Tim Arrigo says most marriages fail because husbands don't hear what their wives are actually saying. Wives voice disconnection and unmet needs, but husbands hear criticism or selfishness instead. Awareness is the bridge between seeing the problem and fixing it.
Your marriage is literally on the rocks because you are lacking this one crucial element. See, your wife keeps bringing up these problems to the forefront of your mind. She keeps holding up the mirror to you. She keeps saying, hey, this is why I feel this way. I feel disconnected. My emotional needs aren't being met, right? How are you not seeing this? And you are literally blind to it. And I understand you're blind to it. You can't see it. You can't relate to it. You're like, I don't get it. It's like you have all these blind spots, right? It's like it's— you're trying to understand a foreign language. And see, it's because you're missing one crucial component. And that crucial component is awareness. See, your awareness is the bridge to action. Before you can take action on making the changes, you have to become aware of what the changes are that you need to make. See, your lack of awareness prevents you from knowing and understanding where she's truly coming from in the marriage, where she's truly coming from in the relationship. A lot of times you don't know what she means by saying, I feel like my emotional needs aren't being met, right? You don't know what she's saying by saying, right, you just seem so selfish and self-centered. You never check in with me. I don't feel like I'm important in your life. I don't feel like I'm the apple of your eye. I don't feel like I'm relevant, significant, or important in your life anymore. And it's like you're thinking to yourself, I do all these things. How am— how is she not seeing this? Like, and you feel frustrated, you feel angered by it. So a lot of times you just, you explode, you let go because your frustration comes from a place of I am doing the best that I can. And here's the thing, you're doing the best you can. That is true with what you have. You're doing the best you can with what you have. So what are you truly lacking? The awareness. The awareness about what is missing. And see, that's when people are able to come into your life and help you establish awareness, help you see those blind spots in your peripheral vision, right? Help you look in certain areas where in plain sight that you didn't even see. Sometimes we're so stuck in our own subjective experience that we don't have the ability to, uh, like really know what's going on with us. So we gotta get objective about our subjective experience. And how do we do that? With the help of other people to help us see these blind spots. And these blind spots are never outside of us. They're always within ourselves. Our ability to be selfless, our ability to be, have self-control, our ability to, right, have to be trusting to other people. It's the littlest things we do that sometimes make the biggest, most important shifts in our life. So don't be blind to the changes you need to make. Wake up to the changes you need to make today by cultivating awareness.
