Being Ignored in Your Marriage and Relationships

A question we’re often asked is how to keep from being ignored by your mate in a long term marriage as a couple. In the beginning, it wasn’t that way. Your mate was attentive to your needs and desires. But now, you’re feeling ignored, taken for granted, and there’s little emotional connection or intimacy. If you’re being ignored, it’s extremely painful. You may ask for time and attention but your mate may make excuses or downright refuse. It is both painful and abusive to live with someone who professes to love you but who ignores your wants, feelings and desires. If you, or someone you know, is in this situation, it is likely that at one time or another they may have asked themselves, “if I can’t get what I want from this relationship, why am I here?” So, how did you get to this place? What has gone so terribly wrong?

The state of your marriage today represents an accumulation of your life together as a couple. When couples perceive that 50% or more of their experiences together have been fulfilling, mutually satisfying, happy, and rewarding, it results in a stronger bond and loving connection. When the level of satisfaction goes considerably below the 50% mark, the more dissatisfaction couples report about their relationships.

In our experience, the #1 reason why couples have dissatisfaction is because of an inability to communicate what they truly need from each other to feel loved and cared about and the inability to resolve problems in the relationship. Years of accumulated unmet needs produce a continuing disconnect between the couple. They may share the same house but except for their children, may live in two different worlds.

So, how to you overcome the pain of being ignored? The solution is what it has always been. Learn each other’s love language and take action. If you have difficulty accomplishing this on your own, get some professional help. We can help. For the sake of your marriage and your family, let us help you.

100 Questions Before Marriage: Attitudes About Sex, Money, and Household Maintenance

The following questions from our 100 Questions Before Marriage exercise addresses the greatest problem areas in marriage. We encourage our pre-marital counseling clients to work through this process to avoid problems before marriage begins. They represent the topics that couples often fight about—sex, money, and conflicts over how their home is maintained and by whom.

By assessing, confronting, and working through possible conflicts now before the marriage, it is possible to reduce major challenges a couple would have to face after the marriage.

We know that many of the questions in this section of our 100 Questions Before Marriage exercise may be considered quite personal by some people. Some questions, in fact, may make some people quite uncomfortable. We would suggest that in spite of your discomfort that you both answer the questions. Again, it is better to address these issues now rather than later. We encourage you to take as much time as you need to respond to each question.

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Marriage Advice: Persistence and Follow Through Will Pay Off

Marriage Advice Persistence PaysOne of the best marriage advice snippets we can provide to you is the idea that couples who are persistent and follow through consistently, together… tend to stay together. It’s about an attitude in the mind of both partners that we are going to stick through, whatever comes our way. These couples share dreams, they share a vision for the future.

We recently read an inspiring story of a young couple who dreamed of opening a health food restaurant. They had met in college, had recently graduated, and had a child and over $100,000 in college loans. They spent hours talking about ways they could help people eat and live healthy lives. The restaurant they envisioned would help people do that.

When they shared their dream with family and friends, they were discouraged. Some considered it foolish—that this was not the right time to take on such a project. But, they continued to pursue their dream by creating the best business plan they could put together and stayed focused on fulfilling their dream.

They decided that they were now ready to seek a bank loan to get the restaurant off the ground. They were turned down by bank after bank—11in fact. And while they were discouraged by so many rejections, they remained steadfast to their dream. The 12th bank approved their loan. Today, they have a successful business and are planning to open 2 new restaurants. Their real success was the fact that as a couple, they dreamed together, planned together, worked together, and were persistent toward their goal. And by the way, they paid off their student loans in 3 years.

It’s not just enough to have dreams or take action toward making them happen. Whether or not you succeed is determined by your persistence and follow-through when your first attempts fail. Thomas Edison tried and failed to invent a light bulb over a thousand times before he came up with one of the greatest inventions of all time.  In our marriage counseling experience, it is the couples who exhibit persistence and follow through who make it more often than not through the hard times.

Marilyn Vos Savant says that “Defeat is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.”

Don’t give up at the first sign of difficulty. Stay committed to see your dreams fulfilled, individually and as a couple.  Studies show  that couples who dream together, work together and achieve together… stay together!

We like how Michael Larsen put’s it. He says that a “diamond is simply a piece of coal that stuck to the job.”