What actually makes you feel loved?

If you feel unloved even though your partner does a lot for you, it’s often because you have no answer to this question yourself. As long as that answer is missing, he can do all sorts of things and none of it reaches you. Not because he’s doing the wrong thing, but because it lands in a place where you don’t feel it.

This is the question I ask most often in sessions. And it’s the one that least often gets an immediate answer.

An argument I’ve seen many times

She says: You don’t love me.

He says: How can you say that? I took out a mortgage for the house. I bought you the new phone. We go on holiday every year. What more do you want?

She says: Even so. You don’t love me.

At this point there are two people sitting there who both feel they’re in the right, and both of them are. He really has done everything he understands as love. And she really doesn’t feel any of it.

Then I ask her: How would you notice it?

And usually what comes first is a long pause.

Why the question is so hard

Because we never learned to answer it.

We all have an idea of what love is. But almost nobody has an idea of how they notice it. That’s a difference, and it decides whether a relationship feels warm or empty.

On top of that comes something many people find embarrassing. The answer is often surprisingly small. It’s rarely the house and rarely the holiday. In the case I’m telling you about, after a long time thinking, this sentence came out:

I would feel loved if you just wrote me a note sometime and put it in my coat pocket.

He was stunned. That’s enough for you? A note?

Yes. That was enough.

What happens in that moment

Two things, and both of them are a relief.

For the first time, he gets a task he can actually fulfil. Before, the instruction was: Love me more. Nobody can work on that. Now the instruction is: Write me a note now and then. That’s doable.

She gets an answer to a question that has tormented her for years. Namely, whether she’s asking too much. The answer is no. She just needed something different from what he was giving.

Neither of them did anything wrong. They were simply loving past each other.

What this is not

There are tests that sort people into types and tell you, this is how you’re loved. That’s not what I mean.

It’s not about a category. It’s about your specific answer, in your own words, as small and unspectacular as it happens to be. “I feel loved when you ask how my day was and then wait for the answer” is a usable answer. “I’m a quality time type” isn’t, because nobody can do anything with it.

How to find your answer

Take twenty minutes, on your own, not right after an argument.

Go back to a moment when you felt it.

At some point in the last few years there was a moment when you felt loved. Not the most romantic one, just any one. What happened, very concretely?

For most women it’s something small. He noticed you weren’t doing well without you saying so. He left you in peace when you needed it. He said something good about you in front of other people.

Ask yourself what it was about it that worked.

That you were seen? That someone made an effort? That you didn’t have to ask for it? That it was in front of others?

That’s the real clue. Not the action, but what it set off in you.

Find an action that would set that off again.

This is where it gets practical. What could he do next week that would set off the same thing?

It has to be small. Something that fits into an ordinary Tuesday. Big things can’t happen every week, and what can’t be repeated doesn’t change anything.

Tell him. Not as an accusation, but as an answer.

The sentence for it:

“I’ve been thinking about something. You once asked me what I actually want. I think I know now.”

That’s something completely different from “you never”. It’s information he can use.

And if he still doesn’t do it?

Then you’ve still won, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.

Before, there was a feeling without an explanation. Now there’s a clear, small request that can be met. What he does with it is information about him and no longer about you.

In my experience, most men do it. Often with relief, because for years they had the feeling they owed something impossible.

What changes when you say it

It gets better, and for both of you.

You then know what you actually want. That sounds trivial, and it’s the harder part. And he knows what to do.

As long as the sentence “I want to be loved” is hanging in the room, he can’t do anything with it. He then answers with what he thinks love is. But I take care of you. I take the bins out. What more do you want?

And he means it.

As soon as you say that you’d like a letter, or for him to take you out, or for him to surprise you, he has something in his hands for the first time.

That brings clarity. For both of you.

The question for him

The question works in both directions, and that’s almost always forgotten.

What makes him feel loved?

Many women have no answer to that, and many men don’t have one themselves. When you both know your answer, a surprisingly large share of the accusations dissolves. What used to be read as a lack of love was often love in the wrong language.

Where this doesn’t apply

If your partner knows what you need and deliberately withholds it to keep you small, then this isn’t a question of understanding each other.

And if you are experiencing belittling, control or violence, then the question of feeling loved is not the next one. In Germany, the helpline Hilfetelefon Gewalt gegen Frauen (violence against women) can be reached around the clock, free of charge and anonymously, on 116 016.

What I’d like you to take with you

Many women believe they’re too demanding. But these aren’t demands. They’re values, and you’re allowed to have values and expectations of people. Otherwise you turn into a rubber band and can no longer live out your own identity.

The problem is almost never that a woman wants too much. It’s that she has never said exactly what it is.

And most of the time it’s a note in a coat pocket. Not a house.