Sexless Marriage… Now She’s Always Going Out

I got another message from a follower. This is a good one. He says, Ralph Brewer, I feel like I'm watching my marriage slowly slip away, but I don't know if I'm overreacting. We haven't had sex in over a year. That part has been bad for a while, but recently something changed. My wife started going out more. At first it was small stuff like dinner with friends and work events, but now it is constant. She is buying all new clothes. She is doing her hair. She's putting in effort that I haven't seen in years. But here's what's messing with me. She used to say that She was too tired to do anything. She was too stressed and too busy. And now she has energy for everything, just not for me. I am not saying that she's cheating, but I feel like I'm sitting at home while she's building a life that does not include me. Am I overthinking this? No, my friend, you are not overthinking this. It seems like you are finally waking up to a bad situation. A lot of men don't catch on to this stuff, if you will, until way down the line, like there's already another guy involved and she's already filed for divorce. You know, all that fun stuff. What you're describing is something that I hear all the time, and it is something that I personally experienced years ago with my first marriage. And it doesn't start with cheating. It starts with distance between the two of you. Let's talk about the whole what she says versus what she does. She says there's nothing wrong. She says she is just tired. She says that you are being very insecure. Words are cheap. Behavior tells the real story. If your wife has zero energy for any kind of physical intimacy between the two of you, if she has no interest in any kind of real connection, like she doesn't want go on any dates, she doesn't want to really do much of anything with you at all, period. But suddenly she has a lot of energy to go out with friends, go to the clubs, go dancing, go get a makeover, go clothes shopping, suddenly goes to the gym a lot. That is what we would call a very real shift in behavior. People tend to not just lose energy spontaneously. A lot of people, not all, but a lot of people, what they do is they redirect the energy. So if she is suddenly dressing up a lot and socializing and going out all the time, that energy, so to speak, didn't just come out of nowhere. It was always kind of lurking under the surface. She just was having a hard time finding a place to invest that energy, so to speak. And what you have learned over the years is you were not worth the investment in her eyes, and she finally found something to direct the energy towards, and that is going out and partying it up. Now, let's slow down for a second and be fair here, because this is where a lot of guys go off the rails. There is nothing wrong with a woman having her own life. In fact, that is necessary. Healthy relationships are two independent individuals coming together. It is not two individuals that are glued to each other 24/7 and they set aside all friends and all pastimes and hobbies and interests. That's not good. You both need friends. You both need time away. And in fact, if you do feel like you need to have your wife with you by your side 24/7, that is insecurity. And that kind of energy, especially from a man to a woman, by my estimation, kills attraction faster than anything else on the planet. But, there's always a but, there is a line between healthy independence, two healthy independent people coming together. There's a line between that and the way to define that line is such: is she living a full life and that includes you, or is she building a life that excludes you? Because real independence looks like this: she goes out, she has fun, and she comes back and she reconnects with you. She has her own world, her own interests, hobbies, and everything, but she still greatly values you two and what you have as a couple. There is real space between the two of you, but there is a lot of closeness. That's called two secure people getting together. What real disconnection looks like is when you are no longer a priority to her, when she doesn't include you or attempt to include you in anything, and when you notice that the distance between you keeps growing and growing and growing and it never contracts and comes back together again. If you're experiencing that, all you're experiencing is a marital separation. It's just happening in slow motion. A lot of guys in these kind of situations that suspect infidelity, they're looking for really concrete proof. They're looking for suspicious texts. They're looking to, you know, catch her with the guy, something really over the top been obvious. The thing is, as far as the relationship is concerned and the health of the relationship is concerned, that is way too late in the game. Wife disconnecting from husband, let's stick with that whole dynamic, that happens way earlier than when another dude comes into the picture. You see it when she stops emotionally investing in you, caring about how you feel, when she stops wanting any kind of connection with you. All that happens way before going out on the town with the friends, getting caught texting some other dude. It's just that you're kind of blind to it because it's just kind of subtle, and it happens over a long period of time. It's not some big grandiose event like catching her, you know, with a text message pop up on her screen that says, "Hey beautiful, how are you?" or "I miss you." Or if she's out with her friends, you know, every Friday until 4 AM and comes home completely drunk. Those are really over-the-top things that make you stop and go, "Something's up here." What guys need to do a better job of is paying attention to the little subtle things, the literal hundreds of little subtle things that precipitated those big moments. All right, so here's the difficult thing, another complication in all of this. You have some, let's say, some underlying not so nice things going on in the relationship, and your wife starts going out and partying all the time. To a lot of guys, some of your more naive guys, some of your more nice guy types, if you will, the guys that don't want to rock the boat, they will paint it as a very positive thing because on the surface it is kind of positive. Like, she's happier, she's more outgoing, she looks a lot better, she lost a lot of weight, she's dressing better, she's finally getting out with friends, something that maybe you bugged her about because she always used to be kind of a depressed introverted type of person, but there's still a little bit of you in there that kind of, you know, it's twitching a little bit, a little bit of insecurity in you, a little bit of suspicion in you, and you feel guilty for having those feelings because of all that positive that you see. And so you start feeling like the problem. If I have insecurities and hesitations about this, this is on me. It has nothing to do with her. I need to shut the hell up. But again, if the new version of her, if it leads to her further devaluing your relationship and investing more and more and more to that new party world, let's say, then you have every reason in the world to go, "Timeout, I don't like this," because that is not signifying some kind of independent growth or growth that has a positive impact on the relationship. Again, that's just illustrative of further detachment, something that's been going on for probably years and years before that. So, if you're a guy in this kind of situation, you notice wife further detaching, going out and partying all the time, making a new group of friends, what you don't do is panic and hit the big insecure panic button. You don't try to further control everything. Who are you going? What's their name? When are you getting back? Where are you going? Basically like an overprotective parent with a teenager going out for the first time. You also don't become super passive and say absolutely nothing or ignore your gut instinct about all this or pretend that this is one of those situations that with time it'll just kind of fix itself, you know? Both of those opposite extremes of the spectrum are a form of weakness, really. Trying to control her, the situation, comes from fear. Being extremely passive, also from fear. And again, fear puts you in a very anxious mindset, a very needy mindset, and that is woefully unattractive. So if you're in this situation and you're like the guy who wrote into me and you're noticing this new behavior from your wife, you may not necessarily be competing with another man or other men. Not yet. What you're competing with is another version of her life that feels better than the life that she has with you. More freedom, more excitement, less pressure, less obligation, and a version of her life that makes her feel like kind of like a winner. She's happy-go-lucky party gal. And when she walks into the room, all of her girlfriends say, yay, Mary's here. She doesn't kind of get that excitement from a typical quote, boring, safe marriage. You can't compete with that. And so you slowly get phased out, pushed out. Not a good thing. What you need to do is, number one, stop lying to yourself. Is this bad? Is this just your insecurity talking? Is there something real here? Is this just the tail end of years of bad stuff? Have you been rug sweeping all these years, if not decades? Be honest with yourself. I'm not blaming you for her behavior, but I'm blaming you for not taking ownership of what you can control. Your boundaries, what you will and will not put up with, your insecurities, your fear. Can't control and You can't ignore. Like a lot of things in life, the sweet spot, somewhere in the middle. You acknowledge what's happening and you put it out there, what you are comfortable with and what you're not comfortable with. You respond to this from a position of strength, not fear and insecurity. And you, if you're a guy watching this and you can relate to this, probably have a lot of work to do in yourself. You, like a lot of men that I have talked to over the years, and by the way, you can talk to me, coaches, and hundreds and hundreds of men from around the world at the Brotherhood. Learn more at help4men.com or jump right to our join page at help4men.com/join. If you're like a lot of guys that I talk to, you have made her the center of your universe. You have lost all direction in life. You have lost what people call your masculine edge. No mission, no independence, no nothing. You have hung basically your sanity, your mental health on her shoulders. So any kind of little or not so little, you know, move in the direction that this woman is doing, it looks extra, extra bad and it probably is really bad based upon your disconnection over all these years. So, regardless of what she does, regardless of what's going on here, dude, you need to work on yourself. You need to work on what's going on up here. It's getting you in a lot of trouble. How's this going to end? Some of these situations do turn around. Unlike what a lot of guys are about to say down in the comments on this video or the podcast, wherever you're listening or watching this, sometimes the partner that's going out, and by the way, it's not always the woman. Sometimes it's the guy that's going out drinking with his buddies a little bit too much. Wife found out he went to the nudie bar a few times and she didn't like it. Sometimes, That person, whatever you want to call them, the offender, says, "You know what? I do need to cool it with this. I need to refocus things on my spouse because they just put down the boundaries and I'm about to lose them. And I got too caught up in the nightlife and the fun stuff. It's understandable because it's fun. Fun is somewhat addictive. But I need to cool it. I need to put that on the shelf." And they come back and they devote themselves again to the marriage and to the spouse and they work on it, usually with help of some kind of third party, a counselor or something like that. But keep in mind, that kind of response, that's the best of the best. That comes from what? Action on the part of the other spouse. You can not sit back and just cross your arms and pout and hope for the best. It don't work that way. You need to show your standards, your boundaries, what direction you're going in life, what your mission is in life, and how this kind of behavior, if you're not cool with it, which most guys wouldn't be, how that affects everything and how that doesn't go along with the plan that you envisioned. And if she wants to remain on Team Bob and Mary, whatever your names are, then she needs to change her behavior or else. You're not necessarily just reacting to bad stuff. And then when it cools down, you'll go back to the old you. No, you're saying like, nah, we're gonna do things differently from now on. So to summarize, there is nothing wrong with independence in a relationship. In fact, it's a good thing. It's when that independence turns into distance, growing distance, investing time and energy in something else and taking away from the relationship. That is often, not always, but very often the beginning of the end. Once that shift in behavior starts to happen, when you notice shit's starting to hit the fan, it doesn't get fixed by chasing, begging, and trying to rationalize and all that fun stuff. It comes from strength. It comes from facing your fears and doing the right thing, even if, yes, it may result in a whole shit ton of drama. Thank you guys so very much for watching. I do appreciate it. If you give me a like, give me a subscribe, I'd appreciate it. And we will catch you on the next one.