Why They Stopped Trying & How to Make Them Want You Again

And then over the next few weeks, you feel some distance. Now, that to me feels right on cue. This was an email from Rain, who says, hi, Jams. Big fan of your podcast, and I can honestly credit Matthew for helping me secure my first real, healthy relationship. I'm hoping you can all help me once more, as I can't tell if this stage of my relationship is normal or not. I just made it to nine months with my boyfriend and noticed some of the attention I'd received before has started to lessen. Up until nine months ago, I'd only ever dated F boys. I'm gonna keep, I feel like I'm enjoying the cleanness of these podcasts, so I'm gonna eliminate the swear.

F, of course, stands for fun boys.

Fun boys. That's great. Yeah, let's go for fun boys. I've only dated fun boys.

This is so PG-13.

So I'm having trouble discerning a red flag from potentially normal behavior. We both just turned 30 and were each other's first serious relationships. During our early dating months, he was very consistent, respectful, sweet, and attentive. For instance, he always wished me a safe flight before trips, remembered important meetings or opportunities I had going on, and texted me before each appointment to wish me luck, followed up on things happening in my life, etc. During month 7, I went on a week-long trip to Europe to meet his family. I'm the first girlfriend he's ever introduced, and everything went really well. At the end of the trip, he even asked me to move in with him when both our apartment leases are up next summer. However, the high we were on after the trip started to reduce and over the last three weeks he's felt a bit more distant. I'm not sure what's changed. We haven't had a fight or anything happen out of the ordinary. He's been quieter and more reserved lately and when I ask him about it he says he's fine. He's also stopped saying I love you and being physically affectionate though we're still having sex regularly. However, I'm confused because I'm spending the holidays with him and his family and today he asked if we should extend our time in Europe for Christmas. Also, as I was getting ready to leave his apartment late afternoon on Sunday, he asked me to stay over, even though we were sitting pretty far from each other in bed watching TV, not speaking. As I've only dated fun boys until now, I don't trust my judgment to know if these are red flags or if he's just getting comfortable and doesn't feel the need to put in the same effort to keep me. I don't want to be blind, but I'm also unsure if it's my anxious attachment rearing its head. As guys become more comfortable in relationships, how can we tell the difference between comfort versus them losing feelings? Thanks so much for the work you guys do. you are truly doing the Lord's work for women. And that is from Rainn.

Great name, Rainn.

You know, when you know yourself that you can have some anxious attachment and some kind of natural, a natural anxious hum, and you then find that something shifts in someone's energy, either because of things they're no longer saying or things they're no longer doing or just things you don't feel from them. Is it down to your anxiety and your anxiety is just making too much of it or has something changed that is actually worth worrying about?

I'm thinking about times if I have had that. Some, maybe there have been times where it's clear that something's on the rocks. and feelings have changed. Sometimes if my Spidey sense goes off for something like that, it's because I've done something that I haven't been cognizant of and I've done something that's upset someone or I didn't know something hurt their feelings and I forgot their birthday. You forgot their birthday. So that can happen and you can get like work yourself into a, you know, internal frenzy thinking, Oh shit, like has everything changed and you know, something happened or you know, what's going on? And I've always hated that feeling of being in the dark about something. Like I feel I just need to, okay, let's just get out on the table whatever's going on. If there's something conversation we need to have, if something's going on, if you're worried about something, I hate that feeling of just watching something simmer when your Spidey sense is tingling. So I've got a lot of empathy for what Rain's going through. and I think we we get scared of saying I feel this right now, like I'm feeling this energy. We are very, very scared to do that because we feel like we're going to set things on a spiral of getting even worse. Well, I think that's the situation I think she's in.

When you're anxious, the instinct, if you're going to have a conversation, is to be like, look, if you're going to break up with me, just say it. Right. If you're gonna leave, just tell me now. Just put me out of my misery. You know, there's a anxiety that at its extreme just makes you wanna like get bad news over with, you know, that's the extreme of that feeling. But of course, that kind of conversation, that kind of communication is not necessarily productive for the relationship.

You know, not to get personal, but in times with us, for instance, where you're busy and you're not giving me as much sort of attention maybe as I think you normally would. And if it extends to a period of time, I'm always one for bit saying to you, like recently, I've just been feeling a little bit XYZ. And I think it's about communicating that in a way where you're not, you're not berating the person, but you're just explaining that, you know, you're just feeling a little bit. unloved or a little bit, you know, I don't know what the word is, but you know what I'm saying, right? And I think sometimes just being able to get that emotion out on a table, what it shows to the other person is that you're not afraid to have that conversation and that you're always going to put your happiness and your needs ahead of the fear of them leaving.

I see anxiety as a a measuring tool that's really valuable, but also the reader on it is really, really, really sensitive. And the sensitivity of that reader is it can be a liability because it can have you not only picking up on things that aren't necessarily there, which by the way, it will also pick up on everything that is there because the reader is so sensitive that it will you will be right one times out of four.

Correct, which is why it's hard.

Which is why it's hard because when you are right the one time out of four or out of three, it's very validating and you're like, this is why I need this reader. This is why I need this because this tells me when there's danger. Think about how important what I'm about to say must be for me to interrupt my own video. Well, here's why it's important. It's gonna change your love life. and it's free. If you want to know why someone may have faded out, why they may have disappeared, why all of a sudden it felt like the momentum was lost with this person, go to whyhesgone.com where I talk about the main reasons someone disappears. Go check it out, whyhesgone.com and now let's go back to the video. But when we're high in anxiety, it also reads everything. It reads, oh, there's an earthquake, and someone just closed a door downstairs, and you felt the vibration of the door, and it reads it as an earthquake. That to me is anxiety, and it's what makes it both something that protects us and something that we start to worry we can't trust. So we almost have to do the counterintuitive thing in those situations. which is to maintain a sense of calm, which is to maintain really strong communication, and sometimes to try to have a wider lens on the situation so that our demons don't just take the wheel. I almost want to set a bit of context for this, right? Because they've been going strong for seven months, and then in month seven, they take a week-long trip to see his family. Now, that's a significant step for some people. That moment where you go and take someone to see your family, if you haven't done it in seven months and now you're doing it, then that probably means something to that person. And then probably what's happened, if at the end of the trip he asked you to move in with him, is probably because he took you home to his family and it was extremely validating. Everyone thought you were awesome. He heard amazing reviews and they said, She's really great. I like her. And when you hear that from people that you love and trust, it's a big needle mover because you say, oh, I'm not crazy. My radar isn't off. This person is great. And so when you get that approval, for someone, it makes you want to double down on that person. So then he said, why don't we move in together? Now that's another big step. So there's that high, there's that excitement of talking about moving in together. And then over the next few weeks, you feel some distance. Now that to me, feels not that it happens all the time, but that feels right on cue. The idea that he took you to meet his family, you got even closer. He said, based on all the reviews, that he wants to move in together because he was on that high. And now all of a sudden, he's probably had a little bit of, oh, my God, wow, this is getting this is getting more serious. And what you may be feeling from him is distance. But what he's feeling inside is, this is, you know, all through my 20s, I didn't have serious relationships. I'm now in a serious relationship, and I know I'm in a serious relationship because my family have met her and everyone knows now that I'm in a relationship and we've talked about moving in together and that's a really big step. So there's a good chance that he's in his head right now. That it's not that he likes you any less in any objective sense or loves you any less. It's that he's now got in his head about the big changes that are happening. and by the way, let's also remember, if this is his first serious relationship, then he also has not necessarily learned certain lessons yet about what it takes to sustain a relationship. That after that initial excitement, after that initial high, that it has to be cultivated. and you have to continue to invest in the excitement of the relationship. And he may not have the tools right now to be able to do that. And you may not have the tools right now to be able to do that. That doesn't mean it won't last. It just means that you guys are still learning those tools. So what you're reading from him is potentially not some, some terminal. loss of excitement, but instead a kind of a feeling from him that, wow, this is serious. That's made me a bit scared. You're reading my fear as I don't like you anymore or I don't love you anymore. But it's just fear. And I don't know how to process it because I haven't been in a long-term relationship before. And also, There may be a little bit of, I don't know how to continue to cultivate the excitement in a relationship after that initial, dazzling honeymoon period of the first eight months.

When I listened to this, I just sense that she's actually being too distant here. And I'm not even interested in her communicating so much. I'm interested in her doing. Like, I'm interested in her, Go try sitting next to him a little bit. Go ahead and try to create the culture of your relationship. You can't like, Hey, I have this big meeting, just wanted to call and say, I love you. Hopefully you'll wish me luck. You know, just go ahead and set that state. And then when you're in these moments of togetherness and love, don't stop treating him like a fun boy. You need to like do the thing that you want to happen in your relationship, whether it's sex or intimacy or cuddling. and then just explain like, oh my God, I loved that. But I just think she's kind of frozen. So maybe she's hyper anxious and sensitive to these things and she's keeping a lot of track of it. But I think it's really, she's not doing anything. She's just, she's letting, she's following his lead and they're both just out of their depth right now and they're not sure what to do.

If you take Esther Perel's dichotomy, between love and desire. And of course, in her famous book, Mating in Captivity, she refers to the paradox of love and desire within a relationship. If you think about it, when you first meet someone, what's driving you? Desire. Desire says, There's a stranger over there. I think there's something attractive about them. I want to get to know them better, and I want them to like me. So, desire starts to make the two of you magnets if there's mutual attraction. Now, the more you start to close down the mystery elements and the more you get to know each other, you start to develop feelings of love. Feelings of love start to bring you even closer together. So, it's like love pulls you together and then, sorry, desire pulls you together. And then love magnifies that. But love can keep magnifying that to the point where all of a sudden there is no space between the two of you. And when there's no space between the two of you anymore, desire gets suffocated. When desire gets suffocated, what's left is just love. And when it's only love that's left, I think this is a very good paraphrasing of of Esther Perel's work. When it's only love that is left, all of a sudden you are losing that mechanism that creates excitement, that creates that kind of visceral attraction.

When we first meet someone and we are in those desire stages, we are firing on all cylinders in terms of decoy in the sort of the work of who wrote the five love languages?

Gary Chapman.

Gary Chapman. So to talk about the five love languages, you know, one of the things he mentioned in his book is that in the beginning of relationships, you are just doing all of them all the time. You're buying gifts, you're being thoughtful, you're touching each other all the time, you're complimenting each other, you're literally just firing on all cylinders, which is how create attraction and love is created. is that you make each other feel so unbelievably special because you're literally trying to just fan the flame of the relationship as much as possible. And when you get comfortable or you start entering the more sort of.

You.

Know, loving and kind of the later stages of the relationship, I think people do just naturally kind of revert back to what their sort of baseline is when it comes to those things. And You know, him being really thoughtful and messaging all the time before interviews and before flights. To me, that actually speaks more to that point, which is that in the beginning he was probably being overly thoughtful because of where you were at. I think a lot of those early stages of sort of like outpouring a lot of energy into each other comes from a place of making sure that person stays. and making sure that person likes us and loves us and falls for us. So once we've got that, the kind of, you know, the drive to do it becomes, actually has to just come from a place of character. And I think there's something to that, which is it can feel really different from the beginning to a little bit in.

Some of our desire to keep treating our partner with the same level of Love and attention and verbal acknowledgement has to be intrinsic, right? It has to be a standard we have for ourselves. And I think that one of the things that this situation has is two people who are young and in their first serious relationship who are learning that lesson for the first time, which is amazing. But it has to come from a place of, as you say, character. There has to be some intrinsic desire to say, I'm going to keep the standard high in this relationship by giving to my partner, by acknowledging them, by telling them I love them, by reminding them how beautiful I find them. But the other side of that is that We, that is much easier if our partner takes responsibility for stoking the flames of that in whatever ways they can. If your intrinsic standard for wanting to continue to give to your partner on that level meets an ownership by them, to continue to keep you desiring them. That's a really, really good combination. So what I'm saying with that is, Rain, it's not your job to give him an intrinsic character that keeps his standards high. That's his job to do that in a relationship. It's your job to set the standard for him that you want to be with someone. who has high standards for that. But you can take ownership for saying, I also want to be the kind of person that keeps his desire high by doing whatever I can. And this is what's interesting to me in terms of that love desire model, is we can take a step back and go, is there anything that I could be doing to create more desire in my relationship. A conversation that you have with someone where you tell them that you've noticed they don't do these things as much recently and you would like them to, that will improve the communication in the relationship and that will be a vulnerable act and it will improve the kind of sense of knowing each other deeply, but it won't necessarily improve desire. In fact, for a lot of people, it might read as one more thing that they have to do and one more kind of stress that they have that, oh, I've now got to do this and I'm doing it because I'm being asked to do it, which doesn't make me feel like I'm desiring it. It makes me feel like I'm fulfilling an obligation. That doesn't make it wrong to have those conversations. It just means that we have to take responsibility for doing the things that that create desire without them ever knowing that we're creating desire. Like, I joked with you, Audrey, I was like, you, you're wearing a lovely outfit today. Thank you. And I joked because I was like, you having the conversation with me to let me know that you've not been feeling something from me recently and you'd love it if I could work on that. Will help because I have an intrinsic desire to want to make you happy and to want to have a great relationship. But it will probably work just as well for you to put on that outfit today.

That's so true. That's kind of what I was trying to get at, where it's like, you can do so much with just that little note you said. Audrey's wearing a nice dress today, and that kind of just like, makes Matt forget about whatever else might scare him.

Also, I think that when you go out and, you know, someone's wearing a nice, it's like, I really believe in the power of just going, going out, leaving the house, go out together, you know, let him witness you being witnessed by other people.

Even if it's just, even if it's just a walk, you could go out and walk around the neighborhood. Like, this is an interesting. one last Esther point, which is you can go on a walk and just talk together, and that's very much love, right? That's the coming together. But if you decide to wear those yoga pants on the walk that look a little bit spicy, and you just walk by some other people and like you realize like, oh, she just got attention from that other person. Like those yoga pants just created all kinds of desire, and then suddenly you have the best of both worlds. You're getting close and connected on the walk, and also she got some spicy yoga pants.

Yeah, because the lion comes out again. Yeah. He's like, hey, you know, what is someone just. Someone just looked at her. Oh, she's attractive. Oh, she's like this person that's desired out there in the world as a stranger. These people that don't know her, they feel immense desire because she's a stranger to them.

I.

The, you know, what may have changed is simply this person's not a stranger to me, but that doesn't change how desirable this person is. But put a lion in a cage for too long and it stops acting like a lion. And that's what it is sometimes to sit at home all the time with someone and to, like I said, you may go on work trips, but that's not the same thing. If you go on work trips and then you're at home together and you're sitting around, it's still, you're still not bringing out the lion. So, and that lion is what got him to this point, by the way. That lion that desired something, that wanted something, that was like, my family like you. That must mean that you're as wonderful as I think you are. I better move to the next stage of this. Let's move in together. That's the lion talking. And it's about bringing that, continuing to bring that out. And of course, I don't want to take responsibility away from him. It's also about the communication that makes him realize that there's a standard you want. for the relationship, which is that the two of you keep trying for each other. Wait, before YouTube sends you down the rabbit hole of watching raccoon videos or videos of large crocodiles on Florida golf courses, I have something that will help your love life more than these things. And it's at whyhe'sgone.com if you want to know why someone faded out, why they were giving you attention and all of a sudden they stopped. This guide shows you. Go to whyhe'sgone.com and then enjoy your baby bear videos.