Q&A: How do I Connect with my Emotionally Disconnected Husband?
Explore additional resources about marriage.
Java with Juli: #485 Your Marriage Won’t Survive Without Grace: Why Marriages Built on Performance Fall Apart
Java with Juli: #494 Purity Culture, Men and Sexual Entitlement
Blog: 5 Healthy Ways to Respond to Your Husband’s Porn Problem
Resource: “Finding the Hero in Your Husband” by Dr. Juli Slattery
Full Transcript
How do you connect with your emotionally disconnected husband?
This is a question a lot of women are asking. I general women are more verbal than men. They connect more by talking and looking at each other than men in general will do. And so a lot of women feel kind of lonely within the relationship of marriage. They want to be close, they want to have intimacy, but they don’t know how to do that.
Well, let me give you a few suggestions. First of all you can start with thinking, how does my husband like to connect? What does he enjoy doing? Instead of just going out for coffee and sitting across the table and asking him deep questions that might be intimidating to him, what about sharing one of the activities that he enjoys? Maybe he likes to hike. Maybe he likes athletics. Maybe he likes fixing cars, or whatever it might be, lawn work. Do that activity with him.
You know, one person, said, men like to do life together. Women like to process life together. And so there’s a big difference between the activity of a teammate, versus feeling like you have to talk about things all the time. So stretch a little bit to understand how he enjoys connection.
The other thing I would recommend is really look for ways that you might be, without even realizing it, creating distance between you and your husband. In general, men can be very sensitive to our words. They can be very sensitive to things that sound critical or demeaning, and you might not realize it, but things that you might be saying or doing might create some insecurity between you and your husband, where he doesn’t feel emotionally safe enough to connect. So the book that I wrote called “Finding the Hero in Your Husband” might give you some specific ways that you can work on really building that bridge of emotional connection between you and your husband.
