Dear DSO: "My Wife Became a Fitness Fanatic and Then Cheated!"

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 dear DSO.com, and if it's a good one, I will create a video out of it for the whole world to see. This one technically came via Facebook. You can follow me, Dad Starting Over, Help for Men, on two different accounts on Facebook, on YouTube, on Twitter or X, on TikTok. Just look for Dad Starting Over or Help for Men and you will see this beautiful baldness and enjoy hundreds and hundreds of videos. And this guy, we will call him Steve. Steve says, "Hey Ralph Brewer." Well, hey Steve. He says, "This is going to sound like something out of a movie, but I assure you that it is all true." Oh boy, buckle in folks, this is a good one. He says, "My wife and I have been married for 15 years and we have 2 children, 9 and 4 years of age. About 2 years ago, my wife went through a major transformation." Ruh-roh. She started working out a couple of hours a day, 5 days a week. Oh boy. She lost about 80 pounds and she looked like a workout fitness model. Well, good for her. She started teaching classes and doing personal training as a side income, and then it became her only source of income. She started making more as a trainer and influencer than she did in her past corporate job. My wife has her bachelor's and MBA degree, so she's not dumb. The world of her being a fitness instructor was something I would have never imagined in a million years. I would hope that her newfound fitness would bring us closer together, but it just— but it did just the opposite. She became more sexy and outgoing, but just not for me. Oof. She spent more and more time away from me and the kids and more time at the gym and with her new gym buddies. I became more resentful of her new life. That just drove her further away from us. We were caught in a circle and I didn't see a way out of it. Well, she found a way out of us by spending the night away from home. Oh, that's not good. It wasn't until that point that I ever suspected an affair. I know I feel stupid just saying that. She was giving every signal and I ignored it. It took her literally sleeping over at somebody else's house for me to wake up. I questioned what she was doing and she didn't even come up with an excuse. She just told me to leave her alone. That's when I decided to go into private investigator mode. I found out way more than I ever wanted to know. It turns out that her workout group was basically one big Swinger orgy. They were all passing each other around. Ooh. Women with men and women with women. It was crazy. Our marriage and 2 other marriages ended over this group and all the drama. Oh, wow. I'm still in shock over this. I cannot believe my wife would do this. I can't believe that this is the woman I married. I've watched all of your stuff and I know what you're going to say and you are right. Yes, the warning signs were there before all of this happened. She came from a very crazy family. Her mom is a complete narcissist, and her bio dad is long gone. Her stepfather is a complete pushover. Her narc mom has been known to have affairs. Um, I knew all of this prior to marriage, but I still got married to her and had two kids. And now I'm paying the price. I'm messaging you to share this as a warning to other men and to tell guys to watch your stuff and learn from it. Oh, because it is all true. This stuff really does happen, and if you are not careful, it can happen to you. Feel free to make a video out of this, he says, if you like. I just ask that you not use my name or location. Steve, not his real name, but thank you, Steve from Parts Unknown, for sharing this. That's doozy, dude. And I am so sorry that you're going through this. I'm sorry you had to endure this. Um, but it is not the first time I've heard this almost verbatim story. Just gonna leave it at that. Uh, how interesting. This is a multi-layered thing. It is not so simple as what a lot of men claim, which is, hey, welcome to being married to the modern day woman. They all do this. No, they don't. But it is overrepresented in my world, in my audience. People that are attracted, more specifically men that are attracted to my material, self-help material, talking about infidelity, talking about the dead bedroom, talking about recovering after divorce, I tend to attract a certain subset of guys that I've talked about bazillions of times on here that I call the anxious guys. And the anxious guys tend to have an anxious form of attachment. And those anxious guys, sure as shit, who knows why, tend to be attracted to a certain type of woman. And those women are usually pretty avoidant, meaning the, the vulnerable, sexy, emotional snuggliness, all that other stuff that men love. Most men love, especially your anxious dudes. They don't get that from her. So how, how interesting that they pair up with a woman who can't provide what they so desperately need. But such is the world of these dysfunctional relationships, as I've come to learn over the years. On top of that, this avoidance that these women often exhibit— and you didn't really talk about the avoidance thing being a long-term thing, but I'm assuming a lot here, and this usually goes with the territory with women like this— is usually born out of a lot of dysfunction and chaos in their own family, in the wife's family. And you pointed to it, ta-da, here we go, narcissistic mom, in your words. We don't know if she formally has narcissistic personality disorder, but she has— at least we can say she has narcissistic tendencies, right? Uh, sounds like also an absent bio dad, as you call it. So absent father figure, but was replaced with— sounds like a stepdad. I don't know at what point in her life, or if that even matters, when stepfather came into the picture. But it sounds like he's a pushover. Kind of interesting. And you say the narc mom had affairs. So yeah, in hindsight, you look back on this and you go, well, Steve, dude, what the hell was I thinking, right? Um, a lot of us have been there, done that, but you were caught up in what we call the, the family machine. You're raising two small children, you're married, you got the bills to pay and all this other stuff, and you lose sight of a lot of the basics, such as the person I married is— has a lot of baggage and that she's not dealing with it. And oh look, now she's become somewhat addicted to this fitness world and this hyper self-improvement and I see her drifting away from me and I see her spending more and more time away from me and the children. And then it led to what you see here, which is not all, you know, I say how common this is, where your story goes into holy shit territories with this. Sounds like this, I don't know, it was like a porno style sex ring that they belong to and stuff. From what I understand in the world of like fitness, I often mention the brand of CrossFit. That's very, very popular. Affairs are relatively common. It's a bunch of people escaping from the doldrums of their life and trying to regain their youthfulness and trying to find some excitement. And it's breeding ground for a lot of inappropriate behavior, but not usually to this degree from what I've heard over the years. So congrats on that, I guess. I'm being silly. There's nothing necessarily funny about this and being on the receiving end of this. So I apologize if you take offense to that, but you have to, I think in hindsight, you'll look back and laugh and just say, What a weird shit show that was. So what do we learn from this? Any guys watching this, what do we learn from this? You're gonna fall in love. And if you're a dude that watches my material, Mr. Anxious Guy, a lot of you, we need to work on our picker, so to speak. We need to work on putting up boundaries between us and others. We need to recognize in ourselves when we fall really, really fast and really hard for women. Maybe we need to take a timeout and say, let's just cool it. Let's take our time before we commit and get married. Let's really be really pragmatic about this. That's the term I often use. Don't be so romantic and irrational and just, you know, ready to hand over this woman your paycheck and all your love and your energy and everything else because you've fallen for her. It's perfectly normal and understandable to fall in love with people, but it's taking that next, next step and basically making a lot of huge mistakes that can have a major impact on your life down the line. That's where it gets— oof, you gotta be careful. Another layer of complexity to all of this that I've mentioned often is, uh, I've noticed, and this has been confirmed by talking to these men one-on-one, is we have a disproportionately large number of men in our group. And I say group because we have a private community just for men. Check it out at help4men.com. We call it the HFM, which stands for Help for Men. The HFM Brotherhood. Go to help4men.com/join and you can check it out. A lot of cool benefits to joining, but, uh, we all talk to each other in the private forums and you'll see a lot of mention of something called, uh, neurodivergence, or more specifically with our guys, ADHD. So we have a lot of guys that are ADHD, some that are on the autism spectrum, some both. Majority of people on the autism spectrum have ADHD, interestingly. Um, and they tend to have a lot of relationship problems. And one of the things is that they fall in love really, really hard and really fast, and they just overlook all kinds of red flags. Other things that people outside of our relationship say, dude, what, what are you doing? They just march right along and they get married and they have 2 kids and they ignore all these red flags and it blows up in their face. And unfortunately, what goes along with that as well is they take rejection and getting dumped and cheated on way harder than the quote average dude does. So it's like a double whammy, double-edged sword of awfulness. So if any of you guys can relate to that, you've been formally diagnosed neurodivergent and you have a track record of getting with the wrong gal, my advice is to take it slow. I know you're with a gal, maybe she's— I've talked about this in another video— maybe she's like early 30s and she's ready to settle down and make babies and she's got to go now, she can't wait. Years before cohabitating, well then this is the big tough decision point where you say, then we are not a match for each other. And that right there is really hard for a lot of guys. I say years. My typical, uh, suggestion for a lot of guys is give it 3 years, 36 months of knowing somebody before you take the next, next step of cohabitating, marrying, whatever it may be for you. Um, take your time, give it 3 years, get to know each other, see each other, visit their family, meet their family, really sit back and go, you know, this, this in-love honeymoon limerence stage, whatever you want to call it, that I'm experiencing, it's not going to be forever. So when that fades, what am I left with? A woman who has a narcissistic mother, an absent father, pushover father, a mother who cheated repeatedly. She's probably very avoidant in nature, this woman that you're dating. You're noticing that she's pulling more and more away as time goes on. You notice that the The intimacy between the two of you has gone from relatively frequently to really infrequently. You notice that she doesn't handle stress very well. You notice her getting, you know, meaner, maybe even violent and so forth. This is where you say, oof, I'm glad I waited and took my time and really got to see the real her. Adiós. That sounds really easy, and it is easy for me to say. It's just, you know, I'm detached from all this, Steve, and, uh, it's very easy for me to just speaking platitudes like this, but when you've been down the— what I— when you've experienced what I have, when you've talked to hundreds if not thousands of guys who have also experienced the same thing, you start to look at this a little differently. And I'm just looking out for you and for others. You guys watching this, learn from this. Learn from Steve's story. It is an extreme example, especially with all the sex stuff, but Some minor league version of this is something that I hear literally multiple times a day from the men that reach out to me. So Steve, thank you for sharing as a lesson to us all. I appreciate it. Sorry you're going through this. Check out the HFM Brotherhood, help4men.com/join if you want to go right to the join page. You can go to help4men.com. We have all kinds of free articles, videos. We do have courses you can pay money for. We do have coaching that you can pay money for, one-on-one with myself and anybody else on the team. If you join the HFM Brotherhood You get those things that you pay for, you get a lot cheaper, uh, some of that for free, and you get a lot of other stuff at no additional cost, including the, uh, discussion forums, live Zoom meetings, of which we're up to like almost like 6 a week with these live meetings. Very, very, very, very active. We record all the meetings. We have over 1,000 hours of audio content for our members to listen to, and we add to it every single week, so you're never going to run out of content. We get together in person, annual conferences. Very cool stuff. So check it out, the HFM Brotherhood at help4men.com. All right, Steve, once again, thank you for sharing. I appreciate it and wish you all the best.