I don't feel in love with him anymore. My name is Paul
Friedman. I founded The Marriage Foundation
and I want to help you with this.
This is not a one-issue topic. This is very broad.
You were in love with him obviously
when you got married, before you got married, when you were courting,
engaged, dating, all of that. What happened? Well
I'm going to share with you what usually happens.
What usually happens is that people get married
and they think that it's the end that they have gotten married
and it's like, "Oh boy, let's get married. Let's have a nice
wedding. Let's go on a beautiful honeymoon. Let's
set up our apartment or our house." And then what, "Oh well, we have to get
dishes. We have to get bedroom set." Okay then, what?
Well, here's the problem with all of those
things that you did. Those were all on the material plane, possessions,
things to do. It's our material life. It's how we live but
you're a soul. You have a body. You don't say my body is me. You have a
mind and this escapes the attention of
most of us. We have a mind. We're not our mind.
You know how I know? Because you can control your mind. How many times
have you had a thought that you didn't like you were going to say
something you had to thought to say something but you didn't?
You controlled it. Now people would say, "No, you just controlled your tongue."
No. You controlled your mind because it's the mind that controls
the tongue. You are a soul. It's not a religious thing.
I'm not knocking on your door selling you religion.
You are a soul. It's just a fact and you have a mind
and you have a body and your soul is not material. How do I know?
Because love is not material. You can't quantify love. You can't put it in a jar.
You can't qualify love. You can't measure love -- it's spiritual.
Remember when you got married and there was that moment
when you felt so much love. You felt it
but how do you recapture that because that's what we're talking about now.
How do you recapture that? Well, here's what happens.
Because we have a body and a mind, our bodies rule us until we take
charge over our mind as a soul and start giving the orders. But because
we don't because you didn't
and we've lived more of a material life not focused on developing the love
and holding back the weird stuff that undermines
our love. We fell into bad habits. It happens to
almost everyone when you don't know about
love and marriage. So, what happens? There's killers in marriage. The first
the biggest one I call it "over-familiarity."
Basically, it means you start taking each other for granted.
You don't consider him. He doesn't consider
you. You say what you want. You know it's a big thing in our world
promoted by therapists and Western psychology
and it's incorrect that when you're in love and you're in a relationship you
get to say anything you want. Well, that's not considerate.
The opposite is consideration. If you consider someone, if you love
someone, you never want to hurt them. You don't want to tease them. You don't
want to criticize them or find fault with them. You want to keep
reminding them of how great they are and you are the
one person in your husband's life who has the power
to do that. And what happens is you're inconsiderate
then he's inconsiderate. Then he's inconsiderate then you're -- it's
a cycle
which is why I named my second book Breaking
the Cycle. At any rate, the point is the material
part of us that's concerned with day-to-day stuff
has created this mud pile on top of love. The love is always there because
you're a soul and he's a soul but it's covered in a layer of mud:
bad behavior, bad thoughts,
inconsideration. But all you have to do is sweep that mud
away and love is amazing -- it shines through.
So my approach to marriage is not to work on the bad stuff
because it's never ending. There's nothing but bad stuff in the world.
My way is to work on the good stuff and it pushes away the bad stuff.
It's like that old
one of the old examples of some spiritual story
where there's darkness in the cave and then someone strikes a match
and the darkness is all gone. The light dispels the darkness instantly
and that's what you need to work on and the love will come back.
It always does. It always does. The Marriage Foundation, we
interact with a lot of people over the past 20 years and I'm telling you that
when people follow the correct methodologies to improve their marriage
which how we do it is never working on the negative but always on the positive.
It always works and it makes sense using that analogy of the light versus
the darkness. Darkness doesn't stand a chance.
So don't fall into the trap of thinking you're not
in love anymore. That in love is a romantic flame and it should be there
and it will be there if you work on the foundation.
Get rid of the negative stuff by pouring in the light.
I have a lot of videos. You can subscribe to this channel
and there's a lot of videos that'll help you. There's a lot of articles,
a couple of books, courses but this is an easy one. You don't
know that it's easy and I know that but it
is from our point of view. We see it
fixed all the time so don't give up on this.
Blessings to you, your husband and your family!
God bless and take care! Thank you!