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Hey Cody Butler here, and in this video I want to answer the question of why is my wife no longer physically or sexually attracted to me? Now, this is this is a topic that really hits men hard. There are a few things that a man wants to hear less than I'm not attracted to you anymore, or maybe I love you but I'm not in love with you, or I don't see you that way anymore in the sexual way or the attractive way. You've you become a roommate or a brother, basically. We really don't want to hear this as men. So when men hear this, it's devastating, it can be humiliating, it's confusing, it's very deeply personal. And he immediately starts to search for answers, right? So the average man starts to ask questions around is it my appearance, is it my weight, is it my age, is it my confidence, is there another man? Why have I become unattractive? And really, more importantly, how do I become attractive to her again? Because this is comes down to why am I not getting sex or how do I get more sex? This is a this is a really important question, right? So to answer the question of how do I become attractive again, or how do I get my wife to want to have sex with me or more sex with me, then you have to understand where attraction comes from, what causes it, and equally what causes it to go away. Attraction is not a random arbitrary thing that comes and goes based on a mood. It's something that it's a cause and effect scenario. And attraction is not something that she gives you. Attraction is something that emerges out of the relationship, or more specifically, it emerges from how this woman is experiencing you, how she feels about the relationship, the emotional environment that exists between you and your wife right now. So it emerges when conditions for attraction and sex and sexual activity, sexual desire, the conditions of the relationship naturally support that happening. Now, this is like trying to try to create attraction, is like trying to make ice. All you can do is create the environment and create the conditions that support ice. And when you do that, the ice is going to show up. You need a sub-zero environment and you need you need water. And if you put, if you understand that that's the environment the ice is created, and you bring these things together, then you're going to get ice a hundred times out of a hundred. And again, attraction is very much uh is very much the same. It's can it's environmentally based, it's it's a cause and effect scenario. The fact that she's saying she's not attracted to you or she doesn't have sexual desire towards you, it's not a verdict on you, it's a verdict on how the relationship feels to her, and it's cause and effect. So when we understand the environment, then we can start to work on the environment instead of actually working on her or go, well, what's wrong with her? What's wrong with me? There's nothing wrong with you, and there's nothing wrong with her. So the mistake that most men make is to think that attraction is the problem, but attraction is often it's the scorecard or the reporting on it on a much deeper problem. And like the warning lights on a dashboard, the lights do matter, that is important, the light is important, but it's it's telling you of a deeper problem. Fixing the light does not fix the deeper problem. And you you can maybe get her to have sex with you out of obligation or something like that, but it's not going to actually fix the deeper problem underneath. So the question is not how do I get attraction back, how do I get her to be attracted to me again, or how do I get her to want to have sexual desire towards me. The question is, what is this attraction, or more importantly, what is this lack of attraction trying to reveal to me about the relationship, about the marriage that I need to fix? And if I fix that, then everything is going to get better. So, what most men tend to believe in this situation is that attraction disappears because they got older, they gained weight, they lost confidence, their status changed, or quite often another man appeared on the scene. Like it's just natural to assume that because she's not attracted to you anymore, it must be because she's attracted to somebody else. But while all of these things can contribute to the attraction problem, it's not the root cause. Something deeper has changed, and it's revealing that there's something wrong with the marriage. So I understand that attraction is behaviorally based. And as men, we can understand that because I'm sure if you think there's been a time where you've been attracted to somebody in the past and you found them physically attracting, but then you found something out about that person, something they've done, or something that they've been, someone that they've been with, or something that they've said, and that attraction just disappears. And someone who you found extremely attractive, all of a sudden, almost in the snap of a finger, becomes very unattractive to you because something about their behavior changed. So as men, we can see that attraction and sexual desire is to some extent behaviorally based. To a woman, it's it's much it's much more so. It her attraction or lack of attraction is almost exclusively, at least in this marriage situation, revealing something about behavior within the marriage, not physical attraction that she has for you. So the loss of attraction here is not merely it's not rejection, it's feedback, it's information, and it's revelation about what is going on. So the critical distinction here is when most men, when they hear I'm not attracted to you anymore, they assume that she no longer desires me. Now, desire and attraction are not always the same thing. Attraction is not desire. So attraction is the environment from which the desire emerges. So when the environment that you're in or the environment that you're creating as a man becomes burdensome, exhaustive, exhausting for her, pressurized, emotionally unsafe, the desire disappears long before the love disappears. So this is where you can hear, I love you, but I'm not in love with you. She has an affection towards you, but she has no sexual desire to be with you in that way. And when I say burdensome, exhaust burdensome, exhausting, etc., this is the instability that you'll bring into her nervous system. When she has to regulate you and stabilize you because you're inherently unstable, and if she's if she's acting in a way that you like and can approve of, then you're stable and you're fine. But when when that changes, when she threatens the relationship or she removes sex, or she provides uh stimulus that you don't like in the in the marriage, you become destabilized. She's got to emotionally regulate you now. And instead of her, instead of you bringing that stability into the marriage that she can rest in, instead of you being the protector, the provider, prophet, and priest, she has to assume those roles in the marriage. And she's essentially now assuming the masculine role. She's becoming the man, she's the one that's required to bring stability to the marriage, which is not her role, it's your role. Her role is to sit in the stability that you bring. So and fundamentally, she she brings the instability to the marriage, right? Because she's emotional. She's a woman, that's what she is, that's what she does. A woman brings that emotional element to the relationship. You bring the stability that makes it safe for her to be emotional. Now, those roles have been re-reversed, so you're the one that's emotionally unstable, and she's having to stabilize the situation. Effectively, she's become the man, and you've become in the feminine energy within the marriage, and she's just not going to be attracted to that. One, she wants to be attracted, you know, she's going to be physically attracted to masculine energy, and two, in the necessity for her to bring that masculine energy energy, the stabilizing uh force to the stabilizing energy to the marriage, she's having to stop operating in that feminine energy. So she's not only been forced to operate in a masculine energy, she's also now been forced to abandon her own feminine energy. And of course, this isn't gonna bode well for sexual desire and attraction within the marriage. So the real reason for the attraction collapse is pressure, burden, instability, dependency, and insufficient capacity effectively on you as the man. You don't have the capacity to stabilize the marriage, you don't have the capacity at this point to bring the emotional safety that she requires to be unstable, which she needs to feel like a real woman. So attraction is not the cause of the problem, attraction is actual actually the casualty of the problem. So let's look at the nervous shift uh system shift here. What's required from her to be physically attracted to you and desire you? Well, the the answer is she needs admiration, she needs to feel admiration towards you, she needs to feel appreciation, she needs curiosity, playfulness, and emotional freedom to be unstable when she has that ability. Because remember, she's a woman, she isn't she's a ball of emotional energy, that's what she is, and it's inherently unstable. And when she's forced to be stable, she doesn't feel like a woman anymore. She loses that emotional freedom and it creates pressure. Now, when that pressure is created, instead of admiration, appreciation, etc., showing up, the emotions that she has towards you, she feels vigilance, walking on eggshells. She constantly has to monitor the situation because you're inherently unstable. Are you going to blow up? Are you going to have an episode? Are you going to get triggered? She enters into a management cycle, managing your moods, managing what's going on in the relationship. And this is emotionally laborious to her. This is hard work. This exhausts her. Her nervous system can't be in admiration, appreciation, etc., while at the same time being in vigilance, on high alert, basically essentially being in fight or flight, because that's what's required from her to stabilize this marriage. So the the more energy that is required from her in managing the situation, the less energy remains available for her to assign to attraction. So the hidden dynamic that's going on is that over time the woman becomes increasingly responsible for stabilizing you, for stabilizing the relationship, for managing the emotional tension within the marriage, for managing you, carrying the emotional labor, maintaining the stability of the situation. And particularly as the relationship deteriorates and moves closer and closer to separation and divorce, typically the man is going to become more and more unstable. He's going to need her validation more, he's going to need her approval more. He's going to need to uh he's going to need her to stabilize the relationship because when he when he feels like the marriage is threatened, he becomes inherently unstable. So as she moves more towards separation and divorce, he injects more of the instability into the relationship that's causing the lack of attraction in the first place. So what happens is as she as she moves towards ending the marriage, at the same time, the man's emotional state becomes increasingly dependent on her approval, her validation, her reassurance, her responses, is everything gonna be okay? I know this is I need I need you to validate that I'm okay. I need you to validate that this is gonna be okay. And she's forced to stabilize him. None of this stuff here, that this is the exact opposite to what she needs to feel attracted to you and have desire for you. So a positive interaction at this point stabilizes the man, a negative interaction destabilizes him. If she leads you to believe that she's gonna continue with the divorce, complete destabilization. When she leads you to believe that there's some hope, you become stabilized again. She fundamentally is the stabilizing force within the marriage, which is the masculine role. So the dynamic change here. What needs to change? So the relationship for her, when this happens, is it begins to feel less and less like a partnership, less and less like she's in a marriage and more and more like emotional care taken. You've become effectively an emotional dependent for her, another child. She's fully responsible now for regulating and taking care of your emotional needs, which is the exact opposite experience that she needs to have to be attracted to you and have desire to want to be with you physically. So she begins to carry more and more of the of the man's emotional responsibility and stability than she was ever designed to carry. It's not her role to stabilize you, it's not her role to stabilize the marriage, it's not her role to make you to reassure you that everything's gonna be okay. It's your role to do that, it's your role to bring that stability to the relationship and the marriage. And this is why the attraction is getting less and less. Not only is she forced to behave like a man, how can she have admiration for a man that she's having to stabilize? How can she have admiration for a man that she's needing to emotionally carry? It becomes literally impossible for her to have or to create the conditions that's required for her to be sexually attracted or physically attracted to you. So what this does is create a double burden upon her, to where not only is she carrying herself, uh, she's also carrying the you within the relationship simultaneously. She's not this she's not meant to carry herself or you. This is your job to carry her. So simultaneously, as this is going on, as this burden to carry the man to emotionally stabilize is to stabilize him, it's increasing the emotional labor required, but it's also simultaneously decreasing the admiration that she has for the man, it's decreasing the level of appreciation that she has, and of course, this is devastating to the level of attraction that's going on. She's just simply not going to be attracted to a man who's in this position. Fundamentally, this is a role reversal within the relationship. He's become, effectively, he's become the woman, and he's performing the role of the woman emotionally unstable, needing to be stabilized. And she's now performing the role of the man, the emotionally stabilizing force within the marriage. It's a complete role reversal that's taken place. So the core principle here is that attraction begins to collapse when the level of burden that she has for the marriage exceeds the level of admiration that she has for you or the man. So uh a woman can carry stress, she can carry hardship, she can carry the uncertainty, she can carry the difficulty, and she can bring the stabilization to the marriage that you desperately need to be stabilized, to feel secure, and for you to function as a man, she can do that for a long time. Uh, and this is why the the marriage feels somewhat secure to you for a long period of time because she is carrying that weight and she can do that, but it is at the expense of attraction. The cost, this is not cost neutral. The the fact that she's stabilizing the marriage and keeping you emotionally stable is at the cost of attraction and physical desire. So what she cannot do for a long time is carry the relationship and the emotional burden of the relationship while simultaneously maintaining attraction for you. This is an either-aw scenario. She can either stabilize the relationship or she can maintain attraction, she cannot do both. And while you're giving her no choice but to stabilize the relationship because you're emotionally unsafe when you feel threatened, then she's in a position where she has no choice but to choose stabilizing the relationship at the expense of desire. So what happens here is as the burden on her increases, her admiration falls. When she starts to assume more and more of the masculine role, when she becomes, when she starts to really wear the pants in the relationship, she just simply can't have admiration for that man. She just simply it's not it's not programmed within her at a DNA level for her to have admiration for a man that she's having to emotionally carry. And as that admiration falls, attraction very quickly follows, and then desire very quickly follows. And again, this is why she can say, I love you, but I'm not in love with you. She just cannot have she can respect who you are, and she can respect you as a father or whatever provider. But if she's providing that role within the relationship, she just simply is not, it's not a choice. She's going to be incapable of having that level of attraction towards you. So the bottom line here, man, is like physical attraction, sexual attraction, desire, it cannot thrive, it cannot survive under emotional burden. So attraction in the woman, it just cannot be where there is pressure, where pressure dominates the marriage, where dependency dominates the marriage. Your dependency, where your instability dominates the marriage, and where emotional burden dominates the marriage. All of her energy is going to stabilizing you and the marriage and keeping a calm environment, which means she has no energy left to go into attraction. Remember, this is an either-or scenario. She either chooses stability within the marriage or attraction. She doesn't have the capacity to produce both. So attraction thrives and returns, and desire thrives and returns where safety exists. And I'm talking about emotional safety. If a woman is not feeling emotionally safe, there's not going to be any attraction or desire there. It's just as simple as that. If she's walking on eggshells or the marriage is in a situation where walking on eggshells is constantly the case, there is no attraction, there is no desire. It thrives where admiration exists. It thrives where freedom exists and it thrives where stability exists. And again, this is diagnostic. If attraction has died, or she's saying, I'm not attracted to you anymore, it's not got anything to do with the hair on your head or how big your belly is or another man. She doesn't feel safe. She's struggling to admire what you how you're behaving in the marriage. She doesn't feel free, emotionally free, and there's no stability. This is what this is telling us about the situation. So what is pressure? How do we how if we we have to understand this if we're going to fix this right? So most men misunderstand pressure completely. Pressure is not always conflict fighting, arguing, etc. Pressure often and and the pressure that is destroying desire in your life. It's neediness, it's reassurance it's it's neediness, it's reassurance seeking, it's emotional dependency, it's pursuit, it's constantly monitoring the situation. You know, is everything gonna be okay? What does this mean? It it really becoming completely emotionally dependent on her and needing positive signs that the marriage is gonna be okay. It's about complete and total emotional collapse on your behalf, and it's about outcome of obsession. I just need to know everything. I need you to tell me everything's gonna be okay. I need you to reassure me that everything's going to be okay. So the hidden definition here is the pressure that she's experiencing is the expectation that someone else is going to regulate you. That's what's creating the pressure that you're stable. If if I have outcome certainty that this marriage is going to be saved, if I have outcome certainty that everything's going to be okay, then you're okay. It's the expectation from you that something external to yourself is going to regulate you, or in other words, you have no emotional sovereignty. So, right now, if there's no desire, there's no sexual desire or attraction, then we can say with a high level of certainty that your emotional stability at this point is very dependent on her mood, her approval, her reassurance, her choices, etc. And she has become the sole provider of the stability and she has now sole responsibility for response or for the stabilization and regulation of your nervous system. So let's look at the uh the pressure, the the the transfer dynamic here. So when a man is unable to carry his own discomfort, when he can't sit in the uncertainty that this marriage might not be okay, or she might leave, or she may not be. Attracted to him again when he's unable to sit in that and carry that weight himself, he transfers it back to her. And he does that in the form of pursuit, reassurance seeking, let me know everything's gonna go be okay, monitoring, emotionally flooding the situation, creating pressure, control, manipulation, outcome obsession. There are lot there are lots of mechanisms that men use to try and take that discomfort and remove it. But the problem is all of these mechanisms to remove this discomfort, the relief that she's that you're requiring, it becomes her burden. The relief to to reassure you is placed on her. So the more relief that the man seeks, which ironically, the the closer the marriage moves to a terminal stage to where either she's asked for divorce or the divorce is moving towards being complete, or it's becoming very certain, more certain that the marriage is actually truly going to come to end and end. The more relief the man seeks, the more relief he seeks, the more burden she carries, the more burden that she carries, the less attraction survives the situation. So in his attempt to receive some relief in seeking some some relief of the it actually creates more of the damage that he's looking to get away from. So why attraction cannot be negotiated or she cannot be talked back into being attracted to you? So most men they try to, or a lot of men, they try to restore attraction through explanations, having conversations, persuasion, pressure, logic, you name it. But none of this is gonna work. None of this can work because attraction is not a conclusion. You don't you don't conclude that you're attracted to this person. Attraction is a response. She's responding to her admiration for you. She's responding to how she feels how she looks at you. She's ref she attraction is a response to this, the to the stability of the marriage and the relationship. So what it actually is, it's the it's her nervous system's response to an experience. She has to experience you differently. She has to experience you as that protector, provider, prophet, and priest. When she does, then attraction is just a it becomes a conclusion and a response. When you show up as that protector, provider, prophet, and priest, she can admire you, she can respect you, she can feel safe around you, she can be feminine around you, she can be unstable around you. And her nervous system response to that is be attracted to this man, have desire for this man. So the problem here is ultimately capacity, the capacity that you carry as a man. So most men believe that attraction is lost because they became less attractive. You got older, you you got you put on some weight, etc., or there's another man involved. So that's often just not the case. Often attraction is lost because uh capacity became insufficient. Your your ability to regulate yourself, your ability to sit in the discomfort of a wife who is behaving erratically and behaving very unstably. You just didn't have the capacity to sit with that, and you needed reassurance from her. You needed her to stabilize. And the solution here is to create more capacity as a man to be able to sit in that discomfort to allow her to be unstable. You need to be the one that is regulating the instability, not the one ultimately that is creating it. So often that, as we just said, that the attraction is lost because capacity came became insufficient. So the same instability that creates that pressure, dependency, and emotional burden, it's the same thing that destroys the attraction. They're one and the same thing. So why does capacity here really become the key to turning this situation around? Because she she can become sexually attracted to you again, she can be physically attracted to you again, but your behavior is gonna have to change. And the only way your behavior is gonna change is if you increase your capacity. So ultimately, look at it like this: you've got a level seven problem, and you're a level five man right now, and it's always gonna be a level five problem. We cannot negotiate a level seven problem, right? We can't negotiate it down, we can't talk her into reducing the problem from level seven to level four, but we can increase our capacity as men to become a level eight man. So if you have a level eight, level seven problem and you're a level five man, you've got a problem. That problem's bigger than you, and you're never going to solve it. You just don't have the capacity. But if you've got a level seven problem and you become a level eight, level nine, level ten man, then the problem is smaller than you. You have more capacity than the problem, and the problem becomes very solvable now. And this is fundamentally how we get through life. We grow and we become we develop more capacity to solve problems. So capacity is the ability to remain stable while carrying discomfort as a man. So, and to do that without collapsing, without controlling, without pursuing, without demanding relief from the situation, and without needing to force outcomes to get certainty to make you feel safe again. So most men they don't lose the attraction of their wife because they stopped caring, they lose the attraction of their wife because they lack the capacity that's required to make their wife feel emotionally safe under the pressure of a marriage that is inevitably gonna have problems because every marriage does. So let's look at the sovereign difference. Sovereignty, becoming emotionally sovereign really is the key here. When I say emotionally sovereign, I mean being independent of the situation, to be stable regardless of the situation. So men are gonna fall into a lot of categories, right? They the people pleaser. The people pleaser needs approval from his wife, the controller seeks certainty from the situation, the victim seeks innocence, he wants to be innocent. He doesn't want to be responsible, he wants somebody else to be responsible. But the sovereign, the man who's sovereign, so uh has a sovereign identity and is emotionally sovereign, he's not dependent on his wife. That man seeks growth, that man seeks increased capacity. He doesn't need approval, he doesn't need certainty, and he doesn't need to be absorbed of any blame. That the emotionally sovereign man requires growth of himself because that man understands that attraction does not return because he gets relief. Your wife is not going to be attracted to you because you feel good now, because you feel stable. Attraction returns because he develops capacity, and that capacity in return allows him to stabilize the marriage, to stabilize the situation, to allow her to be unstable, and he's able to sit in that discomfort of an unstable, dysregulated wife for long enough for her to stabilize, and in that she develops, she admires his stability, she admires his strength, she looks at him as the oak tree, as the rock, as the shelter from the storm. She admires him, she respects him. And when that happens, ultimately she becomes attracted to him again. So you want to get the attraction back in your marriage, you want your wife to be attracted to you. Here's what you must do: you must develop emotional sovereignty, you must develop emotional stability, emotional regulation, and you must increase your capacity to carry weight as a man, specifically to be able to sit in discomfort without needing resolution from that discomfort. So when you do this, or if you want your wife to be attracted again, your emotional condition can no longer be dependent upon her mood, on her approval, on her validation, on her reassurance that everything is going to be okay. Your stability must come within you. You must find it with inside of yourself to be stable. You must develop self-approval, self-validation, self-risk-reassurance. And you must develop that in significant sufficient enough abundance to be able to pump that stability back into the relationship also to stable hers, so stabilize her. So when you do this, what she begins to experience. So when you're able to increase that capacity and become the stabilizing force, she no longer feels responsible for stabilizing you. She no longer feels responsible for managing you. She no longer feels responsible for being the emotional stuff for the emotional state of you within the marriage. Or in other words, she no longer feels like she has to be the rock. She no longer feels like she has to be the shelter from the storm. Instead, she experiences you as a man who can carry his own weight. She experiences you as a man who is the shelter from the storm, not the storm. So as your capacity to carry that weight and sit in that discomfort increases, pressure in the marriage decreases. Burden on her decreases decreases, the pressure decreases within the marriage for her. The burden for her to carry this marriage decreases, her safety increases, her emotional emotional safety decreases, increases. And as her safety increases, guess what? That's right. Her admiration can begin to return to the relationship. She can start to admire you. I remember the the one of the turning points that really stuck in my mind in the transformation of my marriage was when my wife looked at me one day and she goes, I love the man you are becoming. I love the man you're becoming. That's admiration. She's admiring the work that I'm putting in, the work that I'm doing. And that as that admiration returns, then that creates an environment where attraction can also return. And if attraction can return, then sexual desire towards you can return also. So she begins to recover the emotional freedom that she's lost, an openness, a playfulness, a receptivity to you emotionally, sexually. She begins to feel that level of vulnerability again. Why? Because less of her energy is being used to consume managing the situation, carrying you, stabilizing the situation, and anticipating what you're going to do next. So the highest level here, most men think the goal is attraction. The reality is the goal, if you want to do this, if you want attraction to return, the attraction cannot be the goal. Attraction is simply a byproduct. It's a byproduct of safety, admiration, stability, etc., emotional sovereignty. So the chain here, the casual chain, is that when there's pressure in the marriage, when you're when you're bringing pressure on her, that creates burden. Burden reduces safety. That reduced safety reduces admiration for you. Reduced admiration produces reduced attraction. And reduced attraction means you ain't getting no sex. The restoration chain here, the chain of custody that needs to happen is you need to become an emotionally sovereign man. That means that your capacity increases, and when your capacity increases, that creates stability within the marriage. When that stability increases, that creates emotional and physical safety for her. When that safety shows up, she develops admiration for you because you're doing your job, you're creating an environment that keeps her safe, and she can admire that. When that admiration reaches a certain level, attraction and desire return, which is what you want. So the core takeaway here is that attraction was never the primary issue within this marriage. When she says, I'm not attracted to you anymore, it's just a symptom. She's just basically saying that there was too much I'm experiencing too much pressure, too much burden, too much, too much dependency, and I'm experiencing insufficient capacity from you as my husband or as a man. So the solution is not to become more attractive, it's not to go to the gym, although that certainly isn't gonna hurt anything. Losing some weight, getting in shape, this certainly isn't gonna hurt for sure, but it isn't the solution, and it alone isn't gonna make any difference. The solution is becoming a more capable man. The solution is becoming emotionally sovereign. So the ultimate truth here is that most men spend years trying to become attractive, more clothes, hair, transplants, going to the gym. That's not gonna work. The wise man focuses on becoming more capable. Because attraction is about capability. Attraction simply is not women are not attracted to neediness, they're not attracted to control in behavior, any of those things, all of these things that are showing up simply are not attractive to a woman. What a woman ultimately is attracted to is capacity. Your capacity as a man. This is where the real magic happens in increasing your capacity. So the final takeaway here is if you want to if you want your wife to be attracted to you again, attraction is not the thing you need to fix, capacity is. That's it. So attraction was simply always just revealing the deeper reality underneath it. Increase your capacity as a man, and attraction simply is going to become the natural response that she has to you. So that's it for me. If you want help with this, I work with men helping them save their marriage. I work with men in late-stage marriage, a crisis, many whose wives have already asked for divorce, filed for divorce, moved out. We can we can help you give you the best chance of success in all of those environments. If you're interested in learning about that, I've got a free free workshop, great place to start. It also is going to give you some great tips on how you can turn this situation around by yourself. There's a link in the description. Uh, go ahead and watch that. That's a great place to start if you want some help. Also, give us a thumbs up, give us a like, uh, leave a comment if you find this content useful, really helps to get the message out. And uh, I'll put another video right here for you to watch, and we'll see you in the next video.