A short excerpt from Nick Stumbo's YouTube monologue "It Might Be Time For a Wake-Up Call" (Dec 2024). Stumbo discusses marital relationship dynamics, advising that a spouse may need to clearly communicate hurt—saying the partner's behavior (competing images) is harmful and undermines the marriage—and that such a candid conversation can be the starting point for recognizing and addressing deeper problems in the relationship.
For a spouse to maybe call time out and say, this is really harmful to me. This is really making me feel like I have to compete with these images. This is making me feel like, you're not actually into me, and that's undermining our relationship. And if that conversation, I mean, I know we. We probably assume, like, oh, every man knows that or has heard that. Well, maybe they haven't. Maybe they are so, you know, caught up in the fog of denial and delusion that they think it's all hunky dory. And to have a spouse say, I'm not okay and I'm hurting, and I can't exist in a marriage where this is the norm. That could be the little starting point of, oh, there's a problem here, and we need to begin addressing it.
