Sexless Marriage… She Says She Doesn't Feel "Safe" With You

Has your wife ever said to you, look, I need to feel safe in order to do the old hanky-panky with you? And ever since then, you've been what? Walking on eggshells, trying to be the safest, softest, nicest guy on the planet Earth. And what happens? Invariably, somehow she wants you even less than before. What the eff? So let's talk about this because for a lot of you, even though you have the best intentions at heart, you are digging an even deeper hole than what you were in before. That word safe has trapped a generation of men. Let's see what we can do to pull you out of the trap, so to speak. I got an email this week, and by the way, you can submit your own story to me at deardso.com, and if it's a good one, I'll create a video out of it for the whole world to see, or for the podcast listeners to listen to on the Dad Starting Over podcast. And by the way, wherever you're watching or listening to this, if you could pause for a moment, do me a favor, give me a like, give me a subscribe, give me a follow, however the hell it works. I would really appreciate it. Now on to today's email. This one comes from David and he says, Hey Ralph, been watching your stuff for a few months now and I finally decided to write in. Not really sure where to start, so bear with me. My wife and I have been married for 14 years, 2 kids. Things have been dead in the bedroom for, I'd say, close to 2 years now. Maybe longer if I'm being honest with myself. A few months ago, I finally got the nerve to bring it up again. Calmly this time. No blowup. I just asked her what was going on, if there was anything that I could do. She told me she doesn't feel safe with me. That she needs to feel emotionally safe before she can want me again. She said it really matter of fact, like she read it somewhere. And honestly, maybe she did because she's been listening to a lot of these relationship podcasts lately. So I took it to heart, man. I really did. I figured, Okay, I must be doing something to make her feel unsafe. So for the last few months, I've been on my absolute best behavior. No raising my voice, no pushing for anything. I let her have her space. I do more around the house. I ask how she's feeling. I try to be the calmest, most patient guy I can be, and nothing. If anything, it's worse. She seems even more checked out. Last week, she actually pulled away when I just put my hand on her back walking past her in the kitchen. I don't get it. I'm doing everything she asked. I'm being safe, I'm being gentle, and she wants me even less than before. What am I missing here? I'm starting to think I'm just not the guy for her anymore. Thanks for reading this far, Dave. Okay, Dave, first of all, once again, thank you so very much for sharing today. I know that's not easy for a lot of guys, but I appreciate it. And let's put to rest, like, maybe you're just not the guy for her. Maybe, but that's, possibly not the case here. And for sure, you are stuck in something here. But what's interesting is it's not your fault necessarily because the solution, or the trap rather, is disguised to look exactly like the solution. Be more safe. Here's what happened. Your wife threw to you the word safe. In your anxious, possibly a little codependent kind of mindset, dude, You saw that word and you just jumped on it. You said, "Oh, must fix situation." You know, you turned into this little fixer robot guy. Must fix situation. I hear keyword safe, make her safer. And you do what just sounds like boilerplate, make person feel safer stuff, right? It's logical. It's also in a way dead freaking wrong. Let's break this down. Number 1, the word safe got hijacked. There are just completely different meanings sitting inside one little word, safe. There is safe, probably like what you and I think of it as, I'm going to get hit, I'm going to get hurt, I'm going to get screamed at, I'm going to get verbally or physically abused. I feel unsafe. But for the guys that I hear who say this, by the way, I've heard this, oh shit, I don't know, like 600+ times at this point. That is usually, in fact, I've never heard it be the case. Most guys that are taking in self-help material and trying to figure out how to fix their marriage, make their wives happy and all the good stuff. Are usually not abusive guys. Usually these guys are already pretty goddamn safe. And so when you become even more safe, more comfortable, more secure, more sedate, more predictable, your attraction, yes, sorry, does tend to go down. I know it sounds crazy, but this brings me to point number 2. This is going to be tough for some of you guys to hear. Comfort does not necessarily equal sexual desire. Or rather, it doesn't correspond to sexual desire. And I'm not the first to say this. This isn't some monumentous aha moment on my part. There are books written on this subject. There is a female psychotherapist who is very, very popular, way more popular than I am. Her name is Esther Perel. Check her out, Esther Perel. She has put out a lot of books and video content and podcasts. She had a TED Talk that went really, really popular. Her whole premise is, you know what? It's tough to marry the two. One is the safe, secure, domestic, to marry that with the erotic and sexy and titillating and fun, the two are like oil and vinegar. Putting them in the same container, it just doesn't work. When you two are just completely enmeshed like that, completely fused together as a couple, there's no distance. There's no polarity. There's nothing to reach for necessarily. There's nothing left to want anymore. I know it sounds silly, but this is human nature. So when you crank up the SAFE, which often corresponds to crank up the fusion between the two of you, you are just lessening that very natural tendency in human beings as far as what is it that garners attraction. You become softer, gentler, more available. You are the warm bath that she settles into. A warm bath is for settling and calming down and just melting into. It is not necessarily to crave and desire. So David and others, what you did in the circumstances, you took that little bit of edge that you had in the relationship, the little bit of edge, the little bit of, oh, independence, disconnectedness, whatever you wanna call it. And by the way, there are healthy and unhealthy versions of this. I'm talking about the healthy sexual tension, potential sexual tension between the two of you. And you kind of sanded that down, you smoothed it over and you said, we don't have to worry about those little edges anymore. And voilà, you're even worse than you were before. You heard the word safe and you interpreted that as remove all friction. Eh, wrong. This is something that a lot of very codependent men have a really hard time with. And I wrote about this in my latest book, Rebuild, and you can learn more at readrebuild.com. I talked about in my first marriage, I used to be the type of guy, and I know a lot of you are gonna relate to this, where I would walk into the room, I would look at my wife's face and I'd see a little bit of discomfort, a little bit of anger, a little bit of sadness, something like that. And I immediately went on the fix-it mode. And by being Mr. Fixer, I thought I was a good husband. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do. I'm supposed to be overly emotionally invested in my spouse and how they feel, right? I was being super duper what? Safe. And my wife, like a lot of wives, didn't want super duper safe guy. You know what she wanted? She wanted a man. Number 3, you are already the safest man that she knows. And that's the problem. So when your wife says to you, "Dude, I need to feel safe," and you go and just crank up the safe stuff, all the safe stuff that you've been doing all up to this point, you're just adding more fuel to the fire. And not the sexual fire, in case that wasn't clear. You, David, are not underdelivering the safe stuff. Dude, your wife is now drowning in it. She's got a guy who never disagrees. He never makes a move to risk rejection. He never has a plan that she is not a part of. He never does anything that she may not approve of. You become a guy whose entire emotional weather, if you will, depends on her mood. You become a piece of furniture. You are comfortable. You are secure. You're always there. Nobody gets hot and bothered for a piece of furniture. I'm sorry. Number 4, sometimes this therapy talk It makes the whole thing unwinnable. And you know what? For a lot of people, that's exactly the point. Here is the dirty little secret about "I need to feel safe." It cannot be measured. It cannot be quantified. There is no moment where you go, "Aha! Click! Safety achieved! Woo-hoo! Let's get it on!" It doesn't work that way. You can be Mr. Perfect in your mind month after month after month, and you can go to therapy and the therapist can tell you, "You're doing a great job, dude. You're Mr. Safe." You go to all your friends, your female friends, your platonic friends, and say, "Am I doing things right?" and they can say, "Yes, dude, I know a million women that would want to be your wife. You're an excellent guy." And then your wife says, "Eh, not quite yet." She dangles the little carrot in front of you, the treat, if you will, like your little doggy saying, "Here you go, here you go." You get closer and she pulls it away. And before a lot of you go there, it's not like the wife is some master manipulator in a lot of these cases. In some cases, yeah, she's a royal asshole. But in some cases, no, she doesn't even know what the hell it is that she wants. Somewhere along the line in the long-term monogamous relationship, things got turned off. And you know what? She's just as clueless as you are. She's like, "I don't know. I used to be a horn dog. I used to want it all the time. Now I don't even think about it. I don't know what the hell's going on. Maybe I'm asexual or something." Hear that one a lot. By the way, this is the exact sort of topic that we pull apart in The Brotherhood, our private support community for men only. We have moderated private discussion forums, live Zoom meetings. We get together in person. All kinds of audio content, nearly 2,000 hours of audio content, all my books, coaching courses, you name it, we got it in the brotherhood. Check it out at help4men.com or jump right to the join page at help4men.com/join. Number 5, here is, by my estimation, what she's really saying when she says, "I need to feel safe." A lot of you are dealing with what I call an avoidant partner. She values her space and her independence as an individual above all else. Once that honeymoon stage wears off, and the honeymoon stage is the early part of the relationship, usually pre-kids, where all the hormones are just flooding your system and the brain chemicals and everything says, you guys get together and make babies, and you just fall madly in love. And she— you were the first person that she thinks about in the morning, the last person she thinks about at night, and just, you are it, right? And then that fades, and you start to feel like, what, a threat to her? You are just Too much, dude. And so she pulls back. And for many of you, Mr. Anxious, Mr. Codependent Dude, you chase more and more. You're clingy, you're anxious, you have this energy that says, please just let me fix it. And it just makes her run quicker and quicker away from you. So for a lot of you, when she says, dude, I just need to feel safe, what she's telling you is, please get the hell away from me. And sometimes they say something kind of sort of directly to you in that way. I just need space. I just need room to breathe. I can't think. The kids, everything is just too much. And so you do back off. But you still do the little thing, like the little hand on her back, you know, the small of her back in the kitchen, little kiss on the back of the head. You look pretty today. How are you doing, beautiful? Everything all right? You seem down. All these things that you construe as just normal, loving human behavior, because guess what? It is. But to her, you're just further smothering her. So number 6 is stop the chasing. Give the woman space. Let the space do the work, so to speak. This is not about getting mean. This is not about pouting and punishing her. Crossing your arms and saying, "Let's just see what she does." No, dude, back the eff off. When somebody tells you back off, you back off. You stop auditioning. You stop trying to win the reward of love and affection from your wife. You just let her be. And what do you do? You take all that energy that you've been putting on her and you turn it around and put it on yourself for once. It's gonna sound boilerplate and bullshit typical, but dude, this works. What is it that you're doing for your physical health? Let's start there because that is the easy stuff. You push and pull things, you exert yourself, you sweat, you stop putting shit into your mouth, you get a good night's sleep, you stop drinking, you stop smoking. For a lot of guys, a whole lot of life problems get resolved when you do that kind of stuff. Get involved with other men. You need guys in your life. You need a community. You need friends. It sounds silly, but for a lot of you, you have nothing. You have no dudes in your life and you do need that. Check out the brotherhood I mentioned earlier, helpformen.com. You need your own interests, your own hobbies, your own mission. In life outside of your wife. Sometimes for some of you, all of this avoidance and anxious stuff exists on a spectrum. Sometimes for some of you, your situation is such that when you act healthier, because that's what we're talking about, when you take care of your body and you become more involved in the community and you take care of yourself mentally and emotionally, you're becoming an overall healthier human being. For some of you, becoming healthier means also a healthier relationship with your wife results from all this. And for some of you, the wife notices. Hallelujah! The guy's finally doing stuff. For a lot of the women that I talk to, you know what they say? I got my husband back. And he eventually realizes, oh yeah, I used to be involved in the swim team in college, and I used to do this and go play basketball with my buddies, and I used to go out every Friday and play cards, and I used to be involved in this charitable organization, and I used to work out all the time. Why the hell don't I do that anymore? Oh yeah, because I got too caught up in the family machine and worrying about what the hell my wife is doing all the time. To some of you who have a wife that falls somewhere in that spectrum of Ms. Avoidant, that was very, very attractive to her. Mr. Independent taking care of himself. Dude, look at him. That's my husband over there. And now she's like, dude, just please stop. Give me some space here. And finally, you do give her some space. You kind of return back to the old you and hallelujah, things improve. But for some of you, it doesn't. What it does is it exposes just how dysfunctional and broken your relationship is, unfortunately. Regardless of what the end result is, the mechanism is the same, and it is one that all of us need to partake in. So David, back to you. Here's your answer. You've not been failing at safe. Every single gentle, careful, accommodating thing that you're going to be doing over the next few months is going in the wrong direction, unfortunately. For a lot of you, you're giving a comfort problem even more comfort. Stop chasing safe. Stop chasing her. Go become a man that she has to reach for again. And by the way, I talk about all of this, the lover versus the provider and the chasing and the avoidance and the anxious and all that other stuff in my bestselling book, "The Dead Bedroom Fix." And you can learn more at deadbedroomfix.com. And by the way, I have an app that goes along with the book that is very popular, the Dead Bedroom Fix app, deadbedroomfixapp.com. Check it out. So David Nuthers, you're not broken, man. You're just trying to play a game by rules that nobody explained to you. You're kind of learning the hard way like a lot of us do, but you'll get there. Just give it time. Give yourself patience. Give yourself grace. All right, brother. Guys, thank you so very much for watching. I do appreciate it, and we will catch you on the next one.