Tim Arrigo tells men that passivity in marriage often comes from never standing up for themselves, sometimes rooted in an overbearing mother. He argues that becoming a "yes-man" causes wives to take the alpha role, breeding resentment. Reclaiming respect means setting boundaries and stepping into confident leadership.
The real reason why you're so submissive and passive in your marriage is because your whole life you've never truly stood up for yourself. So you can get reactive and you can break character, but when it comes to you actually being assertive, setting boundaries and setting a standard in your relationships, you've never done that. You've let other people take control and you've dealt with overbearing women your whole life. Even some of you guys, back to your own mother. Your own mother was overbearing. And so what do you do? You become submissive and passive in your marriage because a part of you lacks the confidence, the insecurity, dominated by feelings of inferiority, feeling like you're not good enough, feeling like you don't measure up, feeling like you can't be— like you cannot connect to how great you are. You cannot connect to your greatness. And that's the real question for you. Real question is why? Because it's not what you do, brother, it's why you do it. Let's talk about that. What is the reason behind your passivity? How you placate your wife, you become a yes man in your relationship, and guess what? You unintentionally emasculate yourself. You unintentionally allow your wife to usurp you in the relationship, and you put yourself in a position where your wife is being exalted over you and calling the shots and making the decisions. And your wife has to become the alpha in the marriage. And now you're in this power struggle in your marriage, and you're going insane because you know that you created this dynamic. But yet, ironically, the very behavior that you need to use to fix it requires you to have to address your insecurity simultaneously. And that means what? There's going to be conflict. That means what? You and your wife might butt heads. But you know what that also means? It also means it gives you an opportunity to step into who you need to be in the fullness of your confidence, brother. It also means, right, that your wife can learn to respect you again, because guess what? You lost the respect because you don't walk in your authenticity. You don't walk in your truth. You don't walk in the essence of who you truly are as a man, in the self-respect, in the self-assurance. You put off an energy of insecurity, and then you second-guess yourself with the self-doubt. And so guess what? When you procrastinate and you have too much self-doubt, other people just start to take action. When you're not being the leader, somebody else needs to fill that position. So the question right now for you is, what are you willing to do to reclaim your masculinity so that your wife doesn't have to keep making decisions that inevitably she doesn't even want to make? Because part of the reason why your wife is so resentful is because you're not being a leader, that you're not taking action, that you're not taking initiative, and she has to continue to take on all this weight and the burden of what you don't do because because you're so passive. Brother, this is time. It's time to step into your authentic self. It's time to step into a position of confidence, self-assurance, self-respect. Guess what happens when you walk that way? Guess what happens when you put off that energy? People feel it. People feel it. They intuitively feel that energy from you. Guess what happens when people feel that energy? They respond differently to you. Because when people like what they see, they're more likely to listen to what you say.
