How to Fix Your  Marriage When You’re the Only One Trying — Dr. Lee H. Baucom

How to Fix Your  Marriage When You’re the Only One Trying — Dr. Lee H. Baucom

Lisa Marie Bobby, PhD, LMFT, BCC

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby is a licensed psychologist, licensed marriage and family therapist, board-certified coach, AAMFT clinical supervisor, host of the Love, Happiness, and Success Podcast and founder of Growing Self.

If you’re trying to figure out what to do when you’re trying to fix your marriage, but it feels like you’re the only one trying, you’re not alone. Many people reach a point where they feel like they’re carrying the emotional weight of the marriage by themselves.

You initiate the conversations. You suggest date nights. You bring up therapy. And yet your partner seems emotionally checked out. Over time, you may find yourself thinking, “Why am I the only one trying?”

It’s exhausting. Over time, it can leave you feeling deeply lonely in your marriage — even while sharing a home and a life with someone.

In this episode of Love, Happiness and Success, I sat down with Dr. Lee H. Baucom to explore what’s really happening in these one-sided relationship dynamics and what actually works when your spouse refuses couples counseling or withdraws instead of engaging.

If you’re seeking clarity about your next step, our coaching and counseling services are designed specifically for moments like this.

Why You Feel Lonely in My Marriage

When someone says, “I feel lonely in my marriage,” they rarely mean they lack companionship. Instead, they’re describing emotional disconnection.

You reach out, and your partner pulls away.
When you want repair, they avoid the conversation.
Meanwhile, your desire for closeness is met with shutdown.

If this sounds familiar, you may want to explore more about Feeling Lonely in a Relationship. Emotional loneliness inside a committed relationship often hurts more than physical distance.

Importantly, this dynamic frequently develops into what we call the partner emotionally checked out pursue withdrawal cycle.

Is Your Partner Emotionally Unavailable?

The pursue-withdraw cycle works like this:

• One partner pursues connection.
• The other partner withdraws.
• The more one chases, the more the other distances.

Eventually, both partners feel misunderstood. The pursuer feels rejected. Meanwhile, the withdrawer feels pressured or criticized.

If you’re wondering whether this pattern fits your relationship, you might benefit from reading: Is Your Partner Showing Withdrawn Behavior?

Research on adult attachment shows that under relational stress, most people move toward either anxiety (pursuing) or avoidance (withdrawing) (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2017; Simpson & Rholes, 2012). In other words, this pattern doesn’t necessarily mean your partner doesn’t care. Often, it means they don’t know how to re-engage safely.

What to Do When You’re the Only One Trying in a Relationship

Many people believe that if their spouse refuses couples counseling, nothing can change. That belief feels logical. However, it’s not entirely accurate.

Relationships function as systems. Therefore, when one part of the system shifts, the entire dynamic changes.

You cannot force your partner to participate. However, you can change your side of the pursue-withdraw pattern.

That is where your leverage lives.

If you’ve ever wondered How to Get Someone Else to Change, the surprising answer is this: you don’t. Instead, you change the dynamic that reinforces the behavior.

How to Stop Chasing Your Partner

Learning how to stop chasing your partner does not mean giving up. Instead, it means interrupting the pursue-withdraw cycle.

Chasing often feels like effort. It feels proactive. Yet in practice, chasing increases pressure. And pressure typically increases withdrawal.

So what works instead?

• Regulate yourself before initiating hard conversations.
• Lower the intensity of your requests.
• Offer warmth without attaching a hidden agenda.
• Invite connection rather than demand it.

Emotion regulation research consistently shows that regulated behavior changes relational outcomes (Sheppes, Suri, & Gross, 2015; Marroquín & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2015).

If you’re focused on fixing everything at once, you may also benefit from reading: How to Fix a Relationship

Sometimes the solution is not fixing harder, it’s shifting steadier.