Your Wife Wants Divorce…And You’re Not Taking It Seriously

So today I want to talk about the fastest way to win your wife back. So when a woman asks for divorce, most men assume at that point that that decision has come from dozens and dozens of different problems within the relationship, but in reality it really comes down to one catastrophic breakdown, and that is emotional safety has completely collapsed at that point. So what most men start to do here is try try to fix 20 different problems within the marriage at the same time. They start scanning for what's wrong and try to fix everything that they see is wrong. But if emotional safety has collapsed, then none of those fixes are going to make any difference whatsoever. So the bottom line here is no emotional safety results in no marriage. So in this video today, I'm going to share with you the emotional safety framework that shows you the exact tipping point where marriages actually collapse, the 4 behaviors that destroy emotional safety actively and quickly, and how, how to reverse the entire breakdown process so her attachment to you can begin to rebuild again and she can start to reattach. So the big idea to take away from this video is that marriage crisis is not caused by a loss of love or a loss of feelings. It's caused by the collapse of emotional safety. Now, we can break this down into 3 parts. So the first part is going to be the emotional safety threshold. So the emotional safety threshold is the point where a woman's nervous system shifts from experiencing the relationship, and by the relationship I mean specifically you, as safe, to experiencing the relationship stressful or threatening. So there are 3 stages of the threshold here. The first stage is above the threshold. This is the early stage of the relationship and safety is present here. So at this point, her nervous system experiences the relationship as predictable and as safe. So what this looks like in the, in the marriage itself is your emotional reactions are stable, you stay calm and confident in pretty much all situations. She feels heard when she expresses her emotions to you. Disagreements, when they do arise, they don't threaten the relationship. They tend to be dealt with and resolved. Emotional connection feels reliable. So at this point, she feels everything that she wants to feel within the marriage. She feels an openness between the two of you. She feels, as a result, affection towards you. She has feelings, she feels vulnerability, which is good. A woman likes to feel vulnerable in a good way, in a positive way, when she feels safe She feels that there's a spirit of cooperation present within the marriage, and as a result of all of this, there is physical and emotional attraction to you. So as time goes on and the emotional safety begins to weaken within the relationship, which typically is the man becoming complacent and being less incentivized to behave well, as you start approaching the threshold, the critical threshold of emotional safety, Repeated threat signals begin appearing within the marriage. So what this looks like from your perspective is conversations increasingly turn defensive instead of understanding what's going on. Small disagreements quickly turn into arguments. This is the eggshell scenario when you sound— feels like you're walking on eggshells or anything can turn into an argument. Things escalate quickly. She begins Choosing her words very carefully because she knows that certain words are going to produce reactions within you and she doesn't want to trigger you anymore, so she starts to self-censor and regulate her, what she talks to you about. And emotional conversations end in correction instead of acknowledgement. This is the man starting to defend himself and his position instead of trying to understand what she's actually trying to communicate and the problems that are that she's trying to solve here. So, she begins, some of the things that you'll hear at this stage to indicate that you're in this part of the Threshold is, "Never mind," "Doesn't matter," "Just forget about it." She stops bringing up problems because it doesn't feel productive anymore. So there's only 2 reasons a woman would ever stop talking to you, and that is, it feels unsafe or it's dangerous to talk to you, it's painful, or it's completely pointless. At this point, she starts to feel that the problem's just pointless bringing it up. There's no point bringing it up. So also, neutral comments that she makes start to become interpreted as criticism by you. You go into defensive mode. You start getting thoughts like, "Nothing I can do is right. Everything I do is a problem." And you begin interrupting or talking over her during conflict. You don't really listen to her. You're interested in just resolving it or explaining yourself. And what happens in this stage is her nervous system begins monitoring interactions with you for stress. The relationship, i.e., you, is starting to become stressful to her. Now, this is where it starts to become a problem, is when you go below the emotional safety threshold, and this is where safety has actually collapsed within the relationship. Now, what's going on now is her nervous system is actively treating interactions with you as threatening and as dangerous. So her nervous system begins prioritizing self-protection over connection with you. And it's important to understand here, this is a self-defense mechanism. It's not something that she's necessarily consciously choosing to do, but now the relationship has become threatening, she's moving into self-defense mode, and that's more important to her than having a connection with you. So when the threshold, the emotional safety threshold drops below a critical level, these are the top 5 most common behaviors, the most common ways that she's going to respond to the marriage so you can diagnose and identify where you are at this point in the process. So the first thing she's going to do is she's going to emotionally detach from the marriage. She's going to stop investing emotionally into the relationship. Conversations between you and her are going to become transactional, affection and warmth is going to disappear. So this is where she starts to move from being your wife to being your business partner, co-parent, or roommate, basically. The second behavior is, this is where loss of attraction starts to occur. So physical intimacy has probably already been declining at this point, it's been reduced significantly significantly. This is where the intimacy just reduces to an absolute trickle or stops completely. Her romantic interest in you fades to a little bit of nothing at this point, and she begins to see you much more of a source of stress and threat within the relationship than a source of desire. A woman is never going to be attracted to a man that she sees as stressful and threatening. She's going to be attracted to a man that she has that vulnerability and openness with, and that has been destroyed at this point. The third behavior that indicates that you've dropped below the threshold is she stops looking to you for emotional support. She doesn't come to you anymore. She goes to a support network, family, church, friends, ChatGPT, for example. And a lot of times at this point, I will hear from a man, he will say, my wife just doesn't like talking. And my response to that is no, sir, that's not correct. She loves talking, she doesn't like talking to you is the problem. I guarantee she's talking to somebody and she's getting that emotional support from somewhere else at this point. So she also begins processing life and the problems and situations she's dealing with in her life without the man at this point. This is, she's getting that processing from her support network and this relationship begins feeling much more like a partnership as we just explained. You become a roommate or just a marriage of convenience at this point. Stage 4, Step 4, is she starts to create a desire for distance. And again, all subconscious, she's not choosing this. So her requests for space increase. This is where she might say, I need space from you, I need time, etc. She actively spends less time with you, which for the man, this can be quite positive at this point. She's spending, she's dumping her emotional burdens, as he sees it, on her friends and her network. So he's having to deal with less of her problems. So he kind of likes this at this point, not really knowing the damage that this is doing. And of course, there's an avoidance from her for any deeper interaction with the relationship whatsoever. So This moves us to behavior number 5, which is she now starts the consideration of separation or divorce. And this is where you're going to start to hear things like, I can't keep doing this, I love you but I'm not in love with you, I need space. She starts emotionally preparing to leave, and the mental separation for this begins way before the emotional, the physical separation. So this is why statistics show that 70% of men never saw the separation or the divorce coming is because she makes this decision emotionally minimum of 12 months, typically 18 to 24 months before you know anything about it. She's processing and deciding what she wants to do internally before she reveals any of this to you. This is why men know nothing about the problem typically when it happens. So the core principle to understand in this situation is that the emotional safety threshold is crossed when threat signals occur often enough that the relationship itself becomes associated with stress. When she thinks about the marriage, the core response in her body, her emotional feelings, her emotional response is, "This is stressful." She has a stress response when she thinks about the relationship. So, The relationship itself at this point is becoming associated with psychological, emotional, and even possibly physical threat to her at this point. This is where she's at emotionally, and this is what you have to understand if you're going to turn this situation around. So once that happens, as you can imagine, attachment to you and attraction, it begins to shut down. She is not in the least bit interested, or she's not even capable emotionally of being in a relationship and attracted to somebody who's psychologically, emotionally, and physically threatening to her. It's just not going to happen. So, key idea here is marriage stability, and we can also say marriage reconciliation, depends on one single variable: does her nervous system experience you as safe or unsafe? Now, this is going to be why most men unable to reconcile, and this, this is going to be triggering for some people, but it's the truth that's going to save your marriage. The reality is the reason your wife is wanting out of this marriage is because she's scared of you, or even worse, she's actually terrified of you. And for most men watching this call, the truth of the matter is your wife is terrified of you. And that's very triggering and very confronting for most men, and my marriage didn't start to improve until I actually looked in the mirror and confronted the fact that I'm looking at a man whose wife and children are scared of him. I'm staring straight in the eyes of a man whose wife is terrified of him. And for most men, they would choose to lose the marriage, to lose the relationship, and blame her and say it's her fault, it's she did this, it was another man, all of the reasons that come into it, than actually look in the mirror and see a man that has created an environment that their wife is terrified of. And when I looked at that man in the mirror and said to myself, "I am looking at a man whose wife is terrified of him," that was unacceptable to me. That was something that I could not live with. I could live with the marriage collapsing because she was the problem, and I could live with the marriage collapsing. That was easier than me looking at myself going, I am a man who my wife is terrified of. That had to change. So emotional safety can be— this is the simplest form that this can be defined as. Emotional safety equals nervous system predictability. Okay, does your wife find you predictable? So let's do some myth busting here because there's lots of myths around this. So emotional safety is not created by being nice. You're not emotionally safe because you're a nice guy. You're emotionally safe because you're predictable, and we'll go more into that in a minute. It's not about, it's not created by agreeing with everything she says, avoiding difficult conversations, trying to keep the peace, or just giving in and becoming agreeable to stop answers. Now, this is a very common misconception men have. They think that in order to create emotional safety, they just have to sacrifice everything about themselves and effectively become the proverbial simp. I just have to just give in to her. No, that's not what emotional safety is, and that is not what your wife wants from you either. A man that just gives in and gives her everything she wants without— that's not attractive to a woman at all. So emotional safety is created when a woman's nervous system learns that I can predict what will happen when I interact with you. I know who I'm going to get. I know who's going to show up when they come home from work today. This is why alcohol is so devastating to a marriage, because she simply cannot predict you when you're drinking. So the question to ask yourself today is, are you an emotionally self-regulated and stable man, or are you a man that your wife is at best scared of and at worst terrified of. Because predictability reduces threat, unpredictability increases threat, and threat is what builds or destroys emotional safety, which is the number one factor in whether you are going to stay married to this woman or not. So what's the fix? So it's quite simple. Right? Like, this is probably the most profound advice you will ever get anywhere when it comes to saving your marriage. Stop being a destabilizing force and become a regulating influence in her life. Are you somebody who destabilizes her nervous system and creates, quite frankly, fear? Or are you a regulating influence that she can feel safe and stable around and creates that environment to where once you become that regulating influence, she becomes emotionally vulnerable to you because she knows it's safe again. So what is the collapse point? What is the point of singularity where this crosses over and the marriage actually goes into failure? Well, if stress continues in the relationship for long enough, her nervous system stops seeking safety inside of the relationship and it begins seeking relief outside of it. The key point to understand here is her nervous system has taken over and it is seeking safety. It is a core human need. We need to feel safe, and whether that is within the relationship or whether that is without the outside of the relationship, she's going to seek that relief. So let's look at part 2 of the process, which is The 4 emotional killers of emotional safety. So there are actually 4 behavioral patterns that repeatedly destroy emotional safety, and anybody watching this video is, is engaging in multiple of these, if not all of them, and most probably all of them. So each one of these toxic habits or patterns creates a serious threat signal to her nervous system. So let's run through these 4. The first one is the habit of negative interpretation. So the core pattern here is it's interpreting her words, tone, or behavior as criticism, disrespect, or hostility when that was not necessarily her intent. It's negatively interpreting everything that she says in a way that threatens your ego or you take it personally or as disrespect, and of course you're going to respond. When you feel like your wife's disrespected you or criticized you in an unjustified way, do you think that's going to produce a positive response that creates emotional safety, or do you think you're going to behave in a way that is going to destroy safety and create unpredictability? So some examples of this are assuming negative motives behind neutral comments. Her comment may simply be on how to improve the relationship and you simply take it as a criticism. It's— these are very typical in men, hearing criticism where none was present, none was stated. Responding defensively to situations before actually clarifying what was actually meant. And let me be clear here, whether you're the aggressor or whether you're the defender, arrows are flying. If you're in the ramparts on top of the castle and you are being unjustifiably attacked by the Mongol hordes and you're shooting arrows, you are still attacking. There are still arrows flying and those arrows are still going to do damage to your wife. So even if the defense is justified, it is still doing damage at this point. And interpreting questions as accusations. She simply asks you questions for clarification and you take that very personally or as an accusation. Some more include treating disagreement as personal attack, assuming that she's trying to control, criticize, or undermine. None of us have ever done that, right? Or responding to perceived disrespect instead of the actual message that she's given. So the result here is that communication, her attempts at communication, begin triggering defensive reactions instead of creating resolution and connection. She's trying to remove the blockages that are destroying connection, and instead of doing that, her attempts to do that actually create more disconnection. Number 2 toxic habit is invalidation. So the core pattern in this, in this habit is dismissing, correcting, overriding, or emotional overriding her emotional experience instead of acknowledging it. And this is really critical. This is really prevalent in men because this is the logic that we operate from as men, right? So some examples here are going to be correcting how she remembers events. So an example would be she goes, "You said this to me at the restaurant on Tuesday night," and the man responds, "Well, actually it was the grocery store and it was Thursday, not Tuesday." He corrects the actual logistics of the event instead of understanding that she's trying to communicate an emotion or a hurt or a problem. He explains intentions instead of acknowledging impact. So a good example of this would be a woman might flat out say, "You're scaring me. You're scaring me right now, Cody." And the man goes, "Well, that's not my intention. That's not what I mean to do. So you're not justified in feeling scared." He, instead of acknowledging that she feels scared and working with the perceived threat, he escalates it by saying, "You're feeling scared right now is completely unjustified." He debates facts instead of responding to feelings. We just covered that. Says things like, "That's not what happened," or "That's not what I meant." When she says, "I feel like you disrespected me," or "I feel like you didn't respond appropriately," he just, instead of going, "I understand why you would feel that way," he goes, "I didn't mean that," etc., tries to explain his way. And the bottom line is you cannot talk your way out of a behavioral problem. You can only behave your way out of a problem that you behaved your way into. Most men think that they can talk their way out of a problem that they behaved their way into. It's fantasy. It's not going to happen. Minimizing the significance of what she feels, framing her reactions as irrational, emotional, exaggerated. You're exaggerating. That's not fair. That's just what women do, time of the month, change, etc. If you want to ruin your marriage irreparably, start blaming your wife's legitimate concerns on her hormones or, you know, the feminine disposition, period. It's a good way to do it. Turning emotional expression into a logical argument. She's trying to communicate that she's upset and instead of you acknowledging, going, "I can see that you're upset right now," and trying to calm her down, you turn it into a logical argument and explain why she has, why she simply is not justified in being upset. The result here is that her emotion, her emotional experience repeatedly meets correction instead of acknowledgement. She wants you to acknowledge what's going on. She doesn't want you to correct her memory of what's going on. So the failure point here is that over time she learns that expressing her feelings to you will lead to debate rather than understanding, and she begins at this point reducing vulnerability because vulnerability becomes threatening and dangerous to her. Number 3 is my personal poison of choice, withdrawal. The core pattern is disengaging from emotional reactions, interactions, and tension, conflict, or when vulnerability appears. Essentially just shutting down emotionally, walking off, refusing to deal with it. This is how I naturally like to deal with things, just go, screw all of you, I'm leaving. Don't care, don't need you, never wanted you anyway, so I'm off. That's how I naturally deal with things. But this can involve shutting down during conversations. You just go blank, you just go, screw this, I'm not dealing with this, she's attacking me again. As you can see, we can stack habits here. She's attacking me, she's criticizing me, so you just shut down. You go silent instead of responding, you just go into whatever mode, whatever, say what you want, I'm over it, I don't care. You simply avoid any topics that are going to require emotion or any real kind of interaction, vulnerability, or communication. Leaving the room, walking off, slamming doors, ending discussions abruptly or aggressively. This was again one of my favorite mechanisms to shut down conversations I didn't want to have. I become aggressive. Which leads to, "My wife is scared of me." So any issues that I didn't want to deal with in the marriage, it just became aggressive and that's that. It shuts it down. That's a withdrawal mechanism. You respond with minimal or dismissive answers, just like, "Yeah, whatever." Like, "Yeah, I did that. So what? What's your problem? What's your problem with that? You got a problem?" Emotionally checking out, refusing to continue conversations once those conversations become uncomfortable. Which can be things such as, "I don't like your tone, so I'm not talking to you," etc. And the result of this is her attempts again to connect with you repeatedly meet with absence instead of engagement. All of these habits, you're training her nervous system that communication, connection, vulnerability is utterly pointless, painful, or dangerous. And number 4, escalation. Are you like most of you are warlords. You actually need to be peacemakers. So the core pattern in escalation is emotional intensity increases rapidly during disagreement, creating an unpredictable and stressful interaction. So an example of that is what I just said, right? When I don't want to talk about something, if I'm in the wrong or just something I don't want to talk about, I can become aggressive. Shuts it down. So raising your voice during conflict, is one. When you start shouting at your wife, trust me, she's scared of you. She's not stopping because she agrees with your point of view. She's scared of you. Sharp or aggressive tone, again, creates fear of you interrupting or taking over the conversation. It's male dominance. It's using your physical superiority to dominate the conversation, to avoid the conversation that you actually, that she wants to have. And sudden anger when you feel criticized is that when your ego feels challenged or triggered, you become angry. Again, difficult for men to understand this because they know that they would never hurt their wives or they would never would do the damage, but perception is reality. You're coming across, when you're coming across aggressively and you're escalating the situation, just because you know that she would not that you would never do anything does not reassure her nervous system. She is going into severe threat management mode at this point. Turning small disagreements into large arguments. None of us do that, right? None of us have any skill at turning anthills into mountains. Harsh or cutting remarks during tension. Insulting her family, insulting her. Very easy way to intellectually or aggressively dominate a conversation and escalate it. Instead of addressing the concern, we call her names. Emotional reactions that feel disproportionate to the situation. The result of escalation is the conflict, conflict to her which is necessary to resolve issues, becomes emotionally unsafe instead of manageable. Nobody wants to have conflict within a marriage. Nobody wants to have these arguments, but they're necessary because no No two people on the face of the planet are ever going to agree, and this is a partnership, you're living in the same space, difficult conversations have to happen. And if that, if those conversations become emotionally unsafe, then she's just going to shut down and you've crossed below the critical threshold at this point. So Part 3 is the pattern. What is the safety collapse pattern? Key idea here is that emotional safety rarely collapses in a moment. If it does collapse in a moment, the police are probably involved. Uh, the police are knocking on your door, someone's called 911, there's a restraining order happening, something like that. You can collapse emotional safety in a second, but really, generally speaking, it collapses through the repeated repetition of threat signals over and over and over and over again within the marriage. So the progression is this: negative interpretation, The result, it creates tension within the marriage. Invalidation creates communication shutdown within the marriage. Withdrawal creates emotional distance within the marriage. And escalation creates total instability within the marriage. So when we remove the actual mechanisms that were causing these and we describe a marriage, if I tell you I've got a friend and his marriage is tense, there's no communication, every time they try to communicate it just shuts down. There's emotional distance between them and the relationship is highly unstable, is that man getting any sex? What do you think? Is that man moving towards collapse or is he moving towards reconciliation? When we look at the actual outcomes of the negative behaviors, it's very easy to see why our marriage is collapsing. When we just look at the behaviors, it's much harder to see why it's causing the problem. And ultimately, when we describe the outcomes— tension, no communication, emotional distance and instability, not hard to see what's going on. Not hard to see what's going wrong. So eventually the end result of this is her nervous system concludes this relationship is stressful, and that's, that's the best case scenario. More likely, she concludes this man is stressful, or even worse, she concludes this man is dangerous. This man is unsafe. So the final insight here is going to be that most men believe that the breakdown within the marriage is a communication issue, and they look for the 7, you know, give me the 7 Love Languages, Cody, teach me how to communicate better. They think that it's an attraction issue and that attraction just wanes and decreases over time, and they just say, well, that's what happens, you get married and sex stops. No, that's not what happens. That's the environment that you create. You did that to the marriage. That's not what happens naturally. They think that there's another man involved and there might be another man involved, but again, let's look at why. Because she's seeking safety and she sees that another man is a much safer option outside of the relationship than staying inside of the relationship. Her primary core need here is safety. She needs to feel safe. And remember that the woman is responsible for children as well. If we want to look at this as a biological, from a biological perspective, she needs to feel physically and emotionally safe to create the most stable environment for her children, the safest environment for her children. And if another man is presented as the best option, then she's likely going to do that, not because she's a hoe and she just wants to screw everything, She's doing it because that's what her nervous system is pushing her towards biologically. And then of course the loss of love. She just fell out of love with me. No, she didn't just fall out of love with you. She made 1,000 attempts to maintain love with you and it was met with invalidation, withdrawal, escalation, etc. So all of the things that most men think are the problem are actually the symptoms, and communication, attraction, another man, and loss of love. It's like saying these spots on my face, are causing the measles within, within the relationship. You can put some cream on the spots and get some temporary relief from the itching, but the problem doesn't go away. No, the truth of the matter is the, the, the, the measles are causing the spots on your face. The lack of emotional safety or the destruction of emotional safety is causing the loss of communication, attraction, and love, et cetera, not the other way around. So all of those are secondary effects. The primary variable that is destroying your marriage is nervous system safety. So let's simplify this to something you can take away. When safety, emotional safety disappears, attachment to you disappears. It's inevitable. When safety stabilizes, attachment within the relationship can start to rebuild again. So if you want to know how to do this, how to rebuild that safety, then some things that you can say to speed that process up by 70 to 80, even 90%, and rebuild the emotional safety faster. I've got a video that teaches you how to do that. I'm gonna put that here because that's a whole nother topic. You can go watch that, and if you're in the private group here, let's jump over to Q&A and have some discussion and coaching.