Your Marriage Could Be Dying Without You Knowing

Alright, so today I want to talk to you about why women leave marriages and the 8 predictable stages of marriage breakdown, because over 70% of men when questioned about divorce said they never saw it coming. So at the end of the day, marriage is just human behavior. It's all it is. It's 2 humans behaving together, and human behavior is very, very predictable. So none of this stuff is actually mysterious when we understand it. So what we're going to learn today is the patterns that take place in a marriage over an extended period of time from early on when she says yes to marrying you to the final death knell of the marriage where she wants a divorce and ends it. So when we understand these patterns and how the marriage deteriorates over time and why it deteriorates and what emotional impact that's having on the woman and how you're interpreting that emotional, those emotional events, makes it very easy to understand what's gone wrong in the marriage. When we understand what's gone wrong, Makes it a heck of a lot easier to turn it around and fix it. So hopefully by the end of this video today, this presentation, you're gonna understand why she does what she does, why she behaves the way she behaves. We're gonna demystify this because it's not mysterious. And as a result, you're gonna be able to reverse engineer a pathway back from this. So quick caveat before we get started, this presentation is a generality, of course. It's not every single person in every single situation. But this will be predominantly true for most people in most situations. So my challenge to you is to find yourself in this, and whenever you hear yourself saying, I know that, or, that doesn't apply to me, that's you shutting down learning, and that's you shutting down any pathway back. So I encourage you to really try and find yourself in the presentation today. So what most men think in a divorce or a breakdown situation is that it can't really be understood. We put it down to, this is random. She changed. She lost feelings. She met someone else. She wants her freedom. We got married young and she never got to figure out who she was, and now she wants to experience life alone. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence, always. She wants a better life, etc. But my challenge to you is, what if this was never the real story? What if the marriage breakdown actually follows a predictable pattern? What if it actually has predictable stages? And what if her leaving is not random at all, any more than if you eat McDonald's every day for lunch and you never move and you never go to the gym, you put on weight, your health deteriorates, and eventually you have a heart attack and die at best, right? None of this is random. So what we have to understand, there are 2 questions that every marriage runs on, or 2 situations that are experienced within the marriage. And the first question is, how do I feel with this person? How does this person make me feel? So ultimately, it comes down to the big idea to hold onto here as we go through these stages is there are only 2 reasons that your wife ever said yes to you, and vice versa, Really, and that is she loved the way that she felt around you. She loved the way you made her feel, and she saw that a future with you was better than a future without you. Now, if she's leaving, the exact opposite is true. She no longer likes how she feels, or even worse, she hates and detests how she feels around you, and she sees that leaving you is a better option than staying with you. Or in other words, a future without you is better than the future with you. And when you understand this and everything fits into that two those two buckets. Then it makes understanding the 8 stages that we're gonna go through much, much clearer to understand psychologically what's going on. So again, the second question is gonna be, does my future look better with you or does my future look better without you? So in the beginning of the marriage, even before that, the relationship, she loved the way you made her feel. She loved how she felt around you. She saw life as being better with you. You represented pleasure to her. Going out on dates was pleasurable. Intimacy was pleasurable. The future was pleasurable, and you also represented when she looked at you, you represented hope, hope of a better future. Now at the end, the opposite has now happened. She hates how she feels. She feels small. She feels insignificant. She feels unimportant, etc., etc. She believes that life without you is a better option. than life with you, which is self-evident, right? Because she's choosing that option. Men all the time go, my wife tells me that she doesn't know what she wants. Well, that really isn't true, is it? Because she's demonstrating with her behavior what she wants. She's demonstrating that she wants a life without you. Now, she might not know what that life looks like. She might not know that. That might be true, but she's saying fundamentally that I don't really care what that life is. It's— whatever it is, it's going to be better than without you. So she does know what she wants. It's not true that she doesn't know what she wants. She also looks at you as pain. You represent pain to her now. In the beginning, you represented pleasure. You represented promise and you represented hope of a better future. Now she's leaving or she wants out or she's getting close to that stage. Now when she looks at you, the future that you represent is one of pain or one of insignificance or in some form or fashion, a future that she does not want to experience. This is fundamentally what's going on. So this is the emotional equation, and this is basic math, right? She stays when staying feels better than leaving. It's as simple as that. She stays when being with you is a better option than leaving you, and she leaves when leaving you is a better option than staying with you. This, this is just simple math, right? This is And this is the equation that we're going through as men as well. We're just on the opposite end of it. Right now, we see our future and our lives as being better with her, but if that changed for whatever reason, you would also leave most likely. So ultimately, we can summarize it as this, right? She leaves when leaving feels better than staying. It's really that simple. We don't need to complicate it any more than that. Not logically, not financially, not practically, right? So again, a big problem that we make as men is we try to solve an emotional problem with logic, and we'll say, well, what, what's wrong with this woman? Like, logically, this makes no sense. Like, look at her finances with me, look at the children with me, look at the future with me, look at all these. These are logical arguments being applied to an emotional situation, and if you're arguing logic And she's speaking emotion, you've lost the argument already, and vice versa. We get very frustrated, right, when we want to speak logic, we want to communicate logically to our wives, and she will only communicate emotionally. We have to understand that the decision to move away from the marriage is an emotional one, and any logical intervention is going to be met with resistance. This is why in the recovery program, right, in the 7 steps of recovery, arguing logically is a devastating move because she's not in a logical plane. She's not in a logical state. She's in an emotional state, and when you approach emotion with logic, all you're doing, man, is communicating that you don't understand how she feels, and this is 100% about how she feels. She feels that leaving is her best option. It's not logically her best option. We know it's not. So the emotional confusion here is as men, we think she's chasing pleasure. She wants another man. She wants excitement or something new in life. She wants freedom. She wants to experience something different. But the deeper truth underlying this is none of those things are true. If she's pursuing those things, they're simply byproducts. The deeper truth, the deeper psychological underlying truth is Is she's trying to avoid pain. And when I say human beings are predictable, this is what I mean. You give a person the choice of pain or no pain, they're going to choose the no pain 100 times out of 100. Our highest motivation in life as human beings is to avoid pain, to escape pain, to move away from pain. Very rarely is it moving towards pleasure, but moving towards pleasure becomes a motivating factor If there's no pain involved in pursuing that pleasure. But fundamentally, we're all moving away from pain, or our actions are designed to escape pain. And when we understand that, or we understand motivation from that perspective, motivation becomes very, very easy to understand. And how our wives or our children or anybody else is interpreting our behavior can be determined from what they're moving towards or what they're moving away from. So, I've got 6 stages here of the silent death of a marriage. It's actually 8 stages. So, stage 1 is the promise. Let's go through the whole marriage now, from dating to divorce. So, the first stage is promise, and from the woman's perspective, here's the promise, right? Like, my life feels better with him. It's as simple as that. She feels seen. She feels chosen. She feels desired. She feels important. She feels safe. She feels hopeful. She feels alive. Feels, right? Feels. This is fundamentally what she is saying yes to, and this is how she felt in the beginning with you. That translates into the belief of, my future is better with this man than without this man. I will experience more pleasure with this man than without him, and he will move me further away from pain by being with him than being without him. This is her belief in the beginning, and this is What she says yes to. So what you represent to your wife or girlfriend or fiancée in the beginning of the relationship is pleasure right now. You represent pleasure now; you represent safety later. You represent love right now; you represent a better future later. So she's getting a double whammy of endorphins and dopamine here, right? She's getting she's getting a pleasurable future. Pleasurable present and a better future. This is what you represent to her in the stage of the marriage where she's head over heels in love with you and wants to be with you. So the diagnostic takeaway from this, man, is that this is why she said yes to you. You have to get this. You have to understand this. She didn't just say yes because she loved you. She said yes because she looked at life with you and saw it as being a better option than life Without you, or in other words, she she projected into the future and goes, "What is what is the next twenty? Where will I be in twenty years with this man?" She didn't just say yes to the present you; she said yes to the future you, which is very important later on because she's not just saying no to the present you; she's saying yes to what you represent in the future as well. And that's very important to understand, right? Because a lot of men go, "I've made these changes right now," blah blah blah blah blah. Well. Yes, if the decision was made on the present you, that would be meaningful, but it's not. There are 2 sides to this. There's the present you and the future you that she's projecting into the future. What does the future look like with you? This is long-term investment, not day trading. Stage 2 is the shift. So this is where you're now married and you may have been married for 2, 3 years and she starts to move into, I used to be the problem. The priority in your life. Now I'm competing. So for men, work gets more of you. Stress gets more of you. Money gets more of your time. The future gets more of your time, and she gets less and less of you. Now, as the man, we we think well we're doing this. I'm doing this for you. I'm doing this for our family. I'm doing this to build a future for you. I am building the future here. You just don't understand. Like Who's gonna? These bills are not gonna pay themselves. This car payment's not gonna make itself. This business is not gonna grow itself. I'm being responsible right now. I'm doing the I'm doing the adult grown-up masculine thing and taking care of the family. She should appreciate this from me. She should understand this, and and all she can do is be ungrateful. Now we've got now we've got a slight dissonance of opinions, right? She's like. He's not prioritizing me, which is causing a little bit of dissonance in her. And she's got— he's going, I'm doing this for us and she's not appreciating it. And it's causing a little bit of friction and a little bit of dissonance in him. So now slightly off, right? We're not, we're not in dangerous territory yet, but we're moving in the wrong direction. So she feels, I used to matter more. I used to have his attention all the time. He prioritized me over work before. When we were dating, he'd leave work early to pick me up. Now he stays late and cancels a date. I was his priority when we were dating and in the early stages of the marriage. Now I'm in competition with his clients, with his patients, with his business, with his work. I'm now in competition. Now I have to fight for his attention, whereas I was given it before. And she thinks she feels well the future he's building is costing me the present. I understand he's building a future, but that's at the expense of the present, which I have not consented to. So as you can see, friction starts to arise, and again, wrongfully or rightfully, we're not debating the morality of male and female energy and positions and so on and so forth. This is this is we're just we're just stating facts here, right? This is what's going on. Maybe she's right. Maybe she's wrong. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're You're wrong. It doesn't matter. We have to deal with what's going on, not what we think should be going on. So the outcome of this stage is the first reversal in the marriage, the first turnaround of the marriage starting to head in the wrong direction. It's very subtle. It's not nefarious. It's not an affair. You haven't beaten her or anything like that, and she doesn't feel hatred for you. She doesn't feel animosity towards you. She doesn't feel resentment towards you. She just feels like a loss of priority has taken place. That's it. I used to be his priority. Now I'm not. He used to prioritize me. Now he doesn't. Something's changed here. This is what it is at this stage. Now we move into the next stage, stage 3, which is the feedback loop, right? So she's trying to correct this situation. The boat is off course. The ship's off course. So she tries to correct him. Gives him feedback. Says, you're spending too much time at work. You get home and you're on your phone. You don't prioritize the family like you used to. To her, she's trying to help the situation and she's trying to course correct. To the man, he takes it as criticism and attack. She's attacking me. She's always attacking me. She never understands. All I do is work for this family. Can I not just get a thank you from her? Can I just not get some appreciation? So, she thinks she's trying to course correct to help the family, and he thinks he's trying to course correct to help the family, but not understanding each other, not understanding what she wants and what he's providing, it causes more dissonance, it causes more conflict, and now the rift grows deeper and deeper, and now resentment starts to set in. So, in this stage, she starts to speak up. She starts to give him feedback that probably is very unwelcome. She asks for more time. She asks for more connection, and she says that something feels wrong. There's a problem here. And of course, as men, we don't really like that too much, right? So we hear that as criticism, ingratitude. I'm being attacked. She doesn't appreciate what I'm doing. Nothing I do is good enough for this woman. Nothing I do is appreciated. Et cetera, et cetera. Multitude of emotions that we experience that, of course, don't put us in a great place to progress the marriage forward. So then, of course, we defend, we explain, we withdraw, we get irritated, we turn the conversation back on her and say, "What about you? Do you think you're perfect? Do you think you don't have any problems?" And again, this is where our upbringings and our psychological Mental health can really affect things because if if we've got low self-esteem or if we have issues around personal emotional security and stuff like that, of course we're going to defend. Of course we're going to explain. We feel attacked. We feel we feel like we're being we're being unfairly judged. So of course we're going to attack. It makes sense. But again, this is this is not a judgment on who's right and who's wrong. We're just stating this is what is right. Hopefully you can see yourself. This is what's happening and how this is now causing a serious rift, a serious deterioration within the marriage. And we're only in like stage three at this point, right? We're only probably five years into the marriage at this point. So what she learns from this behavior, man, is when I try to improve this marriage, I get punished. When I tell him that I'm unsatisfied in this marriage, I'm unfulfilled, I don't feel connected, I don't feel prioritized. When I share that information with him, which is given. To help him course correct, I just get punished. Right? So again, we're now into the emotional security, emotional safety territory. She's not feel she's communicating what she needs to remain engaged in this marriage, and she's punished for that. This is the destruction of emotional safety, emotional security. So what happens here is the problem is no longer the problem. Right? The problem stops being the problem. The problem becomes she no longer feels safe in raising the issues. The problem now is not that you're you stay at work too long or you're on your phone on holiday or any of these little things, right? That that that was the problem one stage ago. Now the problem is not that at all. The problem is that she can't talk to you about it. That is now fundamentally the problem. The problem shifted from logical to emotional entirely. This is why as men we can no longer address that. Like we had the option. Or we had the opportunity to address that in stage 1, 2, and 3. We've moved beyond that now. Now we have to address feelings and emotions because we're actively destroying emotional safety inadvertently, admittedly, but we're nevertheless destroying emotional safety at this time. So now we move to stage 4, which is you've given her a choice fundamentally, or she's presented with a choice in her mind. I can have peace or I can have myself. I can be myself. If I, if I try to improve this marriage, I'm going to get bashed emotionally. So I've got a choice. I can either bring this up and have conflict, or I can just kind of slippery slide into the background and have some peace and quiet. So from her perspective now, from the woman's perspective, she's learned that if she speaks up and tells the man what she needs, what she would like, what she what she needs to give him what he wants. At this point, the man's saying, there's no sex, there's no intimacy, and she's fundamentally saying, well, there's no connection. Give me the connection and I'll give you the intimacy, but that communication has been shut off at this point. It's been closed down. There's no longer a channel of communication where she can tell you what you need to give her in order for her to give you what you need from her. So of course, she's learned that if she speaks up at this point, Conflict increases within the marriage. He gets defensive. He gets aggressive. She feels like every time she brings up something that helps the marriage, or from her perspective, she's trying to help the marriage, she gets punished for that. This is why at the end, a lot of times men will go, well, she just won't make an effort. Well, you've taught her that effort equals pain. We've got to untrain that. Every time she's made effort to save this marriage, she's been punished for that. She's been made to feel unsafe. She's dealt with increased conflict. She's had to deal every time she's tried to make an effort to save the marriage or improve the situation. She reaches she's met with defensiveness. This is what we've trained men. We have to untrain it. And again, this is not bashing men. This is this is just what is right. This is just what we do. She's also learned. Conversely to that, on the other side of the coin, is that if she stays quiet and she doesn't bring up the issues, she doesn't raise her concerns, the house is calm, the marriage looks peaceful. But here's the problem with that: she just disappears inside that silence. Or in other words, she emotionally withdraws, she shuts down, and she's learned that reducing herself and withdrawing into herself Produces less pain. Trying to deal with the marriage and trying to resolve the issues within the marriage produces more pain. So we're now actively training our wives to withdraw into the silence with inside of herself, or it could be to friends, to family. Either way, she's starting to withdraw and disappear from the marriage at this point, right? So he inadvertently and mistakenly thinks at this point things are better. We argue less. Maybe she finally understands me. This marriage is calmer. The number of men that I talk to that go, we don't fight, like that's a good thing. Now you understand. Now you can see why you don't fight, because she's thrown in the white flag. She's capitulated. Not that you're right, but to the idea that things can change. It's not good when she doesn't fight. When she's fighting, she's caring. When she's fighting, she's still making an effort to improve. So what's actually happening is when she stops fighting, is she's withdrawing. She's suppressing herself. She's lowering her expectations of you, the marriage, and her future. She's learning not to need you, and she's becoming emotionally alone. This is what's actually going on. But as men, we look at it and go, "It's peaceful. It's calm. Everything's fine." This is why 70% of men don't— they get sideswiped. They never saw it coming because at this point they've mistaken withdrawal and capitulation to, I agree with you and everything's great. So the outcome here is less conflict does not mean things are fine by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it usually means quite the opposite. When there's no conflict in a marriage, it usually means that she's just given up and she's not trying anymore. So then we're on to stage five, which is the loneliness. I have a husband, but I don't have a partner. Roommate syndrome. Business partner syndrome. What she feels at this point is alone, completely alone within the marriage. And of course, she might bring that up and say, "I feel alone." And what do we do as men? We we just dismiss that immediately. What what are you talking about? I'm right here. I feel unseen, unheard. I'm looking at you right now and I'm talking to you right now. What are you talking about? What do you want me to hear? She feels emotionally unsafe and she feels subordinated instead of equal. And as we move through, of course, when she feels subordinated, she's not going to want to have sex with you. She's not going to want to be intimate with you. She's not going to want to physically connect with you because at this point A woman opens up to those experiences and emotions, i.e., physical intimacy, when she does feel seen, when she does feel heard, when she does feel emotionally safe, and when she does feel like an equal partner within the marriage. That's when she starts to open up. We've created the exact opposite environment here. Instead of creating an equal partner within the marriage that's emotionally connected and safe, we've created a subordinate employee who feels the exact opposite to all of those things. This is the de facto position that we've created, whether we intended it or not, that doesn't make us horrible people. It just makes us lacking in emotional sophistication and education skills. That's all it means. So fundamentally, she feels there's no room in this marriage for her. The number of men that I've spoken to, it just comes down to this, that that's the diagnosis, right? There's no room in this marriage for your wife. There's only room for your opinions. There's only room for what you say is right. And it's like, if you want this woman to be married to you, To you, you're going to have to make space for her. It's as simple as that. That's really all it comes down to a lot of times is make space for the woman. So as we just said, what happens to intimacy, this is where it all goes awry, is the emotional connection is gone, which means with no emotional connection, desire is gone, affection is gone, sex becomes either available through pressure, duty, or avoidance. The marriage becomes one of functionality. It's not intimate. So even if you're getting sex, it's going to be pretty. It's going to be pretty ordinary, and chances are you're simply not getting sex. So what happens here is the man thinks she's cold. She's gone cold. She's withholding sex from me. She's weaponizing sex. She's changed. She doesn't care anymore. Yada yada yada. We can go on and on, right? We've all got our stories on that. So, but what she feels. Is this: there's no place for the real me inside of this marriage. If the real me shows up, I get conflict. If the real me shows up, I get pain. The only way I can experience or move away from pain in this marriage is to suppress the real me, allow an avatar of me that shows up that is fundamentally agreeable and submissive functionally, and that's that's the choice that she has at that point, right? So. The outcome of that, man, it's impossible for your wife to desire somebody who she experiences as unsafe, dismissive, or that man has an attitude of moral superiority. None of these things produce sexual desire, and in fact quite the opposite. So then stage 6 is the wake-up event. So all of these things really just They just up until stage six, with both the man and the woman really is just living a life as Henry Thoreau says, a life of quiet desperation. Right? This is like this sucks, but it's like it's not bad enough to leave, and you know kind of sucks, but that's that, right? The wake-up event is the woman has an event where she looks at this and goes, "Oh my God! Is this going to be the rest of my life?" Right? So it can be something like. Something that forces her to evaluate life. A parent dies, a friend leaves a bad marriage, a health scare, milestone birthday, children getting older, for example. All of these things jolt you out of the hypnotic trance that you're in and force you to look at life and go, man, it's going faster than I thought. I don't have as long left as I thought. I don't have as many swings of the bat as I thought I did. All of these things start to become brought into play, right? So the question in her mind at that point is, am I willing to live like this forever? Am I willing to lose myself in this marriage forever to keep the peace? Is this my reality forever? So the emotional shift takes place, right? So up until this point, her emotional pain Has been in the present, but with, with the life event typically, or something happening that's causing her to look at the bigger picture now, her present pain stops being her present pain and starts to become her future pain. It's one thing to look at, to look at, you know, we all, we all wake up, right, sometimes, and we've slept funny and we've got a lot of pain in our back, and it's like it's severe pain and it's very uncomfortable. But we can accept it as long as we understand it's for a day or two. If somebody told you this is your reality for the rest of your life, the extreme back pain that you're experiencing right now is the rest of your life, all of a sudden that pain becomes completely intolerable. What was tolerable in the moment when it's temporary becomes intolerable in the long term when it's permanent. And this is the emotional shift that happens when your wife decides to leave the marriage. Or leave you. She no longer looks at the present situation as only the present. She projects it into the future, and it stops being just I'm unhappy right now, and it becomes I will be unhappy for years and years to come, if not forever. And as I've just explained, that's a different equation. That produces a different outcome. It produces a different behavior from her. Maybe she can tolerate pain in the present, but when this becomes her reality forever, different story. So when this happens, it stops being just pain in the present. It makes her feel like staying with you is costing her the rest of her life. Staying with this man is no longer I have to suffer today, or I have to suffer next week, or I have to suffer for the children. Staying becomes, if I stay with this man, it's going to cost me the rest of my life. That's now the cost. So now you're being measured against a different standard, right? And then finally, stage 7, or the final stage before the exit, is the last attempts, right? And this is essentially where she's clearing the deck. She needs to know, I did everything I could to save this marriage. She suggests counseling. She suggests retreats, books, videos. You'll be laying in bed and she might go, let's watch this marriage video from Cody tonight, or she might be like, let's go to this retreat, or let's talk to a pastor at church, whatever it looks like, right? She starts to make— she starts laying out all of the options. And of course, what does the man think? This is a pain in the ass. She's nagging. She keeps criticizing. She keeps moving the goalposts. Why would I want to go to a therapist? Everything's great. Maybe I'll go to a marriage retreat, but screw this. Basically, I'll just go because she wants to go. This woman's impossible to satisfy. Whatever. I'm going to go to this marriage retreat and she's still not going to be happy, right? But here's the mistake you're making. What she's actually doing is she's clearing the deck, is what she's doing. She wants to know that she tried everything. She wants to know that she gave you every chance to rehabilitate. She wants to know that no stone was left unturned in this marriage. She wants to know that 10 years from now when she looks back, that she can say, I didn't quit easily. I didn't give up on him. I didn't walk away from him easily. I gave him every chance. I tried everything I had. I left nothing on the field. And ultimately, when she reaches the end of this list, she arrives at the place where she goes, "I can now leave this marriage with a clear conscience." And of course, when she does that, the man says he interprets that as she's cold, she's heartless, she doesn't care, she doesn't care about me, she doesn't care about the marriage. Ultimately, she's moving away from the marriage because that's she needs to experience less pain, and in that very event of moving away, you pile the pain on. Causing her to move away at a faster rate than she would have by herself. So the outcome here, man, in this stage is what you may experience as criticism or nagging or just being a general pain in the ass. She is experiencing as her final attempt, her final efforts, her final roll of the dice, an opportunity to save this marriage is what she's experiencing. And then of course we move to stage 8, which is the final stage. She comes to the conclusion, my future is better without him. Remember the beginning equation? Only 2 reasons why she said yes to you. Loves how she feels around you. Sees that a future with you is better than a future without you. That is now entirely reversed. And now she goes, I don't like how this man makes me feel at all. In fact, I detest how I feel around him, and a future, any future away from him is better than a future with him. Any future. So we can see this is not— this is a gradual, insidious process to go from happily married to getting divorced. It's not one thing that went wrong, and this is why marriages can fail over 20 years. 30 years. This is why men never see it coming, because it's not one thing. It's the boiling of the frog, right? You put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it's going to jump right out. You put a frog in cold water and boil it, the frog will boil itself to death. This is how the marriage died. So at the beginning, as we've just said, I love how I feel with him. My future's better with him than without him. At the end, We're now at a place, I hate how I feel with him. My future is way better without him. So of course, as men, what do we do? We look for, we look for causational events. There has to be another man, right? She just wants her freedom. She's just selfish. Midlife crisis, hormones, menopause. She's just changed. She just, whatever, you know, like pick your poison. We come up with all kinds of reasons why she's doing this. But the deeper reality is it's none of those things. She sees that life without you is less painful than a life with you. That's the real crisis. That's it. That's it in a nutshell, right? The reason she's leaving is because she because she sees that life without you is a less painful option than the life with you. This is the whole puzzle. Figure this out and you figured the game out. That's the real crisis that we're solving. Right. So if there is another man, then honestly, he's not usually the root problem. He may be a symptom of the problem. He may be a comparison point at this point. He may be a source of attention for her, a source of emotional relief, or he may be the doorway out of the marriage, but none of those things, none of those have caused her to leave the marriage. What's caused her to leave the marriage is she's experiencing more pain in the marriage than she would experience Out of the marriage. So the real question, man, is not if there's another man, and it doesn't have to be another man, another situation, right? What does he have that I don't? That's not the question. This is the question that we ask ourselves quite often. What has he got? What has he provided? Like, the real question is, why did life without me start to look better than life with me? This is the question that really forces— The transformation, right? As long as when we understand this, it—the problem's not with her. The problem's not with the situation. I'm not saying she's blameless or faultless by any stretch of the imagination. As you can see throughout this entire presentation, misinterpretation on both sides. She's misinterpreted your intentions, and you've misinterpreted. Her intentions, but the problem is she's leaving, and this video is for men. This class is for men. So we've got to answer the question: Why did life without me become a better option than life with me? If we can understand that, then we can reverse engineer the process. And this is why whenever I whenever I talk to men, it can be quite difficult sometimes because. We have to uncover this, and it's never nice. It's never nice to get to the bottom of what happened in the marriage that made you a bad option. What happened in the marriage that made her go, "I'd rather I'd rather deal with anything than you." That's that's what we're dealing with, and it's just it isn't nice. I'll be honest, but it is also the solution. If we if we put the solution. Or if we make the cause menopause or another man or whatever, it's like we've completely disempowered ourselves from any solution in this problem. Completely disempowered ourselves. And hopefully you can see that going through the steps here because I understand leaving carries pain. We seem to forget that, right? We just think, well, she's leaving, she's moving towards pleasure. No. Leaving creates immense pain for her. Money issues, children issues, family issues, security issues, identity issues, reputation issues, church issues, society issues, home issues, family issues, losing her history, massive uncertainty, massive security issues, financial uncertainty. Like, it's pain on top of pain on top of pain on top of pain when a woman leaves a marriage. Very rarely is she just moving from a bad situation into a good one or a good situation into a better one. Very, very rarely. And never if the marriage is more than 10, 15, 20 years old. Never is that the case. So when we understand that when she leaves, that creates a huge amount of pain, but that pain is still less than staying, that's our clue, right? That's our clue. So the question is not why would she leave the marriage? The question becomes how painful must staying How painful must it have become for her to stay in this marriage, to choose all of that pain as a better option than staying? That's the real diagnostic. That's the real canary in the coal mine. And it's like, at the end of the day, this is not subjective. This is not opinion. If she's leaving, it's because she believes she's going to move away from pain and experience less pain outside of the marriage. So let's just summarize this with my ChatGPT image here. So the pattern, right? The first stage is the promise. She feels loved. She feels prioritized. Second stage, you get married. Your priorities have changed slightly. Your priorities are now work, stress, money, future. She feels less important than she used to. Stage 3, if she gives you feedback on this and says, hey, maybe you spend a little bit too much time on your phone. Maybe you spend a little bit too much time at work. You take that feedback as criticism. It becomes conflict. Stage number 4 becomes the conflict destroys emotional safety. She no longer feels safe being honest. Speaking up leads to more conflict, so she starts to withdraw from the marriage and keep quiet to keep the peace. Now silence, stage 5. Silence has replaced her honesty. She stops sharing her real self. She stops telling you how she feels. She stops telling you what she wants from you. To the outside, to the man, the marriage looks calmer, but she's withdrawing, suppressing, and feeling alone at this point. Stage 6 is connection has now been replaced with loneliness. She feels alone in the marriage. She feels like a single person in the marriage. Emotional connection fades, intimacy disappears, and she feels like there's no room for her in this marriage anymore. It's you and you alone. Stage 7, potentially a life event creates urgency in her decision-making process. Not always, but most of the time, a lot of times she faces— she's through a life event such as a death, health scare, major, you know, major life event. She's forced to face the reality of time. She can no longer hide from it, and she asks herself the question, am I willing to live the rest of my life like this. And then finally, stage number 8 here is the future. The equation is reversed. Her future looks better without you. Staying has become more painful than leaving, so her future with you now feels like a better option, or a future without you now feels like the better option than a future With you. So again, I said at the beginning human behavior is predictable, right? You may have questioned that at the beginning. Got it. Thanks, okay. But hopefully you can see now that this is not a mystery. This is a cause and effect event. This is a sowing and reaping event. And simply because you sow seeds out of ignorance, if you if you if you sow thorns and nettles and poison ivy, you get thorns, nettles, and poison ivy. Like I didn't know that those seeds were poison ivy. Isn't isn't really. Doesn't the ground doesn't care. Poison ivy comes up and you get the results of that. So marriage collapses. The pattern is very predictable, right? It's not madness. It's not hormones. It's not random personality changes from you or her. It's not peer pressure from her friends putting pressure on her to leave the marriage because they're getting divorced. Yes, that has that is going to have an impact, but she has to be unhappy to do it, right? A happily married woman is not going to get divorced because her friend got divorced. An unhappily married woman who needs the moral support to make that decision may be pushed into that, or it may be moved forward in timelines because of peer pressure, but she was unhappy anyway. That was going to happen at some point anyway. So here's the hope, man. Like, probably going, wow, what a motivational speech, Cody. What a motivational video. But hey, here's the hope, right? If breakdown followed a pattern, then healing must also follow a pattern, right? If human behavior is predictable, then we then then we are all we have to do is understand the sowing and reaping principle, the cause and effect principle, and we identify the causes that create the effects that we want. Then it becomes predictable in the other direction as well. So if certain behaviors man created pain. Then almost certainly different behaviors can create different experiences for her. And if her if her equation changed once, it can certainly change again. Right, Mango? Well, she says she's never going to change her mind. Well, she also told you that she was never going to leave you or forsake you. She told you that she'd marry you and be with you forever, right? I promise to have and to hold, to love and to cherish till death do us part. She's changed her mind once. So why can't she change it change it again? She can't. But not through pressure, and not through logic, not through panic, not through arguing, not through trying to convince her, not through showing her that you're the best option, not through basically all of the mistakes in stage 1 of the 7 Steps to Recovery. None of those work, and hopefully you can see why that is actually destructive right now. So, the real question is, where exactly did your marriage move off course? Where can you see that it took the wrong turn? Can you see where it took the wrong turn in those eight steps? And also, what would have to happen or what would have to change for that emotional equation to start to move in the other direction again? Now understand here, your marriage is a lagging indicator. Many men get frustrated because they go, "I'm doing all these things, Cody, but nothing." changing. Your marriage is a lagging indicator. Where you are at today is not an indication of what you did today. It's an indication of what you did a year ago or 6 months ago or 2 years ago. In the same way that your current bank account is a lagging indicator. What's in your bank is not an indication of the money you made today. It's an indication of the decisions that you made 2, 3, 7 years ago. We have to understand that. You don't get instant feedback here. Your marriage is a lagging indicator. You will reap the rewards of the changes that you make today At some point in the future, how long into the future? Well, I don't know. It depends on on you, your wife, the situation, how forgiving lots of factors go into that, right? So my goal here, my hope for you today is to start dealing with what's actually going on in your marriage. Start pulling up the real weeds that are in the marriage and ditch your stories. Your stories are keeping you stuck for the most part. Your stories about why this happened, who's to blame, so on and so forth. These are detrimental and they're keeping you stuck. So that's it, man. Those are the 8 stages of marriage breakdown. Let's jump over to some Q&A. So if you've watched this all the way to the end, there's something that I know about you, and that is that you are very serious about saving your marriage. And if you want help with that, if you were thinking, I'd love to have your advice, I'd love to have you coach me. Cody personally, then check out Coach Cody AI, the link in the description. This is exactly what it's been created for. It is my digital mind trained on over 5,000 real coaching calls over the last 10 years, and it gives you 24-hour, 7-day-a-week access to marriage coaching when you need it most. Coach Cody AI, check it out. God bless you, and I'll see you soon.