Tim Arrigo explains why men walk on eggshells around their partners and what to do about it. He argues you need to understand yourself and your partner, have difficult conversations instead of avoiding conflict, and invest in your own emotional development.
See, winning her over means understanding her first. And in order for you to understand her, you have to understand yourself, because human beings are like a mirror, right? And in the marriage with your wife, if you want to win your wife over, then you need to understand her. You have to be able to empathize with her. You have to be able to connect with her on a deeper level. So much of your life has been predicated and based on separating yourself from yourself. You've escaped through work, you've escaped through all this other stuff in your life. You've, you've used these things as a vehicle to dissociate and disconnect from yourself. So this is why when it comes time for you to actually downshift and slow down and connect with your wife, You feel like this block— there's this mental block between the connection with your wife and where you want to be with your wife in terms of physical and emotional connection and intimacy with her. And then it's this desire to want to connect, but yet I don't know how to be emotionally available, so I walk on eggshells and then I placate my wife and I start to overanalyze and overthink every little thing that I do. See, winning your wife over is not about doing everything that your wife wants you to do. It's not about placating your wife. It's not about being passive. It's not about over-apologizing. It's not about, right, thinking about how every little thing you do is going to affect your wife and taking into consideration every little possibility of what's going to happen when you do A, B, or C. It's not about any of that. It's about you understanding your wife. It's about understanding the deeper components and aspects of who she is. When you guys are in a roommate-like situation, when you're in a roommate dynamic with your own wife, this requires you to sometimes, right, get into a position in the marriage where you guys are having the hardest conversations you could ever have. Your biggest fear is to acknowledge to your wife that it may not work out. And if you keep sweeping these conversations under the rug, if you keep being conflict avoidant, and if you think that avoiding everything is the way to deal with it and not facing it— see, time doesn't heal all wounds. That's a myth. Right? People say that time heals all wounds, but time won't heal what you won't face. Time won't heal what you won't face. And being so avoidant and being passive, right? And living a life in denial where you, where you continue to procrastinate. You think that this is about winning over your wife, brother. This is about you, and this is about the man that you need to become, not only for your wife, not only for your kids, but for yourself. Look at this area of your life, your mental and emotional health, the number one area in men's lives that we neglect. It's the last area that we typically invest in. Why? Because the ROI is not so tangible. It's an internal process. And you don't know what that looks like a lot of times. So investing in my personal development, investing in the necessity to resolve these internal conflicts, that's usually something we put off. But my real question for you right now is, how much longer are you going to wait? And how many more consequences externally do you need to experience before you're ready to make that change?
