When Vulnerability Ends a Marriage

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. I got an email from a follower here recently that made me stop in my tracks, not because it was really, really unique and different, but because you know what? I've heard this hundreds and hundreds of times and it's time to make a video about it. This is for you guys that have been married a long time and you feel like you gotta walk on eggshells around your woman. You feel like she doesn't have any patience for any kind of weakness or humanness on your part. You're afraid to say the wrong thing because you think it's gonna blow up in your face. And for good reason, it will. And the gentleman says, we'll call him Joe, he gave his real name. He says, I saw you talk about a guy emotionally vomiting on his wife and it was exactly what I went through. Let me pause there with his story. Emotionally vomiting, that's what I call it, and that's what I believe Dr. Robert Glover in his book, No More Mr. Nice Guy, I believe that's what he calls it as well. I didn't make up the term. It's basically when a man holds in and holds in and holds in all this emotion and resentment and anger and frustration, and then he just kaboom blows up on his wife and just lets it all out and just comes out like a torrential storm avalanche of information. And a lot of wives take all this in and say, "Oh my gosh, this is no good." That's what I often talk about to guys saying, "That's not good. You gotta let the steam out on a regular basis." So it's okay if you're in a good relationship. Welcome to being a human. You're gonna have some not so good days and not so good moments. It's better to share it now a little at a time instead of bottling it all up and letting it explode. It sounds like that's what Mr. Joe here did. "I'm definitely anxious and my wife is 10 out of 10 avoidant." Oh boy. "I know better than to be emotional with her. She has made that abundantly clear over our 14 years of marriage. She tolerates zero weakness in me. After 3 years of no touching in our marriage, I finally sat her down for the quote healthy version of the talk." This is something I've had podcasts and videos about. Look it up. I admit I got shaky and I teared up while telling her how I felt. She left the room and she didn't talk to me for the rest of the night or all of that next day. Then she took the kids and went to her mom's for the weekend. On Sunday, I got a text that she wants to talk. She got home and she told me she wants a divorce. She makes way more than me, so she wants to be sure I won't screw her over and try to steal from her. Yes, she only cared about money. She threatened to destroy me in court if I try to come between her and the kids. That was almost 2 months ago. We're officially separated and she has moved out. Based on what the kids tell me, she already has a boyfriend and it sounds like they're pretty comfortable, so it wouldn't surprise me if she was seeing him while we were together. "I am completely lost and scared for my future. My career is not going well and my income is way down. I plan on checking out the Brotherhood group. I'm going to need the help. Thanks for your work." As I mentioned, this story is not that unusual, I'm sorry to say. You got the old anxious man, avoidant woman, the long-term relationship, and then the comfort and the stability, the safety, and yes, the boredom sets in. Which is not the greatest recipe to keep a passion alive in a marriage to begin with. That's why you gotta work to stay connected. And it's really not the recipe if one of you is what this, as what Joe here calls, a 10 out of 10 avoidant person. It seems like with a super duper avoidant person, that's not a technical term by the way, the only way to get like a romantic or slash sexual rise out of them is to have the newness and novelty of the relationship when everything's very uncertain when you're— there's no stability, there's no real closeness and vulnerability. You're still kind of in that dating phase, getting to know each other phase, real uncertain phase. That's when you see the good stuff. But when real life presents itself, you know, the day-to-day boring stuff, they just shut down. Some guys that I talk to, they say, Ralph Brewer, I'm not lying to you, quite literally, the day we said I do, the woman turned to me and said, good thing we don't have to have sex anymore. Or, "I hope you know this means that we're not gonna do it but like once a month." And the guy's just like, "Oh crap, what have I done?" This is what guys refer to as the old bait and switch. You give 'em a lot of love up front and then as soon as you get commitment, "Sorry buddy, we're shutting this down." Yes, a lot of you guys out there that are watching self-help relationship-oriented material are anxious dudes. And yes, you have tied yourself to probably a very avoidant woman. Funny how life works, the old yin and yang, opposites attract. The guy had a very vulnerable and emotional moment with his wife, and by his estimate, that led to the divorce. Let's get this out of the way. Having a crying weak moment, if you will, doesn't make you less of a man. Congratulations, you're part of the human race. Feeling pain and sadness and not so secure in the moment does not make you defective. Wanting intimacy with your partner in crime there, your spouse or your girlfriend or whatever it may be, does not make you a broken human being. The point is, her acutely awful reaction to your emotional moment—leaving the room, taking the kids away, giving you the silent treatment, and then literally filing for divorce—that is all on her. An emotionally healthy partner does not punish vulnerability with threats and abandonment, but a very unhealthy and emotionally Immature person. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff they do. And yes, a lot of you guys watching this, you tend to match up with those kind of people, don't you? Their response tells you everything about their emotional capacity. The phrase I often use is, and it applies here, "Sorry dude, she's just a broken little girl." The follow-up to that is, "It ain't your responsibility to fix her or to put up with it." Unfortunately, you intertwined your life and had kids with such a person. So they're gonna be somewhat in your life for, oh, probably the rest of your years. But that is your cross to bear for the mistake you made of getting with her, overlooking red flags, and not dealing with your own insecurities as the broken little boy that you are. As I said, vulnerability isn't the issue. As with all these things, it's kind of a delicate balancing act. Where does it go from being a normal, vulnerable, and yes, strong individual, strong man, let's put that out there, to going to a real, "Oh my gosh, what the heck is this? This guy is, you know, kind of crazy acting. This scares me. This gives me the ick," as the women say these days. Where's the dividing line? That's kind of difficult to say, but there are some parameters or some guidelines in place that can keep you from crossing that line. One is that you approach these weak, vulnerable moments as a life lesson. A way of showing your spouse, your significant other, that, you know, I'm going through a really bad moment and here's how I'm dealing with it. Here's how I plan to incorporate you. Here's how it's going to affect you. Just put it out there. That's strong. That's tough. It's being a man. It's being a leader. You say, here's where I'm at, here's what's going on, and here's how I'm handling my life. As opposed to, oh my God, this horrible thing happened to me. I can't deal with this. I think I'm going to break down. My whole world is collapsing. I don't know what we're going to do. I'm scared. I hope you're scared along with me. Let's be scared together. Please soothe me. Please give me comfort. Assure me that you're not going to leave. I need you. I need you. I need you. I don't care who you are. That is not the most attractive way to frame the whole situation. As Esther Perel, the famous psychotherapist, author, and speaker said, one of the biggest fears of women is learning that their man deep down inside is actually just a scared little boy. That doesn't mean that she can't feel your pain. That doesn't mean that she can't empathize or sympathize with what's going on in your life. It just means that she doesn't want to feel like she has to carry you. She doesn't want to feel like she has to carry the burden of all your feelings and all your stresses and emotions on her shoulders. I'm sorry if that sounds sexist, and I'm sorry if you feel like, oh my gosh, that means we just have to hold everything in. No, but there's definitely a line that a lot of you cross. Now, back to Joe and his story. Joe, buddy, It wasn't your little emotional moment that ruined this relationship. It was a combination of insecure dude, insecure woman get together and they have an insecure marriage. As I often say, the old dead bedroom is the canary in the coal mine for much bigger issues in the marriage. And you guys didn't touch each other, it sounds like, for 3 years. Dude, there were some serious problems. And you held that stuff in for 36 months until you finally blew up at her. Regardless of how you approached her, Eventually, you're going to get to this point. And yeah, you're right. She may have had, probably had, the dude on the side all along. For how long? For the entire 3 years of your dead bedroom? I don't know. No way of me knowing. Does it really matter? It always surprises a lot of guys that the avoidant woman, it's not unusual for them to have affairs. Well, how can a woman, a woman like this, an avoidant woman who seems to be so fearful of any kind of real vulnerability and emotionality and closeness with a person, go and seek you know, kind of extra love outside of the relationship. That doesn't make any sense. Well, going back to my original point, what is that affair partner? New forbidden love, something she knows she shouldn't do, something that represents everything outside of the comfort, familiarity, and boredom and domesticity of your relationship, something that represents a break from the anxious guy whose anxieties make her feel very stifled. That's right up Mr. or Miss Avoidance alley. They're hardwired for that whole affair thing. These folks, unless they get help, they don't do well in long-term monogamy, I'm sorry to say. So this doesn't surprise me whatsoever. And yes, what I've seen from a lot of, I'm sorry, a lot of the ladies that do this kind of thing, it's always amazing how kind of cold and how it seems like they can just at one moment go from loving, loving wife, as loving as they can be, dedicated wife to suddenly, sorry, you're done. Now I'm girlfriend to this guy. And it seems like it's a light switch moment. Just flip and they're done. Don't try to wrap your head around it. Don't try to understand it. Don't try to intellectualize it and, you know, dissect what's going on in her head. Just realize it's a woman that's in the middle of a brand new relationship. She's in love, sorry to say. And if it gives you any comfort, it's probably not going to last. Sometimes they do. If she does, you know, last years and years with this guy and they're happily together, oh well. She's not a match for you. And you know what? What you will learn years down the line is she actually did a good thing by leaving you. You needed the wake-up call, dude. You're not supposed to be with a person like this. No secure or especially anxious dude would want to be with a person like this. The fact that you hung on during all this obvious dysfunction and toxicity in the relationship shows that Joe and others like you, you got some stuff you need to work on. You now see where your passivity gets you. You now see where you're overlooking red flags gets you. You now see how not vetting your relationship partner upfront properly, where that gets you. And I'm gonna make an assumption here, Joe. If you're like most of the guys I talk to, you can see how not having other men in your life, peers and mentors in your life to help you through this kind of stuff, you see where that gets you, which is precisely why I created the Brotherhood. And you can learn more at help4men.com/join to jump right to the join page. Join hundreds and hundreds of men from around the world that are going through the same kind of thing, trying to figure things out, trying to do things the right way in life, trying to rebuild themselves like I cover in my latest book Rebuild. And you can learn more at readrebuild.com. By the way, all members get that book and all my other books for free, ebook as well as audiobook format, plus the meetings, plus the forums, plus the coaching and the courses and the conferences, all kinds of stuff. Oh yeah, and like 1,400 hours of audio content, 'cause dudes love podcasts and audiobooks, but we got hundreds and hundreds of men that have been blindsided, that have been replaced, that have been threatened in relationships, that have been abandoned and scared, and they're all rebuilding themselves from the ground up. And then we have guys who have been there and done that, and they're sharing their wisdom, much like myself. So Joe, if you're watching this, or anybody else that can relate to Joe's story, now's the time to make the change. Now it's time to take things seriously. Now it's time to speak up. Now it's time to lead your life. Because newsflash, it's the only one you have. Build up strength before you have to become the desperate guy who is hanging on for dear life. And if you're one of those guys that's right now in the middle of the wreckage of your life and your relationship, you're not done, dude. You're just done pretending. Let's get to work. Guys, thank you so very much for watching. I appreciate it. And we will catch you on the next one.