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

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Reader Asks: My Husband Says He Loves Me, So Why Does He Seem to Hate Being Around Me?

“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.”

My Answer: Some Men Don't Marry Women They Like. They Marry Women They Expect to Take Care of Them.

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.

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