Dear DSO: From King of the World to Invisible: Navigating Intimacy in Parenthood

All right, everyone, we have another Dear DSO entry on the website, and you can submit your own story to dadstartingover.com/dear-dso. And if it's a good story or good question, I will answer here in video format. This one comes from Joe Schmo, and the subject line is Mom Mode/Dad on the Back Burner. Uh-oh. He says, in short, we have 3 kids. From ages 1 to 7 years old. As soon as the first was born, I was immediately placed on the back burner. I tried the nice guy method and picked up all obstacles that I thought would help her anxiety and let her— and let her spend more time with me. Now it has been 7 years and the intimacy is hanging on by a thread. She understands that I am not getting any of my needs met. But she is confident in our relationship and marriage. Is time the only thing on my side to get off the back burner? Uh, Joe, good question. This is a tough one. Uh, you are basically identifying something that a lot of men, myself included, have seen in relationships with women who become mothers to our children. The relationship timeline goes something like this. I, as boyfriend, am the top thing on this woman's mind. Like, when she wakes up in the morning, it's boyfriend. When she goes to bed at night, it's boyfriend. I take up a lot of space in her head, and as a result of being boyfriend, I'm treated very, very well. And yes, I have a lot of emotional and physical needs met. Basically in spades as a result. Um, this woman treats me like a king, and it's very validating, and it makes you feel like a man. And that's what we love. We got this woman that we're crazy for, and in return, she gives us all kinds of love and attention. Yes, she feeds our ego. And then as time goes on, we see that knob just naturally get turned down, which is again natural, if we're being completely honest. We're not super duper over the top, uh, loving and romantic to her either, but we still have a very much a burning desire physically and emotionally for her. And she takes up a lot of space in our head, and, uh, everything's great. And then we have children, and we hate to say it, and pretty much 100 out of 100 men will admit to this, at least guys that I speak to. In my own personal family friend circle and guys I speak to in the Dad Starting Over world, they will all say, "Oh yeah, I went from number 1 to number like 92 on the list of things that my woman is concerned with. The kids take up like number 1 through whatever in her mind. And then it's followed by job and house and everything else. And I'm way down at the bottom." And society overall, our social group, popular culture, whatever, has done a pretty good job of telling men, dude, just suck it up. This is life. Some will even go as far as to be mean about it and say, grow the fuck up, dude. You're acting like a little kid begging for attention from mommy, begging for some validation. A lot of women like to throw out men have a very fragile ego, and that's not really fair. If we were to throw that same kind of vitriol, that same kind of energy back at women when with their needs, we'd be labeled a monster. But for some reason, when it's the man, the patriarch, saying, "I like this in my partners," a lot of emotional and physical validation and connection and everything else, we're labeled as little whiny babies. Not very nice. And so I can see if a woman were to read or hear your story here, Joe Schmo, I think for a lot of women, the knee-jerk reaction would be, oh shit, here we go. Another guy just needs to get his ego stroked. Not getting enough attention. The kids are getting the attention. It's not fair. So you're going to get a lot of that probably from your social circle, your family group. Like if you were to go to your mom or somebody with this, they would probably say, dude, please. But I get it. I can certainly sympathize with your plight here. And it kind of sucks to go from king of the world to I don't know where my husband is and I really don't care. There's this unspoken kind of phenomenon or thing going on. And it's a very natural thing. And that thing is, there's this honeymoon stage of the relationship, which is super, super connected. And that is driven by, um, basically Mother Nature. Hormones, chemicals in our body, dopamine, serotonin, all kinds of stuff that form this great cocktail that makes you hyper-attached to a partner. It's Mother Nature's way of making sure that you procreate, make babies. Then when you accomplish the end goal of making new little humans Mother Nature has also imprinted in us some not so nice stuff that basically says, okay guys, your job is done. You can go your separate ways now. We see that in women where the old libido— not for every woman, please don't jump on me and say, oh, I like sex 20 times a day. You are an anomaly. Dare I say, for the majority of women, they will report once we got married, got comfortable, and had children, My libido went from 10 to like 2 if I'm lucky. And a lot of women— I've heard this straight from the woman's mouth— will say, I just do not think about it hardly ever. A lot of my brain power is taken up by children, children, children, children, job, house, and a lot of other things surrounding and orbiting around the children. Uh, sex and intimacy with my husband I mean, I guess I recognize it's important. Okay, we can if you want. That's the energy that a lot of women have in a long-term monogamous relationship. Their libido is more reactive in nature, uh, as opposed to being more spontaneous like us guys. Guy sits down next to his wife, sees her, you know, exposed leg or whatever, and just goes, I want some of that. You want, you want to get it on? That's very spontaneous in nature. While the woman's libido is more reactive in nature, so she'll probably go, okay, let's go upstairs. And then once she gets into the act, she says, oh, I like this. This is— we should do this more often. This is great. And sometimes they will even verbalize that, like, I don't know why we don't do this more often. It's so much fun. And the guy's like, yeah, I know. And then quickly the mind shifts to kid mode, just like that. Uh, that's what you're seeing, dude. Welcome to being married with kids. From what I've seen, a big driver for a woman to recognize, oh, I need to, you know, tear down walls between my husband and I in the intimacy department, I need to fight that urge to separate from him and say, dude, you've done your job, get the hell out of here. What I've seen is a big driver of that is her social circle, her culture, her family. If she has a mother or sisters, aunts, or whoever who say, hey, give us the kids, you two need to get away for the weekend, you two need to go have a romantic getaway, get out of here, go, it's important that you guys stay connected in that way, you don't want to lose each other. Um, if she has that influence, that pressure from her social group, That really, really helps in a very big way. If she comes from a background where it's just understood that moms and dads just don't hug, kiss, they're not that way, that's kind of icky, dad does his thing, mom does her thing, and they get together maybe to eat dinner and that's about, that's about it. If she grew up seeing that for all of her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, you are not going to suddenly reprogram things very quickly. Those people tend to be kind of avoidant in nature, is the term psychologists use when it— when talking about attachment. They're just very like, no, you can get away from me, you know, I, I don't want to talk about the relationship, I don't want to touch, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do that. And we as men who have wives that are like this, we frame it in a way which is not really fair. We say it's the old bait and switch. The insinuation is that she was kind of putting on an act and in a show through the honeymoon stage of the relationship. And now that you're married with kids, she can drop that act and show her true self. When in fact, it's Mother Nature at play here. She was genuinely turned on and aroused during all the honeymoon stage, and she was genuinely preoccupied and anxious about you and thinking about you all the time. But now that she has you with the comfort and the security and the uncertainty is gone, and with the kiddos, All that just gets wiped out. It takes a certain set of skills, Mr. Joe Schmo, certain know-how. You need your own culture and your own friend group and your own family around you, those people that have shown you over the years, this is how you stay connected to your spouse. And here's how you keep things sexy and spunky and fun. I wrote a book about this, in case you don't know, it's called The Dead Bedroom Fix. You can find it on Amazon, Audible, Apple Books, wherever books are sold. But since you're reaching out to me, I'm assuming you've probably read it and you realize there's only so much you as a man can do. You check a lot of things off your list. I'm a good husband. I'm attentive. I take care of myself. I'm a loving husband. I have boundaries. All these good things that you can just take to a therapist and say, see, look at all the shit I'm doing here. Then the therapist turns to your wife and say, what's up with you? I have a million women in my practice. That would gladly marry a guy like this. What's going on? And then the ball's in wife's court. And she may very well just say, "I don't see the need to bridge the gap between the two of us. I'm happy with the way things are. I understand that he wants more intimacy and physical and emotional, more of a connection, but I don't. Sorry." That may very well be the end result of all this. And then you have a very real tough decision to make. Do I hang around with this? Or you're insinuating, is time on your side? Dude, from what I've seen, time never solves these issues. If anything, time is the opposite. You're fighting time. Have you heard of menopause? Perimenopause? Do you think your 1 through 7-year-old kids— 3 kids ages 1 through 7— do you Do you see time is going to alleviate on its own the anxieties and stress of having 3 kids? Those 3 kids become 3 adolescents, 3 teenagers, 3 young adults. Stress, stress, stress, stress, stress. You think eventually after so many years, let's, you know, 20 years from now, 20 years from now, dude, let me repeat that, 20 years from now, when you have an empty nest, and that's not a given, let's just say ideally everybody's out of the house, college, all that stuff, 20 years from now, they're gone. You think your wife, 20 years older, is suddenly going to become a horn dog for her husband? You think you're going to wipe out 20 years of resentment and pressure and anger that builds between the two of you? This wall that you build between the two of you, you know, this wall which is made of bricks of resentments and fights over the years, you think that's just going to suddenly be— that wall is going to explode and you two will just magically come together and be this hot and heavy couple 20 years from now? No, you have to resolve this like now. You clean up your side of the table. You do everything that you're supposed to be doing. Take a good hard look at yourself. Are you genuinely the husband that you need to be, the good partner that you need to be, the co-parent that you need to be? Is that you? Maybe need to go to therapy, talk to somebody about some issues that you may or may not have. I don't know. But clean up your side of the table. Then you look at wife and just say, you see all I've done? I'm not asking for awful things. I just want us to be connected. I'm not saying let's just jump in the sack right now. That's the endgame of all this. But you and I have disconnected since the kids came into the picture. I just want us to come back together as a couple. That is very, very important to me as your husband, because I love you. That's why I married I married you. So what do you say, wife? Do you want to jump on board and let's do this? Be a team together again? What do you say? She may very well say, "F off." Happens, and it sucks. Or she may say, "All right, sure. What do you have in mind?" You got to be able to answer that question. How do you want to resolve this? You want to go to marriage counseling? You better make the appointment. You better have that in your back pocket ready to go. Wednesday, 8 AM next week, we're going. I already got it lined up. I got the kids' childcare taken care of. Grandma's coming over. You and me, we're going to work on this starting now. And you, from what I've seen, need to be the champion of this because the second you take your hands off the wheel and your foot off the gas, you just go right off the ditch. Everything's done. She's not going to steer this relationship machine down the road. That's going to be up to you. Sorry, I know that sounds sexist. Whatever. That's just what I've seen. All right, brother, best of luck. Keep in touch, and thanks for reaching out.