Does My Husband Hate Me? He Acts As If He Does (Reader Asks)

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“My husband loves me but doesn’t like me.
I know my husband loves me. But he doesn’t like me anymore. Anytime I try to extend any type of affection, or any attempt at connection it’s rejected. He barely wants to talk unless it’s him talking. I have to ask him to listen and for him to put his phone down and pay attention. When I try to be physical, even my leg resting on his he pulls away. This most recent time he moved me away and when I said I was just trying to connect he said “ew why do you say it like that” idk what to do.

We have a baby that’s between 11 months and 12 months and I know people say don’t talk about divorce the first year but we are nearing it and I still feel so unwanted or liked. Idk what to do.”

I think you should take your own observation seriously: your husband may love you in whatever way he understands love, but he is behaving like a man who does not particularly enjoy you, seek your company, or want intimacy with you. And I don’t think you should spend your time trying to talk yourself out of noticing that. Being technically loved is an extremely low bar for a marriage. You are allowed to want a husband who actually seems happy to have you beside him.

There is also a much uglier possibility here that I think women are often discouraged from considering. Patriarchal conditioning teaches men that a wife is supposed to provide an enormous amount of value to their lives without necessarily being someone they genuinely enjoy as a person. A woman cooks, cleans, manages the household, provides emotional support, has children, organizes family life, facilitates a man’s career, and makes a home comfortable. Meanwhile, men are given little to non-existent cultural cues to ask themselves whether they actually like the woman performing all this labor.

This creates a particularly depressing version of heterosexual marriage in which a man can be deeply attached to his wife while having very little interest in her as an individual. He may love what she provides, or the family structure they’ve built. He may love the security of having a permanent partner who will organize his life. He may even sincerely believe that he loves her. But none of those things necessarily mean that he enjoys her company, respects her personality, is curious about her thoughts, or desires genuine intimacy with her. He just loves what she does for him, actually.

And I think this is very relevant for your situation.

Because you’re not describing a husband who is simply less physically affectionate than you are. You’re describing someone who repeatedly rejects attempts at connection, in a hurtful or rude way. You have to ask him to put down his phone and listen to you. Conversation seems to happen primarily on his terms. When you initiate physical contact, he moves away from you. And when you tried to explain that you were reaching for him because you wanted to feel connected, he responded with “ew, why do you say it like that?”

You’re right, that is a profoundly unpleasant thing to hear from the person you’re supposed to be most intimate with.

And I don’t think you should be worrying about whether you’re ‘too needy’ for wanting to put your leg against your husband’s. You’re not asking for an unreasonable amount of affection. You’re just asking for the most basic experience of feeling like your presence is wanted by your spouse.

The baby is also important here, of course, but probably not in the way people mean when they tell women to wait out the first year. Having an eleven or twelve-month-old can absolutely make a relationship exhausted, sexually disconnected, and temporarily less romantic. Sleep deprivation is real. New parenthood is difficult. Some couples go through periods where they have very little energy for one another.

But exhaustion doesn’t explain contempt. It doesn’t explain repeatedly rejecting ordinary bids for connection. It certainly doesn’t explain making your wife feel disgusting for trying to articulate a perfectly normal desire for basic human closeness.

And I particularly dislike the advice that women shouldn’t consider divorce during the first year after having a baby, as though there is some morally significant twelve-month waiting period during which they are required to endure whatever marriage they’ve ended up with.

If a relationship is temporarily struggling because both people are exhausted, fine. Give it time if you want to. But if you are discovering that your husband fundamentally does not want intimacy, companionship, or even ordinary physical affection with you, you don’t have to spend another year proving that you’re patient enough.

I also want you to pay attention to what happens when you stop doing the work of connection. Who initiates conversations? Who initiates affection? Who notices the emotional distance? Who tries to repair it? Who asks for attention? Who is responsible for making sure the marriage still feels like a marriage?

Because there is a familiar heterosexual pattern here: the woman notices that the relationship is emotionally dead and starts trying increasingly hard to revive it, while the man becomes increasingly irritated by her attempts. She interprets his withdrawal as evidence that she needs to try harder. He interprets her attempts to connect as pressure. She becomes more anxious, he becomes more avoidant, strictly speaking about behavior, because I’m not a fan of attachment styles theory. Eventually she is spending enormous amounts of energy trying to obtain scraps of affection from somebody who has stopped offering them voluntarily.

Don’t do that to yourself. You cannot love someone hard enough to make them like you. You cannot communicate your way into becoming desirable to someone who has decided he doesn’t want intimacy with you or who decided it’s simply more convenient to let you do all the relationship maintenance work.

And you certainly cannot perform enough domestic labor to earn affection from a man who has learned to regard your labor as his entitlement. So I would stop trying to solve the question “How can I get my husband to want me or like me?”

That’s his problem. The question for you is: “Do I want to live in a marriage where I have to repeatedly ask my husband to tolerate my affection?”

There is a huge difference between being theoretically loved and being actually appreciated or cherished, and women are routinely encouraged to accept the former when they are desperately asking for the latter.

I also think you should look very carefully at what your husband is contributing to this marriage beyond the assertion that he loves you. Does he actively parent? Does he take responsibility for domestic work? Does he make your life easier? Does he seek your company? Does he express appreciation? Does he initiate affection? Does he care about your inner world? Does he seem interested in you as a person? Because I bet he is falling short on contributing equal effort in many other aspects of your relationship, too.

If the answer to most of those questions is no, then I would be very skeptical of the idea that the problem is simply that your husband has fallen out of keeping up with some romantic habit during the baby year. It may be that he loves having a theoretical wife far more than he loves being married to a real woman.

There is another piece of this that I don't want you to overlook: you are caring for two very young children, which is an enormous amount of physical and emotional labor even under the best circumstances, and from your letter it sounds like you are receiving very little emotional support from the person who is supposed to be your partner. And this is precisely when he has chosen to withdraw affection, attention, and companionship from you.

I am particularly wary of that dynamic because affection can become a form of leverage in an unequal relationship: when a woman is already exhausted, isolated, and desperate for connection, deliberately withholding warmth can keep her chasing the very person who is making her feel unwanted.

Using emotional withdrawal to make an already overwhelmed partner feel even more alone is absolutely an abusive behavior to take seriously, particularly when it occurs alongside the expectation that she will continue providing all the labor of family life.

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You deserve a relationship in which affection doesn’t feel like an intrusion. You deserve to be with someone who doesn’t react to your attempt at closeness as though you’ve committed some social offense. You deserve to feel wanted and accepted in your own home.

And if your husband genuinely wants to repair this marriage, he needs to be the one demonstrating that he understands the problem and is willing to change his behavior. You shouldn’t have to spend the next twelve months or the next twelve years trying to convince a man who supposedly loves you that you are worth talking to, touching, listening to, and enjoying the company of.

Being loved is not enough (assuming some part of him does love you, which I seriously doubt). You are allowed to want to be liked, too.

How Can I Stop Centering My Husband? (Reader Advice)

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Jun 23

Thank you for reading my feminist advice column. For those of you who want help figuring out a particular dynamic, need more clarity about a situation or if you’re just curious what my take would be, feel free to leave me a comment here, or fill in THIS FORM

Am I Expecting Too Much In Relationships? (Reader Letter)

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Jul 9

Thank you for reading my feminist advice column. For those of you who want help figuring out a particular dynamic, need more clarity about a situation or if you’re just curious what my take would be, feel free to leave me a comment here, or fill in THIS FORM