You know, I want to sit with this for a second, because “wife avoids physical contact” – those four words are carrying a lot of weight for you. I can feel that.
Here’s what I want to say first. When your wife pulls back physically, the story your nervous system immediately tells you is probably something like, “She doesn’t want me. I’m not enough. She’s not attracted to me. Something is broken here.” That story is so loud it can drown out everything else.
But let me offer you a different lens.
Physical intimacy, touch, closeness – these are genuinely vulnerable places for most people. Not just some people. Most people. And vulnerability has a habit of making us retreat, not advance. So her pulling back might not be a statement about you at all. It might be a statement about how scary it feels for her to be close right now, for reasons that may have very little to do with how she feels about you.
Now here’s the part that matters. Your pain around this, your longing for her touch, your fear that she doesn’t want you – that is real and it deserves to be taken seriously. The hurt you feel when she pulls away, that is attachment pain. It is some of the most profound pain a human being can experience. And I would guess that the way that pain shows up for you, maybe you pursue a little, maybe you get quiet and withdrawn, maybe you get frustrated – that behavior of yours is probably landing on her in a way that makes her want to retreat even more.
Do you see the cycle? You reach, she retreats. She retreats, you reach harder or you shut down. She feels that, she retreats more.
Neither of you is the villain here. Both of you are scared.
The work is not to get your wife to be a confident, playful, comfortable person with physical intimacy. That bar might be too high, and shooting for it can actually make things worse. The real work is whether the two of you can start to say out loud, to each other, that this is a scary place. For both of you. In different ways. And whether you can start to get curious together about what is underneath her pulling back, without her feeling managed or pressured, and without you feeling invisible and unwanted.
The magic is always in the repair, in the reaching toward each other through the discomfort, not in arriving at some perfect comfortable destination.
Is she someone who could talk about what physical closeness feels like for her? That might be the first door worth knocking on.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Feeling Disconnected from Spouse? What It Means and What to Do
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