Hi Zulu
My wife has stopped trying to impress me barely two years into the marriage. In fact, since giving birth, she doesn’t care about my opinion of how she looks. She has become tough. You know, this woman used to yearn for my attention and when I upset her she would even cry. Those tears dried up, and although she doesn’t disrespect me, she doesn’t yearn for me. We got married young. Did I toughen her up?
 

Hi,

Two years is too soon to experience a drastic drop in romantic interest. I will give you four possible causes and their solutions.

The first is about her age and the developmental phase she’s in.
Sometimes, the season of life we are in affects how we receive and respond to affection. The age of 25 is significant for women because they attain psychological maturity and a different personality emerges that’s usually very different from the pre25 persona.
It’s risky to date a woman under 25 because her prefrontal brain hasn’t matured yet, and as such, she’s in her formative stages. She’s usually easy to convince and even confuse. If she has present parents, they’ll often encourage her to wait until she’s matured for such heavy decisions as a choice of partner, but peer pressure often overwhelms them.
Marrying such a woman is a gamble because you’ll have to wait and see what she’ll change into once her true version shows up.
She could simply decide that you’re not her type and manifest this sudden change of behaviour.
Or she could realise that you took advantage of her naivety and she didn’t have the mental presence to consider the decision in all dimensions. This will usually be followed by ambivalence as she weighs her next move.
Lastly, she might desire to stay but require more freedom to develop herself personally, which will be your best hope.
Someone lied to men that they should get a young lady and groom her into what he wants. Humans are not animals, and you can not groom them into anything other than what they want themselves. You may control the game when she’s mentally infantile and unaware, but it won’t last. When she finally awakens, she will change into something you can’t control.

A wise man will date a woman who has matured enough to know what she wants and one who has made up her mind to settle down in marriage. With women 25 and above, what you see is what you get.
Do not believe the insulting notion that women above 25 have too high a body count, and so the younger ones are better. Not every woman is sleeping around. Just like it was in Israel in Elijah’s day, thousands have not bowed to the decadence of Baal.

The problem is that today, many people want from others what they don’t have themselves. If you want a self-preserved person, you must have self-preserved yourself.

Also, in what fashion did you date? You refer to her changing after giving birth. It makes a difference when you had planned for the baby and when you got together in marriage because of pregnancy.
You should never get married to cover up pregnancy because you’ll have made a long-term decision to cover a temporary crisis. If you did this, a woman can change after delivery because she’s questioning whether she made the right decision.
Assuming you did the right things at the right season, you should know that giving birth affects women very deeply.
It can be followed by postpartum stress. It can cause a loss of identity, albeit a temporary one.
Sometimes, the trauma of delivery itself can leave a woman shaken for a long time. Both natural and cesarean deliveries have their pain. You should try to understand what her experience was like instead of focusing on her change towards you. If you come with empathy to understand her feelings, you stand a better chance of reviving the connection.
Also, you say she used to yearn for your approval concerning her dressing.  It’s natural for a woman to want to please her man with her dressing.
When you say she’d cry when you upset her, I wonder if there was infidelity on your part or taking sides with your family and leaving her to feel alone? These are the two most frequent killers of new marriages.
Infidelity can kill a woman’s love slowly, even years after it happened. Yet many men don’t close tabs on the women they had been hitting on before marriage, leaving doors open even after getting married.
Preferring your people over her, on the other hand, can also kill her love because she feels so alone in this new family into which she migrated. You’re the only person she counts on to protect her, and if you don’t, she feels deeply unsafe.
Caring hearts also get tired of caring when they’re taken for granted.
You say she doesn’t yearn for you anymore, or rather, she seems not to. I suggest you cultivate a culture of weekly or fortnight dinner dates where you can just be the two of you and touch base on your relationship. Lead the way yourself and propose the dates. Take your woman out and make her comfortable to open up. She will tell you what’s really happening.
Lastly, you’re supposed to lead in showing affection to your woman. Do not expect her to pursue you. If you just sit there for her to initiate things and come to you, your love will die.
Lead the way in spoiling her and being obsessed with her beauty and her personality. Sometimes, women just mirror back the kind of affection we show them.
Remember to also see a marriage therapist from time to time even before problems become crises. You’re the leader, and if you initiate it, it’ll happen.