and sexually.  The idea of going it alone seems easier than having to fight someone and lose every single day all while losing a little more of herself and her self respect along the way.  It just becomes easier to leave when staying feels like the biggest, largest betrayal of self.  She is forced into a choice, her or him.  And she just can’t pick him anymore.  So she picks herself.  Finally.