Blog

Graham kept a running count in his head of how many days it had been since they had had sex. He never decided to keep track. The number was just there when he woke up, the way you know what day of the week it is without checking.

So he did what he always did. He got up early and made Margo’s breakfast. He took the kids to school so she could have an extra half hour to herself. He texted her at eleven to tell her she looked beautiful this morning. He came home from work and unloaded the dishwasher before she could get to it. And all evening he watched her. Reading her face. Tracking how tired she seemed. Waiting for a window.

When they got into bed and she said she was worn out, something in him went cold and quiet. He rolled over and didn’t say anything. She could feel it anyway.

Graham would tell you he had been trying to love his wife all day. He would tell you he had been more attentive that day than a lot of husbands are in a month.

Margo would tell you she felt watched.

How pursuit shows up

Pursuit rarely looks like pursuit from the inside. It looks like effort. It looks like a person who is trying very hard and cannot understand why it isn’t working.

The spouse who wants sex more often is often the one doing it, and it takes a lot of different shapes.

Sometimes it’s the helping. You do the dishes, you fold the laundry, you handle bedtime. If the night ends the way it usually ends, something in you sours, and the next day the helping gets a little thinner.

Sometimes it’s the touching. A hand on the hip in the kitchen. A hug that lasts a beat too long. Fingertips on the small of her back. Each one is a test. She knows they’re tests, which is why she goes stiff at the sink.

Sometimes it’s the compliments. You tell her she’s beautiful, which is true, and you tell her often, which is also true, and part of you is keeping track of whether it’s working.

Sometimes it’s the research. You’ve read the articles. You’ve listened to the podcasts. You bring it all to her as evidence that this matters. You are making a case.

Sometimes it’s the monitoring. You know what her face looked like when she got home. You know whether she laughed at your joke.

Sometimes it’s the pulling back. She says no and you go quiet for two days. You’d say you’re protecting yourself. She experiences two days of a colder house.

And sometimes it’s just the asking. Over and over. Different words, same question.

All of that can come from someone who loves their spouse very much. His attention has gotten pointed in one direction, and he has stopped being able to tell attention and love apart.

If she said yes tonight, would tomorrow look different? Would you be more interested in her day? Would you touch her more freely? Would you be easier to live with?

If the answer is yes, then what she’s getting from you is a transaction.

What a transaction can’t buy

Men make transactions for sex all the time. Sometimes it’s said out loud. “If I get the kids down, can we?” More often it’s silent. The dishes get done, the errand gets run, bedtime gets handled, and there’s a bill attached that nobody mentions.

Saying it out loud doesn’t make it worse, and keeping it quiet doesn’t make it better. Both are trades.

The trouble with the trade isn’t that trading is beneath you. Couples trade constantly and most of it is fine. The trouble is what you’re trying to buy.

A transaction can buy sex. It can buy her yes. It cannot buy her wanting you.

Her wanting you is what you’re actually after.

So you do the dishes, and you get the “yes,” and afterward you feel worse and can’t account for it. You got the thing you asked for. You didn’t get the thing you wanted. And then you decide the answer is more sex, and you start over.

What she learns from all of this is that her body is the currency in your house. If she wants a peaceful weekend, there’s a price. If she wants you warm at breakfast, there’s a price. Plenty of women in our culture came into marriage already carrying the idea that their body is something other people have a claim on.

And her “yes” stops meaning anything to you, because you bought it. A “yes” you paid for doesn’t reassure anybody.

What’s underneath it

Anxiety is underneath almost all of this.

The count in Graham’s head was never about sex. It was a reading on whether he was okay. Eleven days meant he was failing, or she had stopped wanting him, or something was wrong that nobody was saying out loud. The number went up and so did his anxiety.

Pursuit is what anxiety does when it has nowhere else to go.

And anxiety doesn’t stay in your body. It goes into the room and she feels it. She may not be able to tell you what she’s picking up, but she’s picking up something, and her body answers it before her mind does.

That’s why your wanting lands on her as pressure. Wanting by itself isn’t pressure. Anxious wanting is. When you come to her stirred up and needing the answer to be yes, you are asking her to settle you down, and that is a much bigger request than the one you said out loud.

It’s also why her no is so hard to take. A settled person can hear no and stay warm, because the no isn’t telling him anything about his worth. When you’re anxious, it is.

Settling yourself is your work. Handing it to your wife is how it got like this.

“I want you to love me” is not “I love you”

Those two sentences feel almost identical when you’re the one saying them. They are not the same sentence.

“I love you” points outward. It’s about her. It’s a statement about where your attention is and what you’re committed to.

“I want you to love me” points back at you. It’s about how you feel when she chooses you, how you feel when she wants you, how you feel when you have proof that you matter to her.

Both of those are real. Both of those are human. Wanting your spouse is good, and wanting to be wanted by your spouse is good. I never want anyone to hear me say that desire is the problem. The problem is when we take “I want you to love me,” turn it into service and compliments and attentiveness, and hand it to our spouse as love. And then feel wronged when she doesn’t receive it as love.

She can feel the difference. She usually can’t explain it. She just knows his attention has something attached to it and she can’t relax into it. This is why so many wives sit on a Zoom call with me and say some version of, “He’s so attentive. He does so much. And I feel awful, because I should love it, and instead I want to hide.”

She isn’t being ungrateful.

This isn’t only something husbands do. Noelle is the one in her marriage who wants sex more often. Her version of pursuit looks like being endlessly available. Saying yes to everything he asks for. Agreeing to whatever he wants to do on the weekend. Never being the difficult one. Staying pleasant. And then lying awake resenting him for not noticing what all of that was for.

Sterling has his own version. When she brings it up, he tells her that if she really loved him, she’d stop making him feel like a disappointment. He has taken his own want, which is to feel like enough, and turned it into the measure of her love.

What Noelle is after isn’t sex either. She wants evidence that he’s glad he married her. The availability is how she asks for it, and she has never once said that out loud.

They are both doing it. They are both saying “I want you to love me” and calling it love. And neither one of them is lying.

Neither one has asked the other question. What would it actually mean to love the other person?

What loving someone actually means

Love is what happens when your attention is on the other person and all the good that they do and who they are, including in the moments when nothing is coming back to you.

Everything else in this episode comes back to that.

Intention isn’t the same as love. Graham intended love the entire day. What Margo got was a man watching her.

Most of us use our intentions as evidence. I meant well, so it was love. I wasn’t trying to pressure her, so it wasn’t pressure. Your intention tells you something true about you. It tells you nothing about what your spouse experienced.

You need both. What you meant is yours to know. What she felt is hers. The work is being able to hear hers without arguing that your intention should have cancelled it out.

Mormon described charity as something that seeketh not her own (Moroni 7:45). I used to read that verse as a rule about generosity. It’s a description of what love is made of. Love that seeks its own outcome has quietly turned into something else, and it doesn’t matter how much effort is going into it.

Most of us spend our energy on the wrong question. Does he love me? Does she love me? Am I getting what I’m supposed to be getting here? That question can take up an entire marriage.

The question that belongs to you is whether you are loving your spouse.

We were never commanded to get love. We were commanded to love. “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34).

None of that means putting up with being treated badly. Your side of it is the only part you can actually work on.

So what does that look like in a marriage?

It looks like knowing her. What she’s worried about right now. What she’s proud of. What she’s dreading on Thursday. John Gottman’s research found that couples still married six years after their wedding had turned toward each other’s small bids for connection 86 percent of the time. Couples who had divorced had turned toward each other 33 percent of the time. A bid is small. It’s “look at this.” It’s a sigh. Love is answering those.

It looks like touch that doesn’t lead anywhere. If every time you touch her she has to calculate what it means, you have taught her that your touch is a question. You can teach her something different, and it takes time.

It looks like her no not costing her anything. If she can say no and the next day looks exactly like it would have looked, she’s safe with you. If she can’t, she isn’t, and no amount of dishes will change that. Being safe to say no to is one of the most loving things you can offer another person.

It looks like being interested in her when nothing is on the table. Ask about her day when you both know nothing is happening.

It looks like wanting good things for her that have nothing to do with you. Her friendships. Her health. Her Saturday morning to herself. The thing she’s been wanting to try and hasn’t.

And in sex, love looks like paying attention to what she’s experiencing instead of watching for whether it’s working. It looks like being willing to stop. It looks like not needing her to perform enthusiasm to make you feel okay about yourself. It looks like her pleasure not being your scorecard, because the second it becomes your scorecard, she’s back to managing your experience instead of having her own.

I believe most people who pursue this hard are capable of every one of those things. They’ve been spending all their relational energy in one place and there’s nothing left over for the rest.

All of that is written to the one who’s been pursuing. There’s a version of it for the one who’s been pursued, and it isn’t only about putting up with him.

Loving him isn’t the same as managing him. A lot of wives get very good at managing. You learn his patterns, you read his mood, you time the conversation, you keep the house calm. That’s not love. That’s what you do when you’re handling a situation instead of being with a person.

Loving him might look like getting curious about what he’s actually reaching for, which is usually not sex. It might look like telling him what his attention feels like on your end, instead of going stiff at the sink and waiting for him to figure it out. It might look like letting him have his disappointment without fixing it or absorbing it.

You have your own version of “I want you to love me” too. Yours might sound like wanting him to want you in a way that doesn’t ask for anything. Wanting to be chosen without being pursued. That’s a real want, and it’s yours to say out loud. It isn’t his to guess.

Why we mix these up

We confuse pursuit with love because pursuit feels stronger.

Longing is intense. Wanting your spouse and not getting to have them is a feeling you can’t ignore. Settled love is quiet. So we read the intensity as the measure. He must love her so much. Look how much he wants her.

Our brains aren’t reliable here. In 1974, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Men who had just crossed a high, frightening suspension bridge showed more attraction toward a woman they met at the other end than men who had crossed a low, stable one. Their bodies were stirred up for one reason and they attributed it to another. We do this in marriage constantly. We take agitation, anxiety, and rejection, and we file all of it under love.

We also grew up on stories where the chase is the love story. The grand gesture wins her. Persistence is the virtue and the man who doesn’t give up is the hero. Almost nobody writes a story about the guy who paid quiet attention to his wife.

And a lot of us spent our whole adolescence being told desire was dangerous and we needed to shut it down. Then we got married and were told the same desire was now good and holy. Nobody taught us what to do with it in between. So it comes into the marriage undeveloped, and it becomes the only vocabulary we have for closeness.

I think that’s especially true for men in our congregations. Sex is one of the few places a man has been given any permission at all to want something, to be soft, to say out loud that he wants another person. So everything else gets funneled into it. The loneliness. The stress. Wanting to be admired. When your spouse says no to sex, her no lands on all of it at once. That’s why it hits so hard, and that’s why the pursuit doesn’t stop.

That’s an explanation, and it doesn’t get you off the hook. If sex has become the only place you know how to be close to your wife, that is yours to work on. Building other ways to be known, other places to put stress, other kinds of closeness. That’s your job, not hers.

There’s one more reason, and it’s the one I see most often. Being wanted and being loved feel similar from the inside if you’ve never had much of either. If you grew up in a home where attention was scarce, someone wanting you is the closest thing to being cherished you’ve ever felt. So you go looking for wanting, and you offer wanting, because it’s the only thing you know how to offer.

Back to Graham and Margo

Graham had most of that working on him at once. What changed for him didn’t start with doing less. It started with him telling Margo about the count in his head.

He told her he’d been keeping track. He told her everything he did around the house had a number attached to it. He told her he understood why she’d been going stiff when he touched her in the kitchen.

She cried, because she finally had words for something she’d been feeling.

Then he had to do the work, which was slower and less satisfying than the conversation. He started asking her questions in the morning. He touched her and let go. When she said no, he made himself stay warm for the next twenty-four hours, and I want to be honest that the first several times, he was faking it. Doing it before he felt it. When he was stirred up, he took it somewhere other than to Margo. A run. A hard conversation with a friend. Sometimes letting it be uncomfortable and not doing anything about it.

It was a long time before Margo stopped bracing.

What she told him then was that she had never once doubted he wanted her. What she’d doubted was whether he liked her.

Pursuit says I want you. It can’t say I see you.

Noelle and Sterling are further back than Graham and Margo. What they’ve started doing is saying the real thing. She has told him that her availability was never generosity. He has admitted that “if you loved me you’d stop” was the only way he knew to say he felt like a failure. That’s the beginning of it.

If you’re the one who’s been pursuing, you may not be failing at love. You may have never learned it was a separate skill from wanting. That’s learnable, and it’s yours to learn. Your spouse can’t hand it to you.

If you’re the one who’s been pursued, some of this is yours too. Your spouse’s wanting is not an attack on you, and pulling all the way back isn’t a strategy. You can get curious about what he’s actually reaching for. You can say plainly what would help you feel safe.