It’s hard to know what to do when your husband doesn’t love you anymore. If this has happened to you, here’s what you need to know.

Did you know there are 19 different types of emotional abuse? To see if you can recognize the 19 different types of emotional abuse, take our free emotional abuse quiz.

Transcript: What to Do When Your Husband Doesn’t Love You

Anne: Today we’re gonna cover what happens when your husband says he doesn’t love you anymore. We have a member of our community on today’s episode. We’re gonna call her Denise. This happened to her. Here’s a preview of what she said.

“I felt like he hates me. He hates my guts. I had asked him , “When did your heart turn against me?” So then he tells me…”

You’ll find out what he tells her later on in the story.

If this has happened to you, where your husband has told you he doesn’t love you anymore. Here are two things to consider.

Number one, get educated about emotional and psychological abuse because there’s a chance that this is part of your story, even if it doesn’t seem like it. You’ll hear about how Denise’s husband used two psychological abuse tactics: mirroring and countering. So as you listen, see if you can identify when that happens. And number, two is to observe their actions. And I’ll talk more about that in today’s interview.

So welcome, Denise. Let’s start with her story.

Denise’s Story: The Beginning

Denise: Yeah, I met my ex online. I was in my 40s and had never been married. I always said I didn’t want to get married until I met the one. Like, the one, and I made sure, because I didn’t want a bad marriage. Um, turns out that I apparently didn’t know what that looked like.

So Yeah, he’d been, married before, was a widower, he took care of his late wife, and, seemed to be financially responsible.

The first date was great.

But then on the next date, we went for a hike, and I was asking him questions, and he couldn’t answer simple questions, like, what’s your favorite movie?

Maybe He’s Just Not Ready

Denise: The third date was just awkward, something feels off. And I told him I wouldn’t date him.

I didn’t think he was ready for a relationship, like maybe he needed to heal some more.

Anne: How long after his wife’s death did you start?

Denise: Like three and a half months

So I told him I wouldn’t date him.

But we were hanging out as friends and we would argue all the time. People would say, “what are you arguing about?” Like, I don’t even know, I don’t know what we were arguing about. It was really confusing to me because I’m not a really argumentative person, but for some reason I was drawn to him.

His Sudden Heart Change: Maybe He Does Love Me

Denise: And then all of a sudden, literally one day, he changed and there was no more arguing. It was almost like this happy wife, happy life thing. I thought okay, he hadn’t dated in a long time, that was a fluke. That’s what I thought. That was a fluke. He’s realized he was just being an idiot and now he’s ready to step up and be himself and be respectful.

Anne: Wow! That was a sudden heart change.

Denise: Yes, exactly. And then after that, we got along really well. I had so much fun.

Looking back now, I can see things that I didn’t notice at the time, but at the time, everything seemed great. I just kept telling people like how blessed I was. This was amazing. His friends were all telling me how wonderful he was and random people we would meet would tell me like, “you are lucky, he is a good man.”

My family loved him. I mean, it was like everybody. No one thought there would be a time where I’d have to figure out what to do if he said he didn’t love me anymore. No one ever thought something like that would ever happen.

Anne: Did he have kids from his first marriage?

Denise: He did. They were preteen, and early teen.

His Sudden Heart Change: Confusion

Denise: There were a couple of little other flukes that happened while we were dating or after we were engaged and I thought they were flukes, one of them happened when my niece was graduating from college and I wanted to go to her graduation.

We were engaged at the time and he had never been to that area of the United States. So, he’s like, “why don’t you plan the trip then, since you’ve been there before and we can do our family vacation and go to your niece’s graduation at the same time.” I’m like, Oh, that would be wonderful.

Like I’d been there. He hadn’t. So, we asked the kids if they wanted to do anything like specific in that area. They didn’t want to look anything up. So I was like, I guess I’m planning it. And he was like, “I trust you.”

So, we go on this trip and he starts getting angry at me for not having planned it better and I was like, really confused. That’s what a lot of this whole thing was, a lot of confusion. Like, you asked me to plan it, if you wanted to do it a certain way, you should have stepped in and planned it yourself or said you wanted something else. I mean, it’s common sense. I saw on that trip what he was just, angry, bitter, and yelling at me.

Pre-Wedding Tensions

Denise: That was, before the wedding and I thought it was a one off.

Anne: like a fluke.

Denise: Mm hmm.

And then, there was one more that I see now as major. I thought it was him being under a lot of stress. It was right before the wedding. He said he wanted our bank accounts to be merged, which is what I wanted. I wanted 100 percent commitment, all in, everything shared.

I wanted to be a stay at home mom. That was my goal. He was totally up for that. So, right before the wedding, he starts getting angry that he’s paying more for the wedding than I am.

And I was like, weird, cause we’re merging everything. He wasn’t arguing that he didn’t want something at the wedding. He was saying he wanted me to pay for it.

Anne: Are you okay if we pause right here?

Denise: totally

Mirroring Explained

Anne: This is how mirroring works. He’s not gonna tell you how he feels until you tell him how you feel, so he can just mirror back to you your own interests and your own opinions. So he’s gonna find out what your favorite movie genre is, and then he’s gonna say, me too. He’s gonna wait until he knows how you feel about politics. And then he’s going to mirror your opinions back to you. And then later he’ll have a “change of heart”  when really he didn’t have those opinions in the first place.

So in terms of choosing a good husband, if you’re thinking about dating or getting to know someone, try asking them questions like this before you tell them how you feel and see how they respond.

Denise: That actually makes complete sense. I hadn’t thought of it in that way but now that you say that, I was thinking back, like, after I told him what my favorite movie was, then he said that he liked that one too. Most everything, it seemed like it was a fluke that he liked the same things I did, it was like, oh my , we’re like exactly the same.

This is crazy. I’m like, yeah, this is crazy. I never, imagined that we would like this many things the same.

Countering Explained

Anne: So when you talked about this period of time where you were just friends and he was arguing with you quite a bit.

My guess is that he was countering. Countering is an abuse tactic where they counter basically, everything you say. It’s very similar to like a 15 year old. My son counters right now from time to time, cause he’s 15 and I’m like legit every single thing I’m saying you’re disagreeing with.

And he’s like, “no, I’m not.” I’m like, there you go again. This is happening right now. It’s a really immature way of trying to overpower somebody else. He was countering maybe, to determine how confident you were in your opinions.

And when he realized you’re very confident in your opinions, he also realized he wasn’t gonna be able to groom you that way.

And then, he made an abrupt heart change to acting kind and egalitarian. That’s where you saw that shift when he realized you weren’t looking for the strong, like take charge type. She’s looking more for a partner. It sounds like it was either arguing or everything was perfect.

Denise: Yeah, that is how it felt and that’s the way it was. It was extreme.

Better Communication Won’t Make His Heart Change

Anne: They use communication in this way to manipulate. That’s why learning to communicate better doesn’t solve an abuse problem, and that’s why the Betrayal Trauma Recovery Living Free strategies are so important. Using those strategies will help you see what their true intent is and what they’re actually doing.

So he was using those tactics on you, and you didn’t realize it because, why would you? We’re not educated on what to do if he says doesn’t love us.

Did you know about any porn use?

Denise: That was really important for me to talk to him about before the wedding. He said he had a bo