Problem Question: How Do I Get My Guy To Love Me?

(A reader says, "I just can’t get loved by my loved one and that realisation chills me… I do feel that I am not much of a person… It is the worst feeling to see there is nothing you can offer to your man that another woman cannot do better.)

My reply. You must be in a lot of pain. But you have both the problem and the solution in your email. Let’s identify your key comment:

“I just can’t get loved by my loved one and that realisation chills me...I do feel that I am not much of a person…”

First of all, how can someone love what you are rejecting just now? You don’t think much of yourself (your words) but expect your partner to find that low esteem attractive. That is not possible. No one will love you in your present state because the first relationship begins with ourselves - inside of us. Until you really appreciate the unique and loveable being you are, you cannot appreciate others, neither can they love you in turn. Perhaps that’s why you also call others ‘ignorant’ because they are not seeing your low point of view. Yet that is a stereotype reflecting the negativity you actually feel about you.

Currently, you are not giving out much, you simply have needs – especially the need of another to love you. But just being needy isn’t attractive. Just like how to have friends we have to first be a friend to others, being lovable comes from being able to be a lover, to forget ourselves and to GIVE; to find out what our partners want and SHARE it with them, not just wait for them to love us, or to fulfil our needs. Naturally, the more needy and worthless you feel, the less you will have it remedied, and the less you will have to give, because no one can make you happy if you are unhappy with yourself. You will always feel miserable and inadequate. YOU have to start the loving process first to get the love you seek.

Dealing With a Negative Situation

If your partner is having, or has had, an affair, then sitting in that demoralising situation wondering why he found someone more attractive won’t help you. It only makes you feel worse: truly rejected, unwanted and unloved. You need to begin the slow process of finding out why you think you are not much, why you feel unloved and begin to appreciate yourself, one step at a time.

Once you begin to feel better about you, as a person, others will flock to you and your husband is more likely to notice and respect you. But the simple truth is that you are not likely to find love until you love yourself, because you are offering something unlovable to others, something you don’t care about, and even something you loathe. Yet you expect them to compensate for that loathing by loving you instead. You expect them to be excited about your substandard goods. That's a tallorder, I’m afraid.

You seem to have a lot going for you, with or without a someone else. Pick yourself up and stop focusing on your partner. You will never be able to please him in this state. Keep saying to yourself that if he doesn’t like you, there is always someone else and start to rebuild your confidence. Once attraction goes, it doesn’t return, no matter what you do. Something essential would have been lost. You merely prolong the pain by sitting wondering and playing the victim. To keep the relationship it has to be re-established on a different plain of mutual respect, and that’s very hard to do when we are feeling unloved and resentful and the other party isn’t really interested. Sadly, while you are waiting to please him further, he is already looking outside and the one thing these outside liaisons do to a relationship is to actually show what is missing from it, which makes reconciliation even harder.

Stop trying to be Perfect

Most important, stop being hard on yourself in trying to be a perfect parent for your child. The more you do that, the more inadequate you will feel trying to measure up. Life does what it likes and just because you cannot offer your son two parents doesn’t mean he does not appreciate the individual love you each have to give him. Get rid of your desire for perfection and accept your situation as it is. Try to improve it in other ways instead of vainly holding on to an ideal which is draining your resources and sapping your confidence and esteem.

Will love be back? you ask. Yes it will, every time. But only you can bring love back into your life when you stop seeking approval, stop expecting people to love you to make up for your lack of self love, stop trying to be perfect and start giving to others and yourself, instead of just waiting to receive. It would be a wholly new and fulfilling experience.

How can you make your man love you? You can’t, so stop trying. Something is missing from your relationship and unless you find out what it is, the situation will only get worse. The real question here seems to be, “How can I love myself?”. Once you work that out, things will begin to happen that you didn’t even expect because you won’t wait around for his love. However, do hang in there. It really does get better when you begin to look outwards, when you can see where you want to go and you begin to truly value the most important person in your world – YOU!

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