A man's marriage is failing because he stonewalls, gets defensive, and apologizes without changing. His wife has shut down in response to years of hurt. Real apologies require owning your part and actually changing behavior, not just saying sorry. Healing takes time, and expecting quick fixes is just pre-planned resentment.
Stop having expectations of other people, your wife, without having a conversation. You have an expectation without having a conversation. You stonewall your wife, your defensiveness, your criticism, your black and white thinking. You keep engaging in these behaviors. You don't know how to apologize. Listen, brother, saying I'm sorry is not an adequate apology. Owning your part and making the necessary changes to correct it and not repeat it. So you're not sorry, you're caught. You're caught. So stop having an expectation of how you want other people to be without first having the conversation. See, a lot of times you avoid that conversation. If you're the type of individual that is shutting down and cannot have a conversation, that is pure childishness. That is you not being a grown adult, being mature. The way you handle your emotions— we're called to be mature men in this generation. You shutting down your emotions, bottling them up, suppressing them, pushing them down, repressing them, depressing them is not mature. There's nothing mature about that. But see, you regulating yourself, you being able to walk with confidence, you being able to own your part, you being able to validate how your wife feels. Learn how to communicate with her. Because when you don't, what happens is your wife becomes super controlling. She doesn't trust you, and she gets to the point where she just turns off. She has to shut herself off. Why? Because she's hurt. And then you change for 2 days and then have an expectation that all of a sudden things are supposed to get better right away. This is gonna take time. It didn't take— it didn't happen overnight that you just basically destroyed the relationship because you you weren't leading. And it's not going to happen overnight. When you start to change, you make a couple of different changes, and then you have an expectation. You know what an expectation is? It's a pre-planned resentment. It's a pre-planned resentment. You, uh, you have expectations of how people are supposed to treat you because of incremental changes that you're making, but you're not looking at the damage that you caused over time. And that's going to take time to fix. And listen, bro, if you're not willing to face this stuff— they say time heals all wounds, right? But time won't heal what you won't face. Time won't heal what you won't face. So stop living in denial about everything that's going on around you, because everything that's going on around you is a byproduct of what's going on inside of you that you're not addressing.
