Dear DSO: "How Can I Win Her Back?"

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person, real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. All right, we have a new Dear DSO entry on the website, and you can submit your own story or question to deardso.com. That's deardso.com. Fill out the form, and if your story is a good one, I will create a video out of it. Oh, and one more thing, we have the option of doing a live one-on-one chat for these videos where you will just be heard, not seen, kind of like a radio call-in show. We can talk back and forth about these issues instead of me just assuming a lot and trying to go on just text from your message. Like with this one from a guy we will call Bill because he does not give his name, but we'll call him Bill. He says, does getting your wife back work? Interesting. Says, hi Ralph Brewer. Hey Bill. He says, I'm a big fan of the podcast. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. And the podcast, yes, there is a Dad Starting Over podcast, been going on for years now. Do a search wherever podcasts are for Dad Starting Over and you will find me as well as on YouTube, the Dad Starting Over channel on YouTube. But anyway, he says, my wife moved out 6 months ago. Oh, sorry to hear that. Uh, we had been together for 20 years and married for 14. We were basically each other's first significant other and had been together since late college. We have 2 small kids and interact quite a bit, although it is mostly around the kids, logistics, etc. It is amicable, and you wouldn't guess that we were separated if you saw our family interact. Without spending too much time on our issues— that's where I paused. You really need to go into what precipitated this breakup. Why did she leave? It means everything. But I digress. He says, I came across— and he lists some content creators which I am not going to mention by name simply because I'm about to shit all over them. And he says, and others on the internet who seem to have different methods of, quote, getting your wife back. I am hesitant to go too far down this road, but I do want to— I do want her back, and I feel like I am out of options. We saw 3 couples counselors over 2 years before she moved out, and I found most of it unhelpful. Do you have any strong opinions on these guys, the content creators he mentioned, or similar ways to work towards reconciliation? Thank you. So anyway, back to my point of, you're leaving out all the detail here, Bill, my friend. Why did she leave? What was the purpose of you guys going to counseling for so long, for 3 different counselors? Where did things go wrong? Where did you, you know, go off track that required you to go see counselors? And what eventually led to her leaving the family or leaving the home and splitting up the family, as it were? All kinds of questions, which basically completely dictate any kind of advice towards reconciliation I'm going to give you. The content creators that you mentioned that I did not say their names on here, I went and took a look at them because I had not heard of them. They're not really that big, not, you know, as far as the audience is concerned, but they're very active. And their content all centers around basically— all three of them that you mentioned, their content centers around kind of one predominant theme that I hear a lot In some— in this circle of male-oriented relationship advice, there are different little pockets or different little niches, if you will, of advice. I would like to think that I take a piece out of each of them, and mine is a more holistic, fair, if you will, even-handed take on a lot of this stuff. There's some stuff that's very anti-female, kind of red pill-ish, manosphere kind of stuff. Which I like to steer away from. Certainly they make some good points. Certainly there's, you know, some nuggets of truth to take from that, but I don't, you know, subscribe 100% to everything they say, obviously. And some women content creators out there that are very pro-female, take some of their stuff, and you get my point. But for these guys, it seems like their point is one of, um, dude, it's all your fault, um, you really effed up, that's why she left you. And this is fixable. And then the— where they get you is that it's very much centered on you need to be more alpha male, you need to be tougher, you're too weak, you're too feminine, you're too all these things, and that is what caused the downfall of your relationship. Now, they may have a point for some, but they certainly don't have a point for all. Dare I say, they don't have a point for the majority. For a lot of the instances that I have seen of the men that I've spoken to, and I've said this countless times in my videos, so I apologize if you've heard me say this hundreds and hundreds of times for those more loyal followers here, but there is a subset of men that I attract to my material, and they are what we call anxious dudes. They have what we call an anxious form of attachment. These are the guys that are pursuing, that are constantly worried about the state of their relationship. They're preoccupied with the health of the relationship. What is she thinking? Did I do something wrong? Am I being, um, Am I being a good person, a bad person? Am I being an alpha male? Am I being a beta? Am I being a simp? Am I gone too far into asshole territory? Their head is spinning with all these thoughts, and the predominant theme of all of it is, I'm not good enough, I need to be better, or I'm going to lose her and I'm going to lose this relationship. And these men love to study on the topic. They will go to a lot of YouTube videos and podcasts. You mentioned several content creators all talking about the same kind of thing, so I can see that you've been doing your Googling. So you're probably one of those anxious guys, and as a result, you have probably married one of these gals who's just the polar opposite, which is strange how that works, but it works. Opposites attract, right? They don't like that personal vulnerable connection. Their sexuality really shuts down when it's past the honeymoon stage. It's just all kinds of negatives that all point to one conclusion, which is, well, wow, these people really aren't wired for long-term monogamous romantic relationships at all. And unfortunately, you may have— I don't know the story, hence why I say you need more detail, dude. Perhaps you should reach out to me. We should do the talk, you know, back and forth, the live talk. Again, we won't see you on camera, we just hear your voice and go back and forth and figure out what's really going on here. But if you're like most of the guys that I talk to, that's the dynamic within your relationship, and invariably it fizzles out in some way. What's strange is these women are so Um, against that vulnerable, real connection with another human being. Usually that comes to light when things get comfortable, things are certain, uh, things get real with kids in the house and everything else. They just shut down sexually, they shut down romantically. The honeymoon stage, the new relationship energy brings out some of that out of them, but that's not the real them, and then it's quickly squashed. And then those women, from what I've seen, tend to be more apt to have affairs. As strange as that sounds. They look, you know, they're human beings, they have needs, they have emotional, physical needs, and so forth. And they look for that outside of the confines of the very real, quote unquote, boring marriage and long-term relationship with a guy that they've known for years and years. So maybe that's what happened here with your situation. I don't know. When I go to those content creators that you mentioned there, I noticed that a lot of them had content surrounding the topic of cheating wife and how to get her back. And when you look at their content, it's all about being more alpha, being more tough. Guys, I'm going to say it till I'm blue in the face, these people are taking advantage of you. They know that you're out there hunting for reasons. They know that you really love this whole thing of, you know, man the F up and you will win your girl back. When it should be— the message should be one that I put out there, which is man the F up, do the things you're supposed to do in life, take responsibility. Yes, take care of your body, take care of your mind, and do all those things. You could— but you could still be a vulnerable human being. A shocker, I know. What you need to do is you need to cultivate a, a sense of worth, a social group, a, a life basically, which allows you to come into contact more so and form real relationships more so with secure, healthy individuals. And you will in turn have a secure, healthy relationship. Note, my advice doesn't say do all you can to prop yourself up so that you will be a bigger prize, so that you will win the affection of Miss— Mrs. Avoidant all over again. No, you need to let her go. Lesson learned. She left, took off, cheated, did whatever. You say, I made a big oopsie with that person. That person's obviously got some problems. Again, I'm assuming a lot here. I don't know your particular situation, but I'm basically talking to the majority of my audience out there is dealing with these kind of issues. Gotta let her go. You have to have a sense of self-worth, and you got to realize, you know, figure out what's going on up here in the noodle that got you in this mess to begin with. And drop all the horseshit of trying to win them back, doing that little pick-me dance, you know, trying to be that, that South American bird who fluffs his feathers saying, "Aren't I a good match? Pick me, pick me, pick me." It's pitiful. I understand though the attachment to a person that you had been with for 20 years. When they're with you for that long, they're like a part of you. They feel like a limb on your body, and for them to go away feels like somebody cut off the limb. And your initial reaction is to grab said limb and say, can anybody please reattach this for me? You don't need the limb to survive. You can live without it. You never needed that limb to begin with. That's part of your downfall. As a man is to think that you need them when you don't. None of us in these relationships need the other person. We grow accustomed to them. We can in fact become kind of quasi-addicted to them. We need them for certain kind of emotional and physical feedback day after day. And when we don't get it, especially us anxious guys, that feels like, holy shit, where's my drug? Drug goes bye-bye, you try to do anything and everything you can to get that drug back. Some guys finally are pushed away for good from their ex. Maybe the ex says, get the hell away from me, calls the police, something like that. And he's like, fine. And then what does that guy do? He tries to find this drug elsewhere, and he immediately puts himself on the dating market, immediately finds Mrs. Right, immediately commits to her and her 4 kids, brings them into the house, and then a year later says, oh shit, what was I thinking? Because they're an addict, basically. I don't want you to go down that road. I would recommend, my friend Bill, if you're watching this, um, check out our group, the HFM Brotherhood. Learn more at help4men.com. You can jump right to the join page at help4men.com/join. It's a private community for men only. We have very active private discussion forums. We have live Zoom meetings, like 6 to 8 Zoom meetings every single week. We record all the meetings, you can listen back to them. We have an archive of over 1,000 hours of audio for you to listen to. We have my books in ebook as well as audiobook format, no extra charge to our members. We have coaching with myself, other guys on the team. Consider it kind of mentoring, one-on-one mentoring. You pay by the hour. You can set up to do a regular monthly thing if you wish. We also have— each of us have like our own workshops and so forth and programs for guys. And all of that for members is way cheaper than it is for the general public. I, I'm saying this not to sell you something. I'm saying this because I created that group and all that material and all that content and all that valuable stuff for you, basically, dude. I was in your shoes years ago, if you don't know my story, and I wish somebody had put all that together for somebody like me when I was in your shoes. So I went ahead and did it. And I've been working on it with my team for years and years, and we got a pretty good thing going, I think. And it costs you less than a dollar a day to join and to get all that good content, to get all that feedback from other guys. You do need other dudes in your life, other dudes that will, you know, put the proverbial arm around you and say, it's okay, man, we've been there, done that, here's what we did, here's how you can get better. And you don't get better by chasing after and hoping to win the affection of a woman who basically said I don't want you anymore. What you do is you say, I understand, I wish you all the best, best of luck to you, and you move on with your life. All right, brother. But again, I'm sure there's a lot more to the story that we're not hearing here from her and from you. So I'd be very interested in chatting with you one-on-one. HelpForMen.com, check out the group, the HFM Brotherhood. And I do wish you all the best of luck, and thank you for reaching out.