Every Time I Try To Have A Calm Conversation About Us, She Shuts Down Or Walks Away

Hey, Cody Butler here, and in this video I want to talk to you about why is it that every time you try to have a calm conversation about the relationship, she shuts down, she walks away, she doesn't want to talk about it. The question is, how do you create the conditions where she actually wants to talk about the relationship? When we're talking about late-stage marriage crisis divorce, this is really frustrating for men because we want to talk about it. We're willing to talk about it, but she's just not wanting to do that. She's not wanting to have that conversation. So how do— so what's going on and how do we fix it? So every time we try to have a calm conversation, a mature adult conversation about what's going on so we can fix the problem, is she shuts down, she walks away. She's avoidant, she avoids the conversation, she disengages emotionally, she just won't participate in the common— in, in the conversation. So the common frustration that we experience as men when that is going on is we think, we go, we're trying to communicate calmly with my wife, I'm trying to have a conversation with her about this, I'm willing to solve this problem, Why won't she talk to me about this? So where the man tends to go in this situation is he comes to the conclusion that she's avoiding conversation. She doesn't want to talk about resolution. She's refusing to engage in the situation. She's emotionally unavailable. She's emotionally avoidant, etc., etc. But what's actually happening here is none of those things at all. She has a preconceived idea of what you're capable of, the kind of conversation that you're capable of having based on what's happened in the past, and she doesn't believe that you're capable of having a safe conversation with her at this point in time. So when a woman refuses to speak or refuses to engage in the conversation, there's only a few possibilities of what's going on. There's really two, potentially three. So the first is that communication with you is completely pointless. The second option is that communication with you is very painful. Or the third option is that it's both, right? It's, it's painful and it's pointless. So she has a preconceived idea. She had— she's war-gamed this out in her mind how this is going to go. And she's already decided how this conversation is going to go. And based on her past history with you, she's decided that this conversation is not worth having. So it's not that she doesn't want to have it or wouldn't have it. She just doesn't think that it is actually worth having right now. So what's actually going on is her nervous system, which is a predictive mechanism, has predicted that having this conversation with you which you think is going to be calm and productive, she is predicting that this is going to be a pressured conversation. It's going to invalidate her position. She's just going to feel more unseen, more unheard. It's going to be emotionally laborious to her, meaning that there's going to be a lot of emotional work involved to not get very much reward at all from the situation. And she also potentially sees that the the situation is just going to escalate. The conversation is going to escalate, right? So historically, when she's told you how she feels about the situation, potentially it's just escalated. It hasn't been accepted, hasn't been received well. And when she tells you how she feels, instead of validating that, it's taken as an offense or a threat, or it's taken from a, from a fear perspective, and it just escalates the situation to something that she doesn't want to deal with anymore. So she avoids these conversations because historically, over the past 18 months or whatever timeframe, historically, these conversations did not create any understanding for her. They didn't help her understand, didn't help you to understand the situation, and they didn't make the situation better. And potentially the conversations when she tried to have them also just created emotional exhaustion for her. So now her predictive mechanism, her nervous system, is predicting that any time that she has these conversations with you, it's going to lead to frustration, emotional— a lack of emotional safety and emotional exhaustion. This is what's going on. This is, this is what she's predicting. And this is why she doesn't want to have these conversations, or she's walking or backing away from them. It's not that she doesn't want to have it. Per se. It's that she doesn't believe that you are capable of having it. And that's a big difference. If she, if she could see some evidence that you were capable of having this conversation productively, then that would change the situation. So again, historically, what's led us to this point? Well, when she's talked about the relationship, it's become an exercise in ego management for the man. When his ego is threatened or challenged, then it creates a situation where eggshells are coming present again. It creates a walking on eggshell environment. When she brings up topics that are emotionally challenging or threaten the man's ego or produce a fear response, then it requires her to emotionally contain the situation and stabilize the man. And it also requires, uh, it creates an emotional minefield for her to navigate through. So Ultimately, what happens is that the woman learns that this talking the problem out becomes very emotionally expensive to her. So why does this happen? Well, it's because men and women think differently. Men are very emot— men are very logical and factual in their approach. Women are very emotional in their approach. Women don't really care what the facts are. They care about how they feel about what's happened. Whereas a man really is much less concerned with the feelings of the situation than he is with the logistics and the truth, the logical truth of the situation, the factual clarity, right? So he thinks that a calm conversation is logical discussion, factual, factual clarity, correct timelines, technical accuracy of what's happened, happened. Problem solving, solving missing misunderstandings, etc. And let me explain what happened, where she doesn't see a calm conversation as that at all. She thinks a calm conversation, or the way she experiences the conversation as being calm, is it's about emotionally understanding the situation. So the woman might say, for example, when we went out on Tuesday night, you made me feel like 'x, y, and z,' and the man will go, 'Well, actually, it wasn't Tuesday, it was Wednesday.' Or the woman will say, 'When you said x, y, and z, it made me feel like whatever,' and the man will go, 'Well, actually, that's not what I said.' When for the woman, the calm conversation is saying, 'Hey, it doesn't matter where we were, it doesn't matter exactly what you said. What I'm trying to tell you is that in that moment I felt this way. And if that doesn't line up factually, to be factually accurate, the man is going to correct the situation, which to him is completely logical, completely reasonable, and completely calm. But she's looking for emotional understanding. She wants to feel heard, emotionally acknowledged. She wants to feel safe to express the pain that she's feeling and have that emotional experience understood. She's not really looking to validate whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday, whether the dress was red or green, whether they were at a Chinese restaurant or an Indian restaurant. She doesn't care about any of those things. They're completely irrelevant to her. But to the man, these things are all very, very important. So the core distinction between the two listening styles here is that he's listening for facts, he's listening for the details, he's listening for accuracy, and he's listening for the errors so he can correct them. Because in, in the man's mind, it just makes sense. She's just misunderstanding my intentions. She's just misunderstanding what's actually happened here. And if she understood what really happened, then this problem would go away. So he's, he's coming from a very factual, very logical looking for the, the flaws and more what's going on, the mistakes, where she's coming from a completely different place altogether. She really couldn't care less about the actual facts and the details. She's trying to communicate frustration. She's trying to communicate pain. She's trying to communicate the emotional impact that this had on her and the emotional experience that she's having as a result. So effectively, what is actually happening here there's two different conversations going on. The man is having one conversation thinking that this is what needs to happen, and the woman is having a completely different conversation. And all it's doing is creating a lot of frustration. But here's the thing, right? We're not in an equal leverage scenario here. She needs the calm conversation more than he needs the logical understa— uh, understanding. If he doesn't get the logic out of the situation, he's okay with that. He's not going to leave the marriage. It doesn't put him in a situation where he feels like he needs to leave. The woman, on the other hand, that's a completely different scenario. When she continuously gets this lack of emotional understanding, it absolutely does put her in a position to where she questions, can this relationship survive? Because she can't communicate and be heard into the relationship. So why does this fact-checking and fact-correction and logic from the man actually backfire? Well, it's because she, she doesn't experience love and understanding in an emotional partner. She experiences correction, she experiences invalidation, and she experiences emotional, emotional blindness from the man. She goes, he— she just sees that he doesn't understand what she's going through, he doesn't understand what she's experiencing, and as a result, she feels very misunderstood. She feels emotionally dismissed and she feels unheard. And the overall feeling that's come in is a schoolteacher energy from the man. Uh, you're being corrected, you're being, you're being taught instead of being understood. So ultimately the problem that comes up here is that he completely misunderstands the purpose of the conversation at its core level. The conversation is not to get facts on the table and talk about what's happened. The purpose of the conversation from her is to be emotionally heard, validated, and understood. And a great way to look at this is stop listening for facts and start listening for the emotion underneath what's being said. Is it frustr— what's the core emotion? Is it frustration? Is it anger, etc.? So why does this conversation become a net negative for the woman, because a woman needs conversation like a man needs sex. So if she's, if she's refusing to engage in a conversation, this is, this is, this is a diagnostic of a much deeper problem within the relationship. A woman refusing to communicate is like a man refusing to have sex with his wife. It's a sign of a pretty, it's a pretty deep problem, right? So this happens for her because overall conversation with the man becomes a net negative experience. It doesn't solve emotional pain. It doesn't create a release. It doesn't create relief. In fact, it does the exact opposite. The conversation for her, the goal of it is to create that calm, that stability, and that emotional relief. But instead of doing that, it just compounds more frustration. It compounds more pressure. It compounds more exhaustion that she's already experiencing. And these are the things that she's trying to get away from. So when when the very— the mechanism, which is conversation, is designed to reduce these things— stress, pressure, all these things, emotional exhaustion— when the mechanism that's designed to eliminate those things actually causes more of those things, of course she's going to withdraw from that. And it's not that she's refusing to talk to you or she won't talk to you. She just, she can't anymore because the mechanism that creates the relief or provides the relief is now actually bringing more pressure and more strain onto the relationship. So again, the emotion, the emotional expression which the woman is trying to get across here, it's met with intellectual correction, defensiveness, or a factual debate about what happened. So again, the goal of the conversation, man, is not about— you've got to let go of factual accuracy. It doesn't matter. It's not about being factually right. It's about the communication that she's trying to communicate. Everything she can say factually, or everything she says factually, can be completely wrong, but that does not invalidate how she feels about the situation. The time could be wrong, the location could be wrong, the environment could be wrong, the tone of the conversation could be wrong. But if, if she's saying that in that scenario I felt a certain way and that doesn't get validated, it gets met with facts you know, facts and all of that stuff, factual accuracy, proving intent, correction of details, etc., etc., defending reality, then, then she's just going to completely shut down from having a conversation with you because the conversation is just too painful at that point. So if you want your wife to have a conversation with you and to meet you, when you're saying the problem is I'm trying to have a calm conversation with her to talk about this, she just won't do it, the goal has to change. From your perspective? Because if it doesn't, then her predictive mechanism, her nervous system, every time you try to talk, is just going to go, danger, danger, danger, danger, danger, danger. So she has— you have to start changing the goal to be in understanding the emotional impact that this situation has had. So again, it's not about understanding where this happened, when it happened, what happened, what was said, what the intentions were. There's only one thing that's really important at this point in time, and that is the emotional impact that that scenario had on your wife. And if you can let go of all of the logistics and say, it sounds like you're very frustrated, or it sounds like you're in a lot of pain, versus I— there's no reason for you to be in pain because you completely misunderstood what I said. If you start listening for pain instead of listening for details, if you start to create emotional safety, and you start reducing the emotional pressure, if the conversation reduces emotional pressure, then you're going to start to see her re-engage in the conversation. And look to those conversations because it does— the conversation actually does what it's supposed to do at that point, which is release and reduce the emotional pressure that she's experiencing within the relationship. So what actually creates the safety? Now we know why she doesn't want to have these conversations, and it's not because she doesn't love you or doesn't want to talk about this, she just feels at its most basic level that you just can't talk about it, you're just incapable of talking about it, or, you know, it's just going to cause more pain talking about it, then the solution is to start listening for emotion instead of listening for logistics. Where's— where is the pain? Start hearing the pain in what she's saying. What's the frustration in what she's saying? Where's the exhaustion in what she's saying? And start to connect with that versus the details. And it comes down to— don't— it's, it's not about interrupting her emotional expression when she's talking. It's not about every time you stop her and say, actually, hang on a second, like, this let me just tell you, I didn't mean that. That's not all. That's not what I said, or that's not exactly quite how that happened, or actually you've misinterpreted the situation, or you've read the tone of the text message or the email wrong. Like every time you put that correction in there or you offer an explanation or you become defensive because you're trying to show her that she's just wrong, then this causes her more pain, more frustration, more exhaustion, and the very mechanism that she's using to try and eliminate those conditions is actually producing more. And now as a man, you've inadvertently taken the only mechanism that you have to heal this marriage, which is conversation, and you've made it dangerous for her. So the critical principle to understand here is that emotional conversations, they're not— it's not a courtroom. It's not a place to where or it's not a place for presenting evidence or giving evidence to the jury that you're not guilty of what you've been charged of. It's not about proving that you're right. The conversation is about emotional disclosure. It's about your wife being able to say, this is how I feel. If she comes to the marriage and says, John, I feel like I have no role in this marriage, and you go, that's nonsense, of course you have a role, and you try to show her this— you, you're not a bad man, you're not beating her up, or you're not creating a lack of safety through violence. You're creating a lack of safety for her because you're telling her that how she feels is is not true. When she goes, John, you know, I haven't felt loved from you. I haven't felt like you've loved me for years. And you go, that's ridiculous. Of course I love you. All you're doing is saying your emotions are not valid. You've just told me what the problem in the marriage is, you feel like I don't love you. And I've just completely invalidated that and gone, that's ridiculous. That's not true. 'John, I don't feel like I'm able to bring up certain topics around you.' 'Well, that's ridiculous, dear wife. You can talk about anything with me.' Well, you've just proven that that isn't true. When she says, 'I'm frustrated, John, because I don't feel like I can talk to you about certain topics,' and you go, 'Well, that's just not true,' you've just shown her that she can't talk to you about that topic. You've just told her that you're not allowed to have that emotion. And keep in mind, a woman is an emotional creature. If you tell a woman that she's not allowed to have that emotion, effectively, then you're telling her that she can't be a woman. You're telling her that she can't get in touch with her feminine side. So none of this stuff is nefarious. None of this stuff is you being a bad man, or, or it's just you being a man. When she says something like, "John, I feel like you have— I don't feel like you ever loved me," then the only response is, "That breaks my heart," or, "That must be a really difficult position for you to be in." As a man, we're going to want to defend ourselves, and we're going to want to go to the courtroom, and we're going to want to present evidence that that isn't true. Well, what about this? I left you there. What about that? I go to work every day. I go through hell every time I leave the door and go through the front door in the morning. I go through hell for you and this family. What do you mean I don't love you? You're basically saying I'm not listening to a word you're saying, and whenever you bring something to me that you want to talk about, I invalidate it, shut it down, and tell you that you're not allowed to talk about it. And when you do that enough times, she learns that trying to talk to you about the problems creates more problems. And then she has no choice but to stop talking about you or talking to it with you, about it with you. So why would she start to talk to you again? Why would she have conversations with you again? This is our goal, right? Like, your marriage is not going to improve until she, until she talks. You've got, you've got a lot of problems. You've got a lot of legitimate real problems that have to be talked about. And until they're talked about and discussed, your marriage is not getting better. And until she feels safe to talk to you about that. It just ain't happening. Just is not happening, you know. And again, like, understand you're in, you're in a complete leverage breakdown situation here. Yes, I understand. I know what people are going to say. Well, shouldn't I get to say to her? Yes, of course, in a healthy marriage, but a healthy normal marriage. But understand, you're not in a healthy normal marriage right now. The laws of a healthy normal marriage do not apply to you at this point in time. Because you have no leverage. She's leaving. She's had enough. Her nervous system has now predicted that she can't have a conversation with you, that you're not going to change, that nothing is going to get better. And she's decided to leave, and she's set on that. You're the one who wants her to stay. There's no leverage here. It's not a case of where let's work through this. So I want this to work. You want this to work. That's stopped at this point when Once we reopen the dialogue, yes, then we get back to a situation where it's we both get to be heard. You do get to be heard as a man, but you have to do this in order, right? So what happens to start to get her talking again? Well, she will, she will open up and she will start talking when she no longer feels corrected. She no longer feels like you're managing her. She no longer feels emotionally constrained, like I have to hold back. I can't say this because it's going to upset him. Etc. When she has the freedom to speak freely, then she'll start to talk again. She'll start to open up when she begins to— so when her nervous system begins associating conversation with relief, with understanding, with safety, with emotional release. So right now, as we said earlier on, her nervous system is a predictive mechanism. And it's predicting the conversation with you is going to be painful. So we have to reset that. We have to get back to a point where her nervous system predicts that conversation with you becomes productive, supportive. That's when she opens up, starts to open up again, when pressure decreases within the relationship and when emotional trust starts to rebuild. And I can tell you the simplest way to do this, man, is just keep your mouth shut. It's as simple as that. You know, in our Win Your Wife Back program, the thing we say all the time, button the beak, button the beak, button the beak. Listen to your wife. Listen to— all she wants to do is be listened to. You don't have to explain yourself. The best thing you can do to decrease the emotional pressure and to increase the trust that she needs is to speak much less and just to listen. So there are some important distinctions here because let's, you know, obviously men are going to have a tendency to go to the outliers to the extreme situation. So, uh, this does not mean agreeing with false facts. You don't have to go, well, that's true, that's true, that when it blatantly isn't. That's not what we're talking about. It doesn't mean abandoning your boundaries. It doesn't mean suppressing your own perspective, and it doesn't mean becoming passive in the situation. That's not attractive either. What it does mean is prioritizing your wife, understanding your wife before being understood. Or to put it another way, is seek to understand her before having her understand you. You will get a chance to be understood, you will get an opportunity to put your view on the table, but you have, you have to do this in order, right? Remember, she's leaving, she's the one not willing to talk right now. The onus is on you to create the environment for her to talk, not for her to create the environment for you to want to talk. So the next thing is, if this means prioritizing emotional understanding before being understood, regulating your defensiveness. Do not— like, the only defense you have here in saving your marriage is complete defensive defenselessness. It's about hearing her emotional experiences before hearing the accuracy of those experiences. If she's saying she feels like you never listen to her, your tendency is going to be to go, "Well, what about this? You told me yesterday this, and you told me this about your mother last week, and you told me this about the conversation that you had with your brother. Of course I'm listening. I'm hearing every word." That's called defensiveness. If she's saying, "You don't listen to me," just listen to that. Just hear that. So the core internal shift here to make this happen, to make this a reality in your, in your marriage is you've got to stop asking the question, how do I get my wife to talk? That's a bad question. She's not talking right now and her nervous system has already predicted, it has decided that that's too dangerous. You're not going to convince her to talk to you. There's no strategy. The better question is you've got to start asking, How do I make conversation emotionally safe enough for honesty from her again? How can I become emotionally safe and how can I make the conversation emotionally safe enough for her to show up with honesty to where she feels seen, heard, understood, validated, etc., etc.? That is the key. So as always, your wife not wanting to talk or not have— when you say, I want to have a calm conversation, why won't she do it? This is not the situation. The question is, what is this teaching me about the marriage? What is this teaching me about female psychology? What is this teaching me about myself? What am I learning here? What am I learning about how she communicates so I can meet her needs better? What am I, what am I learning about myself so I can stop being these things? Because let me ask you a question. How, how many men watching this are happy to be the man that their wife can't talk to? How many of you are happy to be the man that, that your wife feels emotionally unsafe around? None of us, right? None of us want to be that. And when we find that out, it bothers us. It's disturbing to us. So the better question is, what is this situation teaching me about myself so I can go to work where I have authority and power, which is on myself? You fix the man, you fix the marriage. What this situation truly is telling you is not that your wife's unwilling to talk, or she doesn't care enough to talk about the marriage, or she refuses, she's just hell-bent on leaving this marriage. What this situation is actually informing us is that there are gaps in our communication skills as men. And when we work on those skills, we become a better husband, we become a better father, we become a better man. And it's not that you're a bad man. It's not that you, you're a horrible husband. Who taught us these skills? Who taught us how to be a great husband? Who taught us how to be a good listener? Who taught us how to be emotionally sophisticated? Who taught us true, authentic masculine leadership? Who taught us how to show up in a way that our wife is actually going to be attracted to, not in a way that she needs to insulate? Who taught us these things? Nobody. It's not your fault that you're here. It's not your fault that this is happening, but it is your responsibility to fix it. And for the man watching this that says, "So it's all the man's fault. It's all my fault." Good luck, brother. You're a divorced man walking. If that's your position, then I love you, and I hope it works out for you, but you are a divorced man walking. Because at the end of the day, you only have the ability to act on one thing, and that's yourself. You can look at your wife all you want and say she needs to do this, she needs to do that. But let me ask you, how's that working out for you? You can say she needs to change, and she probably does. You can say she needs to make more of an effort, and she probably does. You can say she needs to do this, this, and this, and she probably does. And you can say she's all these things, and she probably is. And I don't disagree with you on any of that. But here's the thing: what authority do you have to act on those things? And what is your experience in life with changing people? If your experience is like my experience, I've never changed a single person in my life. I'm saying you can't change them. Many people change. You can change, but I will not change you. You have to decide that you want to change and then do the work, and then change becomes a possibility for you. You don't change because I decide that I want to change you. And the same is true with your wife. You cannot change her. You cannot change anything about her, but that doesn't mean she can't change. And it also doesn't mean that she doesn't want to change. The only place you have any authority to act upon is yourself. And when you change how you see the situation, the situation that you, that you see change, it will change. And I'm telling you 100 times out of 100 that when you make positive change in your life, your wife will also make positive change in your life. Here's, here's what I have learned in decades of doing this: whatever you put out is what you get back. The mirror never lies. When most men look at their wife and go, she needs to change, that's the mirror. She's going to mirror that back and say, you need to change. I guarantee that in a short period of time of making positive change and fixing the man— because if you fix the man, you fix the marriage. If you go to your wife today and say, you need to change in this marriage, you're going to get a very negative response. If you go to her, if she's saying that she wants out and she's adamant, and say, we need to change, we need to fix this marriage, you're going to get a great response from her. You're going to get something along the lines of, well, I support your decision to make those changes, and the person after me is going to really benefit from those. So that's fantastic. I'm happy for you. If you go to your wife and say, I am responsible for the breakdown of this marriage, and I alone am responsible for working on myself, the most probabilistic response you're going to get is, well, it takes two. I appreciate you saying this, but you're not alone in your responsibility. When you take full responsibility for what's happened, the most probabilistic outcome is she's going to start to take some responsibility. While you're shifting blame, the most probabilistic outcome is she's going to shift some blame. When you, when you outsource all of the blame, the most probabilistic outcome is she's going to outsource all of the blame. She's mirroring you, man. She's mirroring you. And this is why the man that says, my wife has to change, is doomed. Because she doesn't have to change. You have to change. And the men that accept that, that I have to change, I have to up my skills, I have to up my communication skills, I have to get better at not being triggered, I have to get better at my own stability, I have to get more emotionally mature, I have to do these things because that's who I want to be as a man. I want a better communicator. I want to be more emotionally safe. I want to be stronger. I want to get less triggered. I want to have higher capabilities. Got nothing to do with my wife. And if my wife's in the marriage or my wife's out of the marriage, I quite frankly couldn't care less because I want to do all of those things anyway. I want to become a bigger, better, stronger, more capable man whether my wife's with me or not. Got nothing to do with her. And the man that looks at it like that way and says, I'm making the changes because I've looked at myself and I want to be bigger, I want to be better, I want to be stronger, I want to be I want to be more capable, and I want to carry more weight, and I want to hold more space in the world than I currently do. And if she wants to walk with me in that, that's great. And if she doesn't, she doesn't. I'm doing it anyway. That's the man that saves his marriage. That's the man that becomes attractive to his wife. That's the man that can carry more weight, can hold more space, that grows. And here's what I told my wife. When we started on our journey, I said, here's where I'm going. I'm going on this journey, and I'm going on this destination, to this destination, and you're willing to walk. You are, you are more than welcome to walk that road with me for as long as you want, and you're welcome to go as far as you want to go on that journey, and you're free to leave anytime you don't want to go anymore. And that's what we need to do, man. That was 15 years ago, and she's still walking the path with me because I'm not making my decisions around her. I'm not improving my life to keep her. I'm improving my life because that's who I want to be as a man. And when you set that destination and you stop worrying about your wife and you stop trying to change her and you stop trying to fix the marriage and you say, right, this is who I'm going to be as a man I'm going to be strong. I'm going to be emotionally mature. I'm going to be emotionally independent and sovereign. I'm going to demonstrate— I'm going to be— I'm going to demonstrate a level of true masculine leadership that has never been seen before around these parts. I'm going to carry this. I'm going to be a man who can carry this much weight. I'm going to be a man who can control, who can command this much space. And that's what I'm doing regardless. I'm becoming that man no matter what. And dear wife, if you want to walk with me on that journey of personal growth and development and increasing our size and our strength, if you want to walk with me on that journey, you walk with me on that journey. You're welcome to come with me as far as you want, and we can do this together and we can grow together. That's leadership. That's what she's looking for. She's looking for someone who's saying, I want to— I'm gonna— I'm My happiness is my responsibility and I'm moving towards it. My joy is my responsibility and I'm taking it no matter what. That's what I tell my wife. I'm gonna be happy whether you're happy or not. I'm going to be joyous whether you're joyous or not. I'm going to be healthy, fit. I'm gonna go— I told my wife when I started going to the gym, I said, I've got a personal trainer and I'm going to the gym now. And she goes, well, I don't think I'll be doing that. I said, I don't care, I don't care. I'm taking responsibility for my own health. I'm taking responsibility for my own fitness. And if you want to join me in that journey, you are more than welcome to. And there's a gym membership and a personal trainer waiting for you. But if you don't want to walk that journey with me, I'm doing it anyway. Anyway, a few months later, she joins me at the gym. Had I said, you need to change, you need to do this, like, she would have just pushed back on me. She never would have joined the gym. This is the position, man. This is when your wife starts to feel emotionally safe. This is when the manipulation leaves. This is when the she starts to look at you as someone she can actually follow is when you say, I'm going to be happy no matter what. I'm going to find joy no matter what. I'm going to experience health no matter what. I'm going to carry more weight no matter what. I'm going to hold more space no matter what. I'm going to be emotionally mature, sovereign, and independent, and I am not going to be ruled by other people's opinion anymore, no matter what. And if you want to walk that path with me, walk it with me. You're welcome, you're invited, but if you don't, that's fine. Don't. That's your choice as well. The men that succeed do that. The men that fail tell their wife that they need to walk that path. You need to join me in this journey, or you need to take that journey yourself. She doesn't need to do anything, quite frankly. So stop asking the question, how can I get her to talk? Start asking the question, what kind of man do I need to be for her to feel safe enough around me to be open and honest. So the core takeaway here, man, is that most men— most women in late-stage marriage crisis divorce. They want out. They've decided that they want out. They're not avoiding communication at all. They're not refusing to communicate with you at all. That's simply not what's happened. They're avoiding the emotional exhaustion that you have taught them you are going to bring to this conversation. They're simply avoiding the emotional exhaustion that they have learned that that's what they're going to get. So conversations become safe when emotional experiences are heard, pressure decreases, correction in the conversation stops, understanding from you increases, and emotional safety— that emotional safety that results from that, it creates an openness and a willingness for them to communicate and to want to be a part of your life again. Ultimately, man, she's not leaving because she doesn't love you, and she's not leaving because she doesn't want the marriage, marriage to work. She's leaving because the pressure within the marriage has reached a point that she can no longer stand, and it's not even a choice. There comes a point when it's like, I have to leave this relationship for my own good. I have to live— I have to leave this marriage now for my own self-preservation because this is emotionally damaging, this is mentally draining, this is heavy for me. There's too much pressure and it's going to make me sick or it's going to kill me. And she leaves because she has to, to escape the pressure. If you can remove that pressure within the marriage to where that pressure relief comes within the marriage, then everything changes. She doesn't need to leave the marriage anymore. The solution here is to start taking out one piece at a time what it is that's creating the pressure within the marriage she's needing to escape from. Because keep in mind, and I'll finish on this here, most men think, what do I need to add to this situation to make her stay? You don't, you don't need to add anything. She had everything. She said yes to spending her life with you, with everything. Everything is present. She's already said yes to that. She's already said yes to marrying you. Already said yes to spending her life with you. She's already said yes to sharing her life with you. Everything was, everything was present for her to say yes. What's happened is not what's absent from the relationship. It's not what you need to go out and add, or the skills you need to add. Really, it's about the things that have come into the relationship that are unacceptable. Temperament, pressure, emotion, emotional instability, all of these things. These are things that have come into the relationship after she said yes that she can no longer tolerate. That's what's causing the breakdown of the marriage. It's about identifying what those things are and removing them. You don't need a script to get her to talk to you. You need to remove the elements that are making conversation emotionally painful. That's it. Do that and she'll talk. And the way we do this is we fix the man, we fix the marriage. It's about us creating an environment that our wives feel safe to communicate in. So if you like this, I got a workshop in the description that goes into much more about how to get your wife back. In a Late Stage Marriage Crisis is completely free. And if you like this content, give me a thumbs up, man. Leave me a comment. Subscribe, uh, helps in many, many ways to support what's going on here, to get this message out to, to more and more men. I love every one of you. And look, here's my final message for the day. There is hope for you. This can be turned around. There are— this is by far not a hopeless situation for sure. In 9 out of 10 situations, it is way more advantageous for the woman to stay than it is for her to leave. But it's just about understanding what are the deal breakers for her, what has to go for her to come back, what has to be removed. If you can understand that and you can remove the deal breakers, then she will come back 9 times out of 10. And at least bring it back to a point where conversation can happen. I cover that in the workshop. Grab that if you haven't seen that yet. And that's it for me. I've said that's my last point. That is actually gonna be my last point. I love you all. I bless you, bless you all, and we'll see you all really soon.