Why You Live with a mate that is unemotional

You put others first, to the point of excluding your own needs and feelings.
If you lived or live in relationships that are hurtful or unemotional, you are more accustomed to people that disrespect you than give you love, encouragement, and appreciation.  You have a tendency to believe you must work harder at everything in order to win acceptance and prove your worthiness.  Unfortunately, the ungrateful, disrespectful, or unemotional response you receive from the other person perpetuates the same belief that your work is not acceptable.  As a result, you will always consider the needs of others (at the exclusion of your own) in order to accomplish the task of winning their approval and feeling better about yourself.
 
You are willing to endure more insults and less respect because of one or 
more of the  following:
• When you received negative comments, insults, and disrespect in the past you are more likely to accept it as normal and endure it in the future.
• When you are hurting inside from the past, you are more likely to let others continue to hurt you.
• When you don’t feel good about yourself, you believe you deserve insults and you are willing to accept disrespect from others. 
• Because you must work harder to win acceptance, you are willing to take insults and disrespect to make the relationship work.
• Since you do not see the unhealthiness of the relationship, you are blinded to the disrespect and insults of others.

Your self-confidence is very low, and you struggle to emotionally and physically stand up for yourself.
When you do not feel good about yourself and struggle to express your feelings, you believe it is almost impossible to stand up to a distrustful and disrespectful mate.  You do not have much trust in relationships and chances are you do not have enough confidence in yourself to change your situation. If you live with a mate that controls with anger or verbal threats, you feel even more powerless in the already helpless situation. 

Since your mate has not been able to fulfill your emotional needs, you blame him or her for not living up to their part of the relationship, believing you can’t make a difference in the relationship until your mate changes.
If you did not receive much love and attention from your caregivers as a child, you would naturally have a strong desire to fill those emotional needs from someone as an adult.  However, when you look to the adult relationship to fill the emotional needs, you become disappointed again when your mate does not fulfill those needs.  The real problem typically is not that your mate does not love you; the core issue is that you chose a mate that does not know how to love you (similar to your caregivers).  Secondly, even if your mate did suddenly change by showing you love and attention, you would most likely not know how to accept that love since you are not accustomed to receiving it. 

You tend to live more with the dream of what an emotionally close relationship could be than with the reality of your situation.