“Sexless Since Baby #1… And She Threatens Suicide If I Leave”

All right, folks, we have a new Dear DSO entry on the website and you can submit your own story or question to deardso.com. Just fill out the form and if your submission is a good one, I will create a video out of it for the whole world to see or for people to listen to on the Dad Starting Over podcast available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your podcast. You can probably find the Dad Starting Over podcast. And do me a favor, if you're watching this on YouTube, take a moment, click on subscribe down below, click on like, leave a comment. That will help me out a great deal. Thank you so very much. And now on to today's submission, and this one comes from Keith, and the subject line is Feel Tricked: Divorce or No? He says, dear Ralph Brewer Brewer, my wife and I have been married now for 6 years, and not a second of it has been ideal. For starters, my marriage has been sexless since the conception of my first child 5 years ago. Besides the conception of our second child, we have never had sex. So you had the first child, she got pregnant, and she said, you're cut off, mister. And then she somehow convinced you to go through the motions of making baby number 2, and you're like, yes, at least I finally get some. Made baby number 2, and she got pregnant, and then she cut you off again. Dude, you're a glutton for punishment. I don't know what to tell you. I mean, this is— but I digress. I'm cutting the story off earlier. Here we go, continuing on. This is not an exaggeration, he says. It feels like I was tricked into marrying someone who has no interest in sex. When I have brought it up at home or in therapy, she has one of a thousand excuses as to why parentheses, usually something to do with me. Eventually, I gave up trying. The other aspects of our relationship are failing as well— communication, quality time, etc.— and I have become so beaten down that I can't bring myself to be the only one working on it. She is increasingly volatile. She lashes out at me, the kids, and my family. My recent military deployment was the final straw. He says, parentheses, where I lost my motivation completely. Let me pause there. The military thing, I mentioned this in a previous video, probably multiple videos. There is something about the military that just generates all kinds of chaos within marriage. It attracts certain kinds of people to it. The dynamic of one being gone for super long periods of time is just not good. Um, she threatened suicide if I didn't come home. And the police were called on her several times. They found nothing that they could work with as she is able to switch back to a normal outward face on a whim. I see. So she gets hyper-dramatic. I'm going to kill myself. Please come back. You call the police, go check out my wife. She's threatening to kill herself. They show up and she's like, no, I'm fine. And this has happened several times. Not good. Um, I want to leave, but I'm afraid to pull the trigger on divorce. I don't want to risk losing access to my kids. And lose what I've built. Do you have any advice? Well, Mr. Keith, this is a perfect example. I just recorded a Dear DSO right before this one where the end result was basically the same, which is you need to do the right thing, which is to, you know, let's look at it this way. Is there any indication that you have from your 6 years with this woman that getting with this woman and marrying this woman and having kids with this woman was a good move on your part? No, you say from day one, from second number one of this relationship, it's been broken. And yet you stuck it out. What's going on, Keith? What's going on with you, buddy? Something happen? Are you dealing with some kind of internal trauma, emotional damage that causes you to be attracted to and hang on to people like this? You said it yourself, it's been broken from the beginning, yet you hung on and hung on. And then you had two kids with her. Come on, dude, this ain't good, my man. You got some stuff you need to work on. Yes, you obviously need to break up with this woman and divorce her like yesterday. Duh, right? But you're like, but it will result in drama and heartache, and I will not see my kids, you know, 24/7. Yeah, that's the— I don't know what to tell you. It's still the right thing to do. Uh, two paths to take. I leave her and let's say I see my kids half the time. With your military deployments and everything else, I don't know how that's all going to work out. If you're still deploying with the military, maybe that's done. Maybe you stop doing that. Maybe now you're stateside 24/7. I don't know. Um, but let's say pretend that you're going to see the kids half the time. That's a negative, not seeing your kids half the time. I say that, but what most dads say, half the time just means the time that they're under my roof, under my home. I still see them the other half of the time because I go to this practice, the school function, this game, this event. Still take my kids out to lunch every now and then, whatever. I see the kids all the time, still FaceTime with the kids, all that stuff. It's just that they're not under your roof, and that's not a little thing. I'm not belittling that. That is— it's a big deal thing. But it's not like you're not going to see your kids ever, hopefully, unless she goes crazy and kidnaps the kids and takes off. But there are legal repercussions for doing so. But anyway, so that's the negative repercussion of divorce. Your kids have the time, uh, potentially lose money. I don't know what the financial situation is between you and the wife and everything else, but let's assume the worst. You're going to lose some money, lose some benefits, you know, uh, presumably down the line through some, maybe some military pension and stuff. I don't know. I don't know how it all works. This is all questions for an attorney. I have no idea. And I think the fact that you're military changes the laws and so forth a little bit. And, um, But then there's this other road, which is, let's just stick it out. What are the repercussions of that? There's no question. You've seen it. You've lived it for the last 6 years. Are you, are you cool with just, I don't know, another 20, 30, 40, 50 years of that? That's the other road. That's all there is to it. There's going to be negative repercussions either way. From where I sit, from what little you have shared with us, it seems like The duh option to go with is option A, just leave woman, deal with the negative emotional repercussions and drama, and live the rest of your life by yourself or in one or series of healthy relationships. That's the key though, is that you have a track record of sticking out with very obviously broken relationships for an extended period of time and making some really bad decisions in the form, I'm sorry to say this, this is terrible to say, bad decisions in the form of procreating and making babies with a woman in a very obviously broken situation. So point is not to pick on you, but to say, in the current state of mind that you're in, you're going to do this again. I've seen it a million times. You say, no, I'm not, and then you end up with a woman who seems like your, your dream woman, and you move in with her, and you just ignore a thousand red flags, and then you're going to end up having kid number 3, and it's just going to be do this all over again. So get some help, brother. Get to therapy. Maybe the military offers something that you can talk to somebody there on base or however it works and get with other men, work with other men. You know I'm going to say it if you've been watching my stuff, the Brotherhood. It's our community for men only, private community. No one knows what you say in it. No one knows what you talk about. Hundreds and hundreds of dudes from around the world. We get together in private discussion forums, private Zoom meetings, very frequent. We record all the meetings. You have over 1,000 hours of content for just members. All my books, no additional charge. We get together in person. There's coaching, there's courses, all kinds of cool stuff. So check it out, the Brotherhood, at help4men.com. Help4men.com/join, or go to Brotherhood in the menu. My friend, you need to work with other dudes, other dudes that are there to help you out. All right, brother, thank you for reaching out. I appreciate it a great deal. And guys, thank you so much for watching, and we'll catch you on the next one.