Sexless Marriage… Then I Saw the Text Messages

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. All right, I'm going to read to you today another email from another husband. This one starts in a place that a lot of you guys are going to recognize. The guy talks about how the physical intimacy in the relationship slowly starts to fade. The marriage feels very cold, and he starts wondering if there's something else going on here. Here's what he wrote. He says, I'm 45 and my wife is 42. We've been married 16 years and we have 2 kids. The ages— we hear this, the 40s. I don't think it's a coincidence. That's what I hear more often than not. I also don't think it's a coincidence that it coincides with kids becoming a certain age for a lot of couples, as well as the old perimenopause. But I digress. Continuing on, he says, our sex life has been fading for years. At first it was once a week, and then once a month, and then every couple of months. And the last year we've had sex twice. Gonna pause there again. For you ladies that are watching this, yes, guys keep track of these sort of things, especially your more anxious guys. I've talked about attachment theory. Most of the guys that come to me, most guys that take in a lot of this self-help material are in fact anxiously attached to their partner and they're always looking for reassurance. They're always looking for signs that everything's cool with their relationship. They very much have a mental scoreboard going on in their head. And the most glaring obvious score up on the scoreboard is how many times you guys get it on. So yes, it's important. And yes, guys keep track of that sort of thing. As silly as that may seem to some of you. Continue. Continuing on. He says, she always has a reason— stress, work, hormones, headaches, not feeling good about her body. I try to be patient. I read your book, The Dead Bedroom Fix, and started working on myself. I got back in the gym, I started dressing better, I stopped begging for sex, and I tried focusing on my life more. But something still felt off. She became more protective of her phone. Oh no. If I walked into the room, she would tilt the screen away. If a text came in, she'd check it quickly and then put the phone face down. A few weeks ago, she left phone on the kitchen counter while she was in the shower. I did not plan to snoop, but I did, and what I saw made my stomach drop. There were messages from a guy at her work. Nothing sexually explicit, but lots of inside jokes, flirting, and compliments. One message from him said, quote, 'You looked amazing today,' and she replied with a smiley face and said, 'Stop, you're going to get me in trouble.' And then there were long conversations about their day. Way more conversation than she has with me. Ouch. Now I feel sick every time I think about it. Part of me wants to confront her. Part of me feels guilty for looking at her phone, but the biggest feeling is this: I think my sexless marriage suddenly makes a lot more sense. All right, there's a lot to cover here. And unfortunately, I know a lot of you guys that are watching this are nodding along saying, been there and done that. And guess what? So have I. The position that you're in, and I need to come up with a fake name here, David, position you're in sucks. Emotionally, you're a bit of a mess inside, and it's completely understandable. Life just took a giant crap on you. You found out your wife is betraying you, basically. Now, it would appear by looking at the messages that nothing has gone beyond some flirting. Definitely an emotional connection. And some people would categorize this as an emotional affair. And I am one of them. That's exactly what's going on here. She knows what she is doing is crossing the line. That's why she has hidden it from you. That's why she didn't say, me and this Steve guy at work, again, making up names, we're talking often. Look what Steve said. Let's get together with Steve and his wife for dinner. No, she's kept that world separate from your world. We are all susceptible to such behavior. It's just that some of us have put up boundaries between us and other people so that when we sense that we're kind of tiptoeing that direction, we turn around and go the other way. But your wife, for insert, I'm sure various reasons here, she doesn't have that mechanism within her. She doesn't have that boundary to say, I'm not going there, Steve from work. Please don't text me. I don't talk about that kind of stuff with other people outside of my marriage. Nice talking to you, Steve, but do me a favor. Don't message me anymore. Those are all very adult person in a monogamous relationship kind of behaviors. She doesn't have that mechanism. For whatever reason. Now, like I said, there's a lot to talk about here, so let's go with step 1, which is do you confront her with this? Different schools of thought here. One is that if you do so, what she's going to do is probably hide even more what she's doing. She will realize, oh shoot, I left like this little opening here. He knows how to get to my messages. And she will just close that opening, so to speak, in the form of they will take their messaging from text message and move it over to something else, some kind of app or something that you'll have no idea about. There's Snapchat and WhatsApp and all these others. That is, from what I've seen in these experiences, most likely what's to happen simply because this whole emotional connection with another person— that's something I've talked about quite a bit— is extremely addictive. You don't just go up to a person and say, cut that out, and they go, oh shit, I'm sorry, and they stop doing it. It doesn't work that way. Usually there's a lot of denial. They just hide it even further. And ironically, they further burrow in as far as their connection to the other person is concerned, because now by virtue of your actions, you've introduced this feeling of, oh crap, we almost got caught. Now this is extra naughty. This is an extra forbidden thing. That's a layer of all of this that adds to the addictiveness of it all. You know you're not supposed to do it, but You got away with it. Your heart's pumping. Let's kick this up a notch. There's also the school of thought of exposing this. If this guy Steve that she is having this emotional affair with, if he's like most guys in this predicament, he is probably married. So now you have two married people. One avenue of thought is to go to his spouse and say, do you know what your husband's doing? And then go to your spouse and say, I know what you're doing, and blow up their world. Very often when affairs like this are exposed, they get scared all to hell. Their life's about to get ruined, their career, their family, and they stop. But that doesn't address the underlying issue. Why the hell did she do this in the first place? Why doesn't she have those boundaries in place to stop this from happening? Why are you two so wildly disconnected? Why don't you two touch each other anymore? Why did you only have sex like twice in a year? All these things are interconnected, and I see you making the mistake of saying, ah, that's why she's not, you know, doing me in the bedroom. She has outsourced the energy to somebody else. Now, I'm willing to bet that the disconnection between you two preceded this relationship with this other guy. Keeping the spark alive and keeping that connection in a long-term marriage is tough. Not everybody is cut out for it. Not everybody has the tools in their emotional toolbox to make it happen. I talked to plenty of guys who are just completely clueless about it, and there are plenty of women out there too who have no idea how to do it. And so Mother Nature does what it's supposed to do, and it bonds you guys together, make babies, and then it allows you two to slowly drift away to go do it with somebody else. So if you don't have the skills in place to keep you guys glued together, you notice you naturally drift, and that's what's happened in your relationship. Now, in your defense, you're gonna say, dude, I've tried all I can to work it. I'm putting in the work. What the hell? I know, dude. Good for you, man. But It takes two. It only takes one person to divorce. It only takes one person to say, I don't want to do you anymore. It only takes one person to run off and have an affair. It takes two to make the thing work. And you both have to work in concert with each other. You both got to be on the same page. And you ain't on the same page, in case you didn't notice. And that not being on the same page results in a lot of not so good behaviors. Your flavor of not so good behavior in your relationship is the wife running off and forming an emotional affair with somebody else. It could have been one of you becomes 500 pounds. One of you develops a gambling habit. One of you starts going to sex workers. One of you forms a porn habit, whatever it may be. This is your form of dysfunction, so to speak. I keep using the phrase there's a case to be made for because there's no right or wrong here. Every little situation is different. I know it sounds like a cop-out, but it's true. But anyway, there's a case to be made for possibly becoming a Mr. Private Investigator, getting a hold of her phone and really looking at everything that's going on. Maybe hire an outside private investigator to follow her around to make sure that there's no physical anything going on, if that's important to you. Which it is to most guys, go to an attorney and say, hey, I've discovered this about my wife. I'm about to approach her with this. I want to get my ducks in a row as far as finances and debts and assets. And here's the kid situation, all that stuff. You know, take a spreadsheet to the attorney and lay it all out and say, this is everything we have, just so you're prepared, just in case shit hits the fan. So when you're armed with, you know for sure what's going on with her and the other guy, you're armed with information from the attorney about here's what to expect in case she says, fine, I want a divorce. And then you're really prepared and you go to wife and go, I know about Steve. Don't try to explain it away. I know what's going on, okay? I know you've been talking to him forever. I know you guys talk about this and this. I know you're carrying on an inappropriate relationship with a man outside of our marriage. And I also know that you and I are not in a good place. I'm willing to forgive this outside transgression of yours simply because it hasn't really stepped over the line into physical, sexual, and everything else. Right now you've just formed an emotional attachment to somebody. There's no I love yous, none of that. But you know you've stepped over the line. So I'm willing to overlook that if if and only if you are willing to work on us. You're willing to go talk to somebody about this. I got shit I need to work on. I've been working on it in case you didn't notice. I still have stuff I need to work on and you got a whole heapin' boatload of stuff to work on. Are you willing to work on it with me? If not, let's just go our separate ways, shake hands, keep this amicable, and you can pursue whatever relationship you want to pursue. In fact, I already went to an attorney. Here's a divorce agreement written up. It's all very fair. Have your own attorney look it over. Maybe we can do this, you know, via mediation, whatever. And again, keep this amicable. What does that show? You're serious. You're a man with boundaries. You're a man with certain values, and you are willing to walk away from something that goes against your values and your identity as a man because you're a good spouse. You're a good man. You want to work on the relationship. If she does not want to follow suit, that's her problem. It's not your problem anymore. She's a big girl. She can go pursue whatever life she wants to pursue. Obviously, she's not getting some need met with you. Hopefully she can get it met with somebody else. God bless you. Wish you all the best and really mean it because you can't strong-arm her into committing to you. You can't force her to want you. You can't negotiate your way into her having genuine desire for you. All you can do is put up your boundary and say, this is what I expect out of a relationship. This is what I will not put up with. Are you on board, wife, with getting this relationship back on track? And wife, it means you're going to have to stop any and all contact with Steve. I know you work with him or whatever it may be, but that means you're going to have to move to a new department. That means you have to quit your job. Maybe if you're not willing to make that level of commitment, put in that type of work, tell me now. I won't waste both of our times. But you know what, it's way easier said than done, especially when you've intertwined all your money and you got the kids and the families. It's a mess, right? But from what I've seen, a lot of guys, you know, approach it and go, I just can't flip a switch like that. We're gonna draw this out a little bit. The 6 months of being in limbo, a year goes by, you're not quite sure if you're in and out. Dude, years can go by in that state. And often in that state, what happens is their relationship that they have with their affair partner becomes a full-blown affair. And you better believe that they're the ones to go to the attorney and get all this stuff squared away. And going to be the one caught off guard, and you're going to say to yourself, man, I should have followed through with my words and went to the attorney and got the ball rolling last year. Now let's just hope that she doesn't completely screw me over. Guys in David's situation, you have control here. Set aside the pity party, set aside the old victimhood, and realize you do have control over the direction of your life. No bullshit. But it's not going to be easy. I'm not going to do the whole you're going to make this decision and everything's just going to be wonderful from here on out. No, Often doing the right thing means you got to go through hell. And when you go through a breakup and a divorce, even if they're the ones that cheated on you and all this other stuff, it results in hell. But you still got to go through it. It is the right thing to do. The good news is you don't have to go through it alone. Do you know I have a community of guys, a private community for men only? Guys, a lot of whom have gone through this exact same scenario, myself included. They can give you advice on what to do and what not to do. They can be there to commiserate and talk about all the shit that you're going to endure. You can talk to guys who are currently going through the doing the exact same thing, which gives you a lot of comfort because you know you're not alone. And that's huge. Check it out, the Brotherhood at help4men.com, or you can jump right to the join page at help4men.com/join. Join hundreds of men from around the world in live Zoom meetings, private forums. We get together in person. You get all my books. You get 1,500+ hours of audio content just for members. Check it out, the Brotherhood. I think you will like it quite a bit. And guys, if you enjoyed this video, do me a favor. Give me a like. Give me a subscribe. I would greatly appreciate it. And we will catch you on the next one.