Sexless Marriage... "She's Just Stressed" Is Often the Biggest Lie

How long have you been telling yourself, you know what, she's just stressed? Be honest. How many years has it been? And by the way, the stress, it's very real. How many kids do you have? How many different moves have you done over the years? How many new jobs have you started? How about that time when one of you got really sick? How about the time when you lost a parent? That's the thing. If you think about it, you have a reason to be stressed. Every single year. That's the problem with this whole stress thing. It's not that it's a lie, it's that it's, it's true enough. If you're new here, by the way, my name is Ralph Brewer Brewer Brewer and I've been putting out content under the Dad Starting Over name and I have a larger organization called Help for Men and you can learn more at help4men.com. And by the way, before you go today, if you could do me a favor, gimme a like, subscribe, follow, however the hell it works, wherever you're watching this or listening to this, I would greatly appreciate it. For me, I mostly make videos about guys who are stuck in relationships, often sexless relationships, that they are not happy about. A lot of these guys have no idea why this is happening and they have nobody to talk to about it. So that's what we're here for, to give the straight talk and let's cut out the bullshit. Let's get into it. Let's start with this email that I received. This one comes from Thomas and Thomas says, hey Ralph, wasn't gonna send this, but here goes. Married 19 years, 3 kids, 16, 13, and 10. For years, it was always the baby stuff. Nobody's sleeping. Somebody is always sick. And I got it. Nobody's having sex with a newborn in the house. But the youngest is 10 now. Nobody is in diapers. Nobody is waking up at 3 AM. The thing I kept telling myself we were waiting on basically already happened, and I didn't even clock it. Now it's her job. Now she went back full-time 4 years ago, and her mom's been sick, and there's always something on the calendar. I pretty much run the house at this point, so she's not drowning. I do the school pickups, the bills, the groceries, all of it. And look, she's a great mom. We don't fight, but we've had sex like a handful of times since COVID And the last time I actually tried to bring it up, she cried and said she's just tired all the time. And I felt like such an asshole for even saying anything, so I dropped it again. I'm 46 and I've been doing the math lately and it honestly scares me. Thomas. Thomas, first of all, like I say to all guys, thank you so very much for sharing and for reaching out to me, sharing your story with all of us. I really do appreciate it. Like with most guys in this situation, first it starts with the baby stuff. And by the way, the baby stuff is oh so real. It's not bullshit. For a woman who becomes a new mother, there was nothing more preoccupying her brain than got a new little human to take care of. I once heard the very popular content creator and author, Allison Armstrong, say that women tend to pay attention to what is the loudest in the relationship. And when you're a mother, the loudest thing, so to speak, in your head is the needs of this little child. And often the men at that point go like, "What about husband over here?" And boy, if you wanna get women irate, be a man to point out like, "I kind of feel forgotten after the kid came into the picture." Dude, she is just doing what Mother Nature is telling her to do, what Mother Nature is screaming at her to do, which is be very preoccupied with the health and wellbeing of the new little human. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is, is that this can, when habits set in, this can persist for, oh shit, decades, and that's not good. But once you have that culture of stress that kind of sets in and that culture of stress, which is an excuse for not connecting as a couple, man, that's really difficult to break from. And one of the biggest and most common tactics that women in this example, it doesn't always have to be a woman, but it often is the woman in this example, what they use is something like shame. And you felt it when you brought it up to her saying like, the youngest is 10 years old now and we're still acting like a couple of stressed out parents with a newborn. And what did your wife do? She cried and she said, dude, I'm just freaking tired. And what did you do? You felt like an asshole in that moment. She cried. You felt like an asshole. Nothing changed. Not good. Here is the thing about stress, my man. Stress comes and goes, up and down. That's just what stress does. The deadline that was bothering you at work, that comes and goes. The kids that were really sick, they, they get better. The mother-in-law that annoys the shit out of you, she goes home, thankfully. And if you're a good couple and you're both secure and you have an awesome relationship, you get over the hump. And what happens? You come back together as a couple.. But for Tom and others like Tom, that gap never narrows. You don't ever come back together. The gap remains. So I'm going to be really, really blunt here, and this isn't going to sound very nice and it's going to piss off a lot of people, but what's new, right? Stress is in these examples, the biggest and most common and most useful lie. Yes, I said it. Lie that you can use when it comes to explaining away why you two are so drastically apart. Number 1, stress keeps her blameless. That's important. And also equally important is that it makes you the good guy. You get to be the patient one. You get to be the understanding one. You get to be the good dad. You get to be the one who never pushes and stresses his wife when she is so freaked out in the moment. And if you're a typical nice guy, that sounds very appealing. You get to do things to appeal to mommy, I mean your wife. Yay, gold star for you. Now you're the most understanding, nice, calm dude in a very cold bedroom. Congratulations. The stress story also keeps you freaking busy. Always something to do. Welcome to life. There's always something to fix and you're a dude and you like to fix things as most of us do. So when there's always little fires to put out, That keeps you energized, doesn't it? Especially you ADHD dudes. You need that, that stimuli, that dopamine of project to complete, and you become hyper-focused on it. And that project may be alleviate wife's stress by doing this, alleviate wife's stress by doing that, and do it. Next thing you know, years go by and you're the stress alleviator guy. And by keeping busy like that, you are in fact hiding from the real truth. Busy is a really good place to hide. Because keeping busy and being stressed out causes you to not face the real thing. There's a big question here you need to ask yourself, and maybe some of you have already been down that road and you can already answer the question. For some of you, it's a hypothetical, and that is, let's play pretend and say that all the stress is off the table. You're able to go flip a magic switch and, oh, stress gone. What does your relationship look like then? Many of you are rearranging your life to avoid that very question. You are keeping busy so that you don't have to ever see, "What's it look like when I'm not busy?" Because for a lot of you, I think you know the answer to that question, don't you? More of the same bullshit. For some of you, here's a little exercise for you. Think back to the last year, 3 years, maybe longer if you have to. Was there a single stretch where stress seemed to really not be that much of a thing? A calm period. There's invariably some kind of calm period there, isn't there? There was at some point the big stressful thing hanging over your head and you resolved it or it went away naturally, whatever the case may be. And then, and then what? What did your relationship look like then? More specifically, since I'm talking mostly to men here, what'd the old bedroom look like? Was it a lot better? If the answer is, you know, dude, nothing really changed in that department or really anything to do with our marriage in any way, shape, or form, she always seems to find something else to stress out about, or she didn't pay any mind to that, or I tried to push us closer together and she was very resistant, or whatever it may be, you got your answer, dude. It ain't the stress. Stress that survives every instance or every iteration of your life, no matter what, it's not necessarily stress. It is the culture, the climate of your marriage. That culture, that climate of your marriage that survives through all of that. It survives the move, the new job, the parent dying, the womb, whatever it may be. All the bad stuff. And yes, all the really good stuff that seems to alleviate all that stress. You just hit the lottery. Whatever the hell it may be, you still have this constant hum of this culture within your relationship. A lot of you watching this are engineer types or something close to it. So what a lot of engineer types do is they break things down into ones and zeros. Step 1, step 2, step 3, which is why my book, The Dead Bedroom Fix, was so popular because it's a very regimented, do this, this, and this. Don't do this, this, and this. Men love that kind of stuff. So a lot of you go into Mr. Fix-It mode and you carry all the load of everything on your shoulders. I alluded to it earlier, man, you're just putting out fire after fire after fire. Fix, fix, fix. Do, do, do. And for some of you, hell, probably most of you, you notice that the chasm, the space between the two of you continues to grow, grow, and grow. The more you carry, the less she reaches for you. And it sucks. For many of you, you read her lack of change from all of your fixing. You read that as very much a type of ingratitude. And that's not necessarily fair because you have basically trained her and trained yourself to act a certain way after so many years of doing things in a certain way. This has become the culture and the climate of your relationship. Desire between two people, that does not grow out of a guy that just continuously acts like a sponge and absorbs everything, everything, asks for nothing in return. You, the guy who picks up, let's call it like every dropped ball there is out there. Every time a ball drops, you're there, pick it up to pick it up again and again and again. Every time you're basically teaching everyone there's no limit to what I won't put up with. And a guy who has no limit, no boundaries, there's that term I use often. It's not a guy that garners a lot of respect and it's not a guy that garners a lot of desire and it's not a guy that helps to springboard change in a relationship. You're just a guy who says, bring it on, gimme, gimme, gimme. You see where it gets you. And for a lot of you, this is really hitting home for a reason. A lot of you are very codependent in nature. Guess what? There is hope for you. This isn't like a lost thing. This isn't something that you just go alone and go, oh hell, I guess, I guess I'm freaking broken. That's all there is to it. No, guys, you don't have to go at this alone. Check out the Brotherhood, our support community for men, for members only at help4men.com. Or you can jump right to the join page at help4men.com/join. Join hundreds and hundreds of men from around the world getting together in private forums for members only, live Zoom meetings. We have coaching courses, all my books at no additional charge. You have been clinging to a lie, a comfortable lie, if you will, for years. What are you doing? Are you, are you doing so to protect the bedroom, the, the dead bedroom? Are you hoping that just one extra little project, one little effort will just instantaneously turn everything around and your wife's just going to be this hungry sex slave horn dog for you? No, for many of you, I think what you're doing— I've talked about this quite often. I know it's very negative of me, but you know what? It's realistic. And you actually can have really positive change one way or the other when you face the nasty thing head on. And the nasty thing is, for many of you, your wife checked out of your freaking relationship years ago. And some of you, unfortunately, have turned a blind eye to some really bad behavior on her part. That were subtle enough for you to ignore. You keep doing your busy work, putting out all these fires, fixing this little thing, picking up all the balls that have been dropped, and you ignore the fact that, boy, she sure seems to be on her phone a lot. Anytime I walk in the room, the phone goes face down. The other day I asked to see her phone and she says, uh, and she made up some excuse about it not working right and she left the room. She sure seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time at the gym. She sure seems to be taking a lot of extra work trips that she didn't take before. This isn't all of you, and in fact, it is not the majority of you. It's a minority of you that are seeing signs of what? A wife who is not only disconnected from you but is connected to somebody else. If that's you, pause and realize that, you know what, you need to face that before you do anything. Another chunk of you, you need to realize that this relationship, this marriage, was shaky from when? Day one. The fact that you had sexual intercourse at the early part of the relationship and relatively frequently kind of glossed over a lot of the nasty stuff. I can't tell you how many guys that I talk to reach out to me to say, Ralph Brewer, 911, I need to talk to you. Can I book a time with you to talk this evening or tomorrow morning first thing? It's really important. And I'll be like, yeah, dude, I guess I'll move this appointment here, I'll do this there, and we can talk like at 9 o'clock tonight if you want. And sure enough, we talk. Guess what he says? Eh, false alarm, no biggie. Why? Because he got laid right before the call, and that just erased everything in his mind. He's fine. Setting aside the fact that he just had like 6 months of nothing prior to that, or 6 years of nothing, or the wife is throwing out divorce stuff, or the wife hits him, or whatever it may be. In his mind, that was all wiped out by the fact that he just got laid. Guys, that is just, that's wrong. Don't do that. For those of you in either camps, and they're kind of two extremes here, one is there's probable infidelity, and the other one is like, well, this marriage was just broken from the beginning. We just ignored it from day one. For both of those, the whole, it's just stress thing, it's just a little chew toy for you to gnaw on while you ignore all the real, you know, fire going on around you. And here is where you just gnawing away on that little chew toy. Sorry, I couldn't come up with a better analogy here or metaphor. Here's where that gets you. All that ignoring while you're just keeping busy. It doesn't just cost you a sex life. It costs you a life. It costs you years of your life, dude. I just turned 50 here recently. And you know what? That's pretty sobering. Why? Because most likely I have far more years behind me than I have ahead of me. This isn't just midlife, dude. This is the waning years of my life. Ouch. Guys, I was 25 freaking yesterday. What happened? This shit goes by fast. You're 40-some years of age, dude. You're going to be 50 tomorrow. You're going to be 60 the next day. This is not the time to go, one of these days. One of these days, dude. It's right now. Let me put it bluntly. You cannot stress manage your way back into your wife's pants. You can't put out all these fires and fix all these things and suddenly sexual desire just erupts again. The human body, the brain does not work that way. You learn somewhere along the way, probably in childhood, that you need to be easy, useful, low maintenance, and then people will love you. You carry that into adulthood and you learn what? Holy shit, that doesn't work, does it? You, my friend, need to build a freaking life, a life of your own, a life that is not so caught up in what this woman who who turned you down so many years ago, how she is feeling today. You are a grown-ass man. Stop basing your sense of self-worth on the opinion of a woman who has basically dumped you like 2 decades ago. That doesn't make any damn sense. You're bigger than that. You're better than that. You just need to realize that. So again, sit down with yourself and say, over the past so many years, have we had moments where there was very little of no stress? If so, how were we then? That'll kind of tell you everything. Number 2, play pretend. Let's say I went a whole year and there was zero stress and I did everything right and she has no stress on her plate and nothing changed. What do you do then? Number 3, what are you avoiding? What's the big ugly truth that you're keeping busy so that you don't have to face it? Number 4, who am I when nobody in this house needs anything from me? That's huge. That number 4 is the one that causes a lot of guys to go, uh, you know, I don't know. I've been, I've been kind of serving everyone in some capacity. I've been the fire putter outer, the fixer, the whatever, that when that job goes away, I— who the hell am I? What am I? A lot of guys don't face this until after what? Divorce. It's ironic, the term the work creates the man. There's a lot of truth to that. Problem is your work has been just very misguided and it's just been a bunch of nothing. What if you take that same damn energy and direct it towards yourself for once? Holy shit, the changes that you can make. There are some resources for you out there and I just happen to put them together myself. And the resources are my book, The Dead Bedroom Fix, deadbedroomfix.com. The app— I have a new app out, day-to-day exercises, things that keep you in the right mindset to become a more secure man and in turn reinvigorate your relationship. Check out the Dead Bedroom Fix app at deadbedroomfixapp.com. And lastly, I already mentioned it, the brotherhood, the community, a support community, hundreds and hundreds of men from around the world. Check it out at helpformen.com Join. Tom, if you are watching, you already did kind of the toughest part here. You raised your hand and said, "Little help here. I'm kind of lost. I don't know what to do. I think I'm ready for a change." Dude, that's huge because you know what? Nobody freaking does that. You're like the tippy top of the pyramid of guys that are going to make actual change. So congratulations. But the next step is actually doing something with it. So get with it, dude. I'm here to help. Guys in the Brotherhood are here to help. Reach out if you need to. It goes for the rest of you guys. Thank you so very much for watching. I do appreciate it. And we'll catch you on the next one.