How Do You Rebuild When She’s Already Gone?

Have you ever been in a room full of people that you love and you still felt completely alone? Your wife's in the kitchen, your kids are playing in the living room, everyone smiles at you, but there's a distance. There's a quiet, unspoken thing, something that you just can't bridge. And the strangest part is that you can't point to the exact day where this whole thing started. It wasn't like one big fight. It wasn't like, you know, no slammed doors or ultimatums. It was the little things. It was the little not tonight here and a quick look away there. It's, they're small enough things to ignore and until one day you realize you've been slowly disappearing from your own life. It's like watching a movie that you used to be the star in, but now you're just the extra, the guy in the background. You laugh along, you nod at the right moments, and you play your role, but inside you're wondering, when did I stop being him? The man that she used to look at with love, the man that your kids ran to first. I know that feeling. Over a decade ago, I went through infidelity, a brutal divorce, and I found myself a single dad to 3 little kids. I took all that pain and rebuilt myself from the ground up, and I now run Help for Men and our private support community, the HFM Brotherhood. And you can learn more at helpformen.com. Today I want to share a story that came into my inbox at Dear DSO. It's raw, it's honest, and if you've ever felt yourself slipping away inside your own marriage, then this one is going to hit home. Let's say you're a dad in your late 30s, early 40s. You work hard, you show up, you're not perfect, but you've always been there. You got a 5-year-old boy, he's got bright eyes, messy hair, and there's nothing better in the world than his laugh. And when he throws his arms around you, the weight of the world falls off of your shoulders. And for that moment, you're not tired, you're not stressed. But later, those moments are rare. It's Saturday morning, the sunlight is spilling into the kitchen, you're flipping pancakes like you used to do when the kid was a toddler, and you call out, you know, "Hey buddy, you want to go to the park after breakfast?" And he looks up from his cereal and over to his mom and says, "Only if Mom comes." It's not mean. It's not deliberate on his part, but it's like a knife that you weren't quite ready for. And so later that day, you try again. You say, "How about we go see Grandma and Grandpa, just the two of us?" And the boy says, "Maybe. Only if Mom comes." And you laugh it off because, you know, he's a kid. But deep down inside, you can feel something's changing. Something's shifting in your relationship. Your role in that kid's life is shrinking. And you know what? It's not just your son either. It's your wife too. Since the birth of your child, the us, you know, you and the wife, has been fading away like an old photograph. There used to be weekends away, long walks in the dark, even just, you know, sitting close to each other, not saying a word, but just feeling close to each other. And now there's none of that ever. And intimacy is gone. Not just the bedroom, but all of the little things that make up romance and intimacy between a couple are just Gone. Just disappeared. All those little things that say to each other, "I choose you." And then you realize it's been over a year since we've been together in the bedroom. And before that, to be honest, it was pretty rare. It was always rushed, and she was always very distracted. And she used to stop and say things like, "I need to go check on our son." Or the old, "I'm just too tired." And when you reach to touch her, she stiffens up. And when you go to give her a kiss, she turns her head. And the only time it seems she wants to hug you is when the child is between the two of you and she says, "Family hug!" Yes, you still share a bed, but it just feels like you're just two worlds apart. And she used to do things like take care of herself physically and try to look good, but now, mm, not so much. And yes, you did try to talk to her. You tried the old, you know, "I miss us and it feels like we're drifting apart." And then she stops you and says, "Nah, let's not talk about this later. Our son may hear us." But then later never comes. And then comes the big gut punch. You overhear a conversation she's having with a friend and you hear her say that you as a couple are not really together anymore. She has never said this to your face. And when she's talking to this friend, it sounds like she's just, you know, casually talking about the weather or something. And then you realize this goes beyond just distance between the two of you. This is a complete erasing of you two as a couple. And now you feel like a stranger in your own home. You feel completely invisible. Yes, there are pictures of you up on the wall, but there's— you're not a part of those family moments anymore. It's all the wife and the son. You're not involved. You love your son to death. You still love your wife, but you just do not feel like you are part of the family unit anymore. You feel yourself disappearing one little bit at a time. And that's where the message I receive from our friend Tim ends. You get a very real sense for his exhaustion. Is just complete dismay within his relationship. It's not just something simple like the physical intimacy between he and his wife, but it's just this overall feeling left out and not needed. He's like a father watching his own life from the sidelines. He's not in the game, so to speak. And here's the difficult truth. You can't rebuild all this alone. As I always say, it takes two to tango. You can show up, you can lead with all the love in the world, you can invite all kinds of connection between the two of you, But real change, it takes two. So if you can relate to our friend Tim and his message here, and you feel disconnected, you feel left out, you feel forgotten, here are some things that you can do. First of all, you have to realize that this is a very real and somewhat natural phenomenon that you are experiencing. Although it can be argued that this is a pretty extreme and pretty unhealthy version of a natural phenomenon that you're experiencing, but it's one that a lot of guys are very, very sensitive to. And some guys just see it as a natural progression of life and natural progression of a relationship. And that phenomenon is wife goes from being your lover, your best friend, your partner in crime, to primarily mother, which is a completely understandable thing, right? Of course she's gonna be just mostly mother right now because she has to take care of this little human. This little human just came out of her body, for God's sakes. What do we expect the woman to just completely ignore the kid and go back to being your girlfriend all over again? No, but what we do expect is to have some kind of role in that story, don't we? And sometimes, no matter how much we try to interject ourselves into this— and by the way, Tim in his story kind of sounds very passive. You know, like I always say with these, you would love to be a fly on the wall to actually watch their interactions. And maybe we could say to Tim, you know, this— what you just did was an example of being very passive. Here's an example where you could interject yourself more. Here's an example where you could lead more. And take control and face the inevitable drama that comes from you trying to reconnect to your wife and telling her we need to take a timeout from the kiddo. You need to do more of that. Maybe, or maybe Tim and others like him are doing absolutely everything and she's just really dropped the ball as far as being a wife is concerned. But inevitably, almost 100 out of 100 times, you are going to have a wife who shifts her persona from that of primarily wife and partner, romantic partner, to her man to primarily that of being a mother. And so therefore you have to acknowledge that some of that wifely, girlfriendy, lover stuff is just gonna go away. The goal is not to have that back 24/7, 365, much like you had probably in the honeymoon stage of the relationship, but to get it back in spikes, little blips on the radar as I call it. You have to be forceful in this and you have to tell wife We cannot lose each other. We have to carve out time for ourselves. We have to do the date nights. And yes, eventually we have to do the weekends away. I know, as horrible as that may sound. If we don't do this kind of stuff, we're going to inevitably drift apart completely. And that's where broken marriages come in. Divorce. Ouch. It sounds like she is very much in what we call the old mom-bee, you know, like mom zombie mode. Picture the mom who's just very much like, only kids, can only think about kids, kids, kids, kids. Kinda like the zombies are like, brains, brains, brains, gotta eat people and all that other stuff. They don't think about anything else. And it's for some women that are very anxiety-prone, which is a lot of women out there, sorry ladies, it's very easy to slip into that mode, isn't it? Usually it takes your extended family and friends, your social group, if you will, to say, hey, you two, husband and wife, need to spend more time together. Give us the kid, we will help you out, we will help watch the kiddo. At least that's the way it should be and way it used to be more so in the olden days, it seems. These days everyone moves away from their family, their extended family, and their social network to start over, you know, complete other side of the world or whatever it may be. And they remove themselves from a lot of those safeguards and things that allow you to better reconnect as a couple. So, your job may be a little bit more difficult than the average. You may say, nope, If we don't have a grandma and grandpa around, or Aunt So-and-So, whatever it may be, you're going to have to hire help. Now, I can hear a lot of people screaming in the background saying, my wife would not be up for any of that. She has to be around the kid 24/7. She's involved in every school activity. She just wants to do anything and everything with this kiddo. No matter what I do, it ain't about us. It's about the kid. Oof, that's tough. And what Tim in his message can see, it's not just a disconnection between the parents you know, as a romantic couple. But we also see the kid becomes hyperdependent on mom, doesn't he? To the point where being without mom by his side, without being glued to her hip, sounds scary, even with dear old dad. So dad says, hey kiddo, let's go do something. And kid says, I feel scared unless I have mommy next to me. That is a big no-no. You have to interject yourself in here forcibly, Mr. Tim and others that experience this. This will not go away on its own. This will only get worse with time. The old sit-down talk with the wife. It always comes to communication, doesn't it? Look, wife, the road we're going down is not healthy. This is not healthy for our kid. That's primarily what she's going to be concerned with, isn't it? And this is not healthy for us as a couple. Do you really want to model this for your child? Is that really the marriage that you want our child to have later on in life? Where he's completely disconnected from his spouse and his spouse just takes care of a kiddo and forgets about him. You ever thought about it that way, wife? Usually that kind of wakes them up and they go, oh yeah, you're right. Okay, maybe we need to go to counseling. Maybe we do need to do the date every now and then. Oof, I guess maybe I can trust a babysitter. I don't know, I'll need to interview like 100 of them before I decide on one. Hey, it's gonna be annoying as hell, but at least it's momentum in the right direction. And it's important to not shame the wife for being mother. She may in fact be doing a fantastic job. She just may be doing a little bit too much and a little too well and allowing her anxieties to take over. So assure her, you're an awesome mom, you're doing an amazing job, and I'm here to help however I can. Just allow me into the fold a little bit more, wife. You have to be able to trust me. I'm the father to the child. I'm your husband. I wanna get involved more in helping out And that may mean take the kiddo off your hands. It's important, wife, that you have alone time and that you do your own things for your mental health and physical well-being. Let me and the kid just get out of your hair for a while. That'll be tough for the helicopter mom, hyper-anxious type of mom, but she needs that. And you need to be the good steward of the relationship and show her that you're not championing just for the bedroom, you're championing for both of you. As a couple. She has to realize that and she has to believe it, which means you don't push for sex right away. You don't say, "We need to have sex 3 times a week or I'm outta here, woman." That doesn't get anything done. She has to trust you again. She has to feel safe with you, and you gotta feel safe with her. You gotta show that you can open up to her, be vulnerable about these kind of things without her shaming you and calling you a monster for wanting to take her away from her kiddo. You're gonna have those moments.. And if you're like a lot of men that I talk to, you're pretty sensitive about those things. It's something you need to work on. Don't run away from conflict. I find myself saying that to a lot of guys. And what may help, I alluded to it earlier, is to go to a counselor or a therapist and lay it all out there. Sometimes a third party helps out. You know, they're kind of a referee where they tell the wife like, "Let him say his thing." And husband, "Let her say her thing." And husband, "You're not listening to her." And wife, "You're not listening to him." And after, you know, I don't know, 5 or 6 sessions, you may really get to the bottom of what's going on here. And something may surprise you. You never know. But it's often you need that third party, that therapist, to kind of bring that out of everybody. So if you're watching this and you say, boy, that sounds familiar, and I'm talking about your life, not just our friend Tim, do not wait for things to fix themselves. It doesn't work that way. If your partner is trying to kick the can down the road, so to speak, and just tell— and tells you, you know, let's just wait, you know, a few years after the kid gets older, things will improve. No, they won't. And I want to emphasize, you are not crazy. You are not overreacting, and you are not an animal for wanting physical and emotional connection to your spouse. You are a human being. You're perfectly normal. So if you can relate to any of this, write to me at deardso.com. Tell me everything. The good, the bad, the ugly, the stuff that you've never said out loud before. Let's work on it together. See if we can come up with a solution, a plan, someplace to get you to where you need to be. Do not wait until you disappear completely. Take that first step and do it today.