Sexless Marriage… She Told Me To "Get It Somewhere Else" — Then Got Mad When I Started Looking

One day your wife says to you very matter-of-factly, you know what, dude, if it's that important to you, maybe you should go get it somewhere else. Maybe this happened in the middle of a fight. Maybe it wasn't really that casual of a conversation, or maybe she, she said it as if she was like, you know, talking about what to eat that day. And if you're like a lot of dudes, you're just left stunned. Like, wait a minute. Did she just say what I think she just said? Does she really mean that? Well, one way of looking at this is that she threw to you what we call a test, if you will, a bluff. A quiet insult. Or maybe depending on where you're at in your relationship and what's going on in her head, this may be a bit of a trap. But from what I've seen, if you take that permission at face value, you're about to find out real quick just how not serious she was. And for some of you, she will deny that she ever said it in the first place. Today, we're going to break down one of the most common and one of the most confusing things in the whole dead bedroom, sexless marriage world. Why in the world would your wife say such a thing? And is there any kind of ulterior motive here? Let's get into it, shall we, via an email that I received from a follower, Eric. Eric's email says, Ralph Brewer, I've been married for 17 years. I want to tell you about a comment that my wife has been making for the better part of a year now. The first time I heard, go get it somewhere else, I figured she was just venting after a fight. The second time, a few weeks later, she said it at the dinner table, not yelling, just just a matter of fact. You know, if you're that miserable about it, you can go find it somewhere else. I won't care. By the 4th or 5th time she said it, I started taking her seriously. Not because I wanted to cheat, because I figured she had to be telling me something real. So one night after the kids were in bed, I sat her down and I asked her straight up, are you actually saying that? Are you giving me permission to do something with somebody else? And she said, "Yes." She said, "I'm not going to want it. I'm not going to start wanting it. And I don't expect you to live like a monk forever. I won't ask, you don't tell. We just go on with our lives." I sat there with it for about a month and I didn't do anything. I didn't go to a bar. I didn't download an app. I didn't even think about another woman in a serious way. And then in the middle of that month, An old friend of mine from college reached out on Facebook. A woman. Uh-oh. She was going through a divorce. She remembered I was a good listener and asked if she could call. We had one phone call. It lasted maybe an hour and a half. There was nothing sexual about it. I didn't flirt. She cried about her ex. I gave her some thoughts. We said goodbye, and that was it. A few days later, my wife was on the phone. I don't know why. Maybe she does that all the time and I never knew. She scrolled through my recent calls. She saw a number that she didn't recognize, and so she called it herself. A woman answered, and she lost her mind, accused me of having an affair, called her sister, called my parents, told them I had been cheating on her for months. And when I reminded her about the conversation where she said I could, she looked me in the eye and said, "I never said that. You're making that up. That's a lie, and you know it." Ralph, she said it. She said it 5 or 6 times over the course of the year. She confirmed it when I asked her to her face. I'm not crazy. And right now I have no idea what the hell just happened to me or my marriage. Eric. Wow. Interesting one, isn't it? Let's break this down, shall we? From what I can gather in most of these situations, I'm sure it's not all the situations. Let's just put that out there. But in most of them, from what I have seen, no, it is not an expressed permission slip. Even when she repeated it. Even when she confirmed it, even when she looked you eye to eye and said, "Dude, I'm telling you, go," she is not making a calm and calculated and rational decision about the future of your sex life and the future of your marriage. From what I have seen, she's doing 3 things here. Number 1, she is calling your bluff. She knows that you have been miserable. She knows that you've been bringing up this issue repeatedly for a period of years. And she is betting based upon, sorry to kick a man while he's down, based upon the mountain of evidence that you've been giving her year after year that, dude, she can say it until she's blue in the face. You ain't doing anything about it. She is so sure that you're going to stay in your lane, so to speak, and always be the nice guy, Mr. Good Guy, Mr. Codependent. Look it up. It's a real thing. She is so sure that that's who you are and who you're going to remain being, that she can just say whatever and she can throw permission after permission and you will do nothing about it. She gets to look like the rational one. She gets to look like the one that is not standing in your way. All the while, she knows with 100% certainty that you are not going to walk through an open door of sexual opportunity. That is just not you. It's kind of like when your little kid, you know, is throwing a fit and stomping her feet and says, I want to run away from home. And you said, okay, here's the car keys. Go ahead. You know, I'll be here when you decide to come back. You know, the kid's not going to jump in the car and drive away. The kid's, you know, 6 years old or whatever. They don't know how to drive. They can't live on their own. You get the picture. The number 2 thing I've seen in all this is that she is just— she's venting. She's being emotional. She's annoyed. She's tired of being pestered. She's been kind of pushed into a corner, so to speak. And when people are emotional and they've had enough and they feel like their defenses are down and they've been pushed into the corner, often people will just throw out the worst of the worst things, or sometimes just something that makes you go, whoa, wait, what? This is one of those things. It just stops you dead in your tracks. It stops the flow of negativity coming her way. This is how she's perceiving it. It stops all the anxious energy coming towards you, and she just goes, you know what, dude? Boom. She drops the nuclear bomb and it works. It gets you to shut the hell up. Again, going back to the whole kid thing, it's very similar to the teenager saying what to the parent. You know, when the parent's getting on about clean your room, do this, do that, you stayed out past your curfew, where have you been doing? And the kid says, I hate you. And the parent's like, this is the kid that I love more than anything in the world. This is the one I used to wipe their butt and change their diapers. And now this little thing hates me. Stops you dead in your tracks. Number 3, from what I've seen, is that this is a form of a test, and I alluded to this earlier. A lot of women do this kind of stuff, and yes, it is, um, something that is relatively common in women who have personality disorders. Those people will throw out this horrible thing, something, you know, like, here's an opportunity to be a bad guy. Let me sit back and watch and see if you are in fact a bad guy. Not the healthiest thing in the world. They want you to come back and say, no, no, no, I'm your protector. I love you. I would never do anything like that. I can't imagine being with somebody else. Oh, this is a horrible idea. I want you and only you. Then they sit back and smile and say, "Oh, test passed." Notice with all of these three possibilities with this situation, none of them are what? A green light to go do the hokey pokey with somebody else. All three of them were in their own way a setup for you to do the quote right thing, which is not go do it with somebody else. And in fact, dude, Eric and others, I think that you know that innately, which is precisely why you didn't do anything. Heck, it sounds like you had on a silver platter somebody coming to you and saying, I need some emotional reassurance. You could have taken that to the next step and the next step and had coffee and had lunch and meet up at a hotel, but you just stopped it right at an innocent phone call. Now, for a lot of you, there is a brutal kind of ugly truth under the surface here. This is going to sting coming from a guy like me, but hey, I'm team dude. I'm just trying to put it out there. You guys like good, rational, no BS stuff. So here you go. Often the women say, go get it somewhere else, knowing full well that you cannot go get it anywhere else. She does not think you have it in you, dude. It could be that she doesn't see you as a physically attractive person, an emotionally attractive person. Maybe you are in her mind a bit of a loser. So in essence, go get it somewhere else is really, yeah, go get it somewhere else, buddy. Sure. So that's why she feels safe doing it. Again, it's kind of like handing the car keys to your 6-year-old saying, there you go. You can run away to go to California. You know, the guy's not going to do it. Because he can't, which may be for Eric and others why they say it repeatedly. She is absolutely safe to do so. There is quite literally zero chance of you going out and winning the reward of sex from another woman. This may not be true, but this is how she sees it. In fact, I have seen in my experience in talking to so many men that have been through this situation that they do go get it somewhere else and then they inform their soon-to-be ex-wife, guess what I did? She's just wide-eyed going, Are you serious? And when they have a lot of back and forth, they realize she didn't think he was capable of doing so. And these women will be like, who is she? What's her name? Where'd you find her? How did you find her? What? She said what? You guys did what again? Totally blown away. I know for a fact with my own personal situation that my ex-wife was completely flabbergasted and shocked that I was able to date so soon. She thought that I was a pretty introverted, shy kind of guy, which I was. For a lot of you in toxic relationships, and for some reason people really hate it when I say that, so let's say abusive relationships, dysfunctional relationships, very unhealthy relationships. You are with somebody who is really, in their mind, really devalued you. They look at you like the poop on the bottom of their shoe. And so to say to the poop on the bottom of their shoe, you know, go out and get you some, sure. You can see that it really has no meaning behind it. It's silly talk coming from them. It's really shitty of them, no pun intended, but that's how they see you. Now, for a few of you, there is another version of this, and it's a relatively small number, but I've seen it, where the wife says, "Go get you some," and you know what? She means it. Well, why the heck would she say that? Doesn't she realize that that means you're going to go form an attachment with somebody else? And doesn't she realize that that probably means the lessening of the chance of you two sticking together as a couple because you're gonna go see, you know, the grass is greener on the other side, you're never going to come back to her, right? That's precisely what she's probably banking on. She does not want you, and she hasn't for quite a while. And for a lot of you guys, you just haven't picked up on the hints enough, and you keep trying and trying and pushing and pushing, and she keeps running away. And finally she drops the nuke of go get it somewhere else. And secretly she's hoping, man, I hope he finds somebody else so we can end this charade. You basically at this point do not have a marriage. You just have a logistical relationship where you two are just managing the house and the kids and the finances and everything. Any and all romance is just gone. So this is in essence not a test necessarily. She's not curious to see if others find you attractive. Some guys have, some really codependent guys have in their mind like a, a fantasy, if you will, of I'm going to go form a connection with another woman and that will wake up my wife and she will suddenly have a great deal of attraction towards me and everything will be great. No. For a lot of you, your marriages are so far gone or so broken that even this Hail Mary of going out and forming a relationship with somebody else in order to manipulate or bring about some level of anxiety in her, that ain't gonna work either. And in fact, why would you want it to? That's not the very— that's not a stable ground for re-energizing a relationship. Now let's address the really weird thing here where the woman looks you in the eye and repeatedly says, "Yes, you should go get some. I do not want you. Yes, I really mean it. Go, go, go." Sometimes literally pushing you out the door. And then she denies ever saying it. Basically, she knows she said it, dude. You know she said it. Everyone knows that she said it. But If she denies it, if she changes the reality, then suddenly she comes from a place of strength. She comes from a place of— I guess maybe strength is the wrong word— victimhood. You, bad guy. She, good guy. If she admits to saying it, then she owns part of the outcome here one way or the other. If the story is very simply, she gave permission, you acted on it, you got, you know, mission accomplished, so to speak. She has to take some accountability here. Now you're not just the simple villain. You're a guy that's like, uh, I specifically said this and this. Maybe you even had like a little recorder or something. You put it in her face and said, look, there's no doubt here. This is exactly what happened. For a lot of people that do this kind of rewriting of history, so to speak, that change of history in their mind actually becomes their new reality. It's kind of nutty, I know. So what you do is you don't get sucked into arguing about it and so forth. You just bluntly state your opinion here. No, it happened 8 AM Tuesday, right here in the kitchen. I know what to tell you, sweetheart. We're living in two different realities here. Regardless of what happened, who said what, when, and all this other stuff, we still have a marriage that is very, very broken. We need to address it like now. For a lot of you going through this and a lot of the chaos that usually inevitably results from all of this, a lot of blowing up, a lot of crying and screaming and calling mom and everything else. Like, what the hell do you do about this? What's going on? Understand that for a lot of you, your dead bedroom situation is a reflection of a wife who is very comfortable You have a routine. You have a very safe and predictable life together. She knows what's going to happen tomorrow, the next day, and the next day. She knows what kind of money is coming in. She knows what bills are getting paid. She knows the kids are safe. She knows that she's safe. She knows that there's a routine here. And for a lot of you, if you act on this permission that she gave you, even though she gave you permission, I know, dude, uh, you're throwing a giant monkey wrench in everything. The whole machine breaks down, and she is what? She's scared. All of a sudden, you are not Mr. Safe, Predictable Provider Dude. Suddenly you're a man. Suddenly it's, oh, this man has options. Other people may want him. Oh, my little comfortable existence is threatened. And from what we have seen over and over again, the women in our lives, when they feel threatened, that's when the real ugly side of them comes out. And they tend to have a lot of family and friends, you know, in their ear saying, go for it, sister. You know, take him for all he's worth. Ruin his reputation. Go, go, go. It can get pretty nasty. But all chaos and all the silliness and should you go out and do this or shouldn't you, set all that aside and let's zoom out for a moment, shall we? This is what you see when you pull back the scab, so to speak, on this really dysfunctional, broken relationship that you got. It's not the marriage that everyone sees on Instagram and Facebook, is it? It's pretty broken, dude. And when those words came out of your wife's mouth so many weeks or months ago, that's when you should have said, oh man, We are really, really broken, aren't we? Yeah, you are. And you know what, dude? You've known it for a while. But the problem is that there's no easy fix here. It's— for a lot of you guys, it's getting down to the root of your insecurities and why it is that you got with and stayed with a person like this in a relationship like this for years. That's a big deal, dude. That's not good. You can try and wrap all of this in this charade of vows and your morals, but in reality, it's your fear. It's your hatred of yourself. You have to get to the bottom of all this because even if your wife were to be the bad guy, so to speak, and pull the trigger on a divorce like tomorrow, if you don't get on top of all of this— I've said this a million times, guys— you're going to do this all over again with the next woman. And yes, believe it or not, there will be a next woman. A lot of us guys just don't like to be alone, and we tend to gravitate towards what is familiar to us. And for a lot of you guys, chaos and dysfunction and unhealthy people. That's what you feel comfortable with. You need to surround yourself with like-minded men who are all trying to do better. And if I may, check out the brotherhood at help4men.com or jump right to the join page at help4men.com/join. Hundreds and hundreds of men from around the world all getting together to help each other out. Forums, live Zoom meetings, we get together in person, audiobooks, You name it, coaching, we got it all. So check it out, the Brotherhood. Once again, this whole, why don't you go get it somewhere else, is one of the most common things that I hear from men in dead bedrooms. We have these very emotionally avoidant women, and you watch some of my videos, you know what that means. These women do not come alive in long-term monogamous relationships. The sexy goes, huh, after a period of time. Once you get married, once you move in together, once you have kids, it's just done. And a lot of them just wish you would leave them the hell alone. No, it's not healthy. No, I'm not making excuses. No, I'm not saying you're the bad guy, but those are just the facts. And these statements like, "Go get it somewhere else," just illustrate that perfectly. It shows where you're at in this relationship. And guys, if you want to go further into this concept of the sexless marriage and the dead bedroom, check out my book, The Dead Bedroom Fix. You can learn more at deadbedroomfix.com, or again, join the brotherhood and get all my books at no additional charge. Talk to hundreds of other guys, forums, Zoom meetings, all that good stuff at help4men.com. For a lot of guys, joining the brotherhood ends up being the best decision that they can make in what turns out to be one of the ugliest, nastiest chapters of their life. So guys, thank you so much for watching. I do appreciate it. Give me a like and subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next one.