I’ve heard of scenarios that pretty much describe this situation. I often hear things like: “My husband insists he still loves me, but he doesn’t feel like he can be with me right now. He says he needs space and some time to figure out where he wants to go with this. He feels like he needs to be alone.” for a while. I just can’t figure this out. How can you love someone and then doubt that you want to marry that person?

This can be a very difficult question for a wife to understand. Usually in our minds, if we love someone and things don’t fall apart around us, nothing should change. It’s a simple equation for us. We love each other. We made a compromise. End of story. And we don’t understand why our husbands don’t see it that way.

The truth is, it’s impossible to 100% understand or even accept another person’s thought process, especially when you don’t share it. There is very little you can do to control or change that. However, there is much you can do about the current situation. And, the things you can do may not be what you’re inclined or tempted to do. I will discuss how to understand and handle this situation in the next article.

Take what he says at face value and focus on changing your perceptions instead of changing his words: The biggest initial mistake I see people make is that they focus on semantics. I often hear wives insist on things like “how can he love me but not be in love with me?” or “how can he not want to marry me when he swears he still feels the same way?”

The truth is that you may never get a satisfactory answer to these questions. In fact, your attempted response might confuse, annoy, or hurt him even more. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to accept what he says as fact. He could well be confused, projecting his own problems onto you and the marriage, or just plain wrong. But chances are he won’t change his mind just because you argue with him or point out flaws in his thinking.

Many wives will go on an all-out campaign to convince (or blame) him to stay. What they often don’t realize is that they are actually undermining their position. Because think about it for a minute. What you really want is for your husband to decide two things. You want him to continue with his thought that he loves you, but you want him to take this even further and decide that he wants to be with you and commit to you 100%.

How likely is this if he is left shuffling, pouting, and staring out the window with longing eyes? If you do it all wrong, but manage to keep it with you under the harshness, then really, all you’ve done is earn yourself some low-quality time. Because eventually, you’ll want to break up again. And when it does, it will be much more difficult, if not impossible, for you to control all of this again.

What you want to do instead is change their perceptions. Because right now, he’s probably thinking yes, he loves you, but he doesn’t love being married to you. He probably suspects that his life will be better, for whatever reason, if he is alone. That’s why she wants to test his theory. No, I’m not a man, but I hear enough from them that I know how many of them think about this situation.

What stands between you leaving and staying are your perceptions, not your feelings. This is why you should take feelings at face value and put your efforts into perceptions.

Change what your husband is thinking in a genuine way so that he wants to stay in the marriage: Once this whole concept is explained, many wives understand it intuitively. However, it can be hard for them to hug you or even try because it feels so risky. If you don’t fight your desire to try to be alone or have some space, what if this becomes permanent? What if he sees that he likes being with you?

Well I guess this is possible. But you’re going to address those perceptions that we talked about. And, in my opinion, this is the only option that lets you know that he has made this decision for himself and that he is really sure of it. You want him present, enthusiastic and without doubt. This is the way to do it.

Once many women realize this, they will be tempted to shower their husbands with affection, attention, and light-hearted conversation. Unfortunately, this is often portrayed as untrue and too little too late. You want to act in such a way that it is believable. And you want to focus on things that are sustainable. You really want to resist luring him into something you can’t keep because down the road he’s potentially going to feel like he’s been made some false promises and once again it’s going to be harder to control all of this when he’s tempted to stray on his own again.

This is what wives often don’t realize. You already have the secrets and the key to this man’s interest and happiness. You have already walked this path. You’ve already intrigued him and made him smile with your laughter and attitude. But too often, we stop laughing, we stop being happy, we get lucky, and we allow the stressors of everyday life to erase the joy from our lives. As a result of this, life becomes monotonous, boring and heavy.

As a result, men begin to perceive that the grass is greener elsewhere. Your job is to change this perception. And you are more capable of this than you think.