Getting Married Is Dangerous for a Man

First of all, you met a girl, she got your attention, you fell in love, you asked her to marry you, and she said yes.

And you live happily ever after, right?

Well, yeah, it can be that way, really. If you're prepared for the problems that you're going to face and how you need to position yourself as the leader in the marriage to deal with those problems effectively.

Now, I'm not saying you don't deal with the problems because you do. You absolutely do.

But you do it based on how you feel in the moment. And I know you guys like to think you're totally rational, but you get your feelings triggered as well. That hurt runs deep the first time the woman you fell in love with attacks you or criticizes you or blames you for something going wrong. Or if she tries to one up you or compete with you or make you look bad in front of other people.

I mean, there are so many things that women can do that are so damaging to men.

And what makes that possible is the very thing that allowed you to fall in love with her in the first place and her to fall in love with you.

And that was letting down your guard and letting someone actually matter to you.

And when she matters, it makes you vulnerable.

You feel like you can totally be yourself. You're totally relaxed. Everything is wonderful. But now you're exposed.

And that exposure is what makes her words, and it's usually always her words, feel so painful to you.

Now, you know, the question is, does she do it on purpose? Does she really want to run you and ruin you and manage you, control you, fix you? Is that really what she wants?

Well, I guess for some women that's true, that they have been so indoctrinated into this idea that men are dumb and useless and all those things, which I do not believe at all, not even for a second.

But some women have been taught that their whole lives. And so they step up from the beginning. I mean, if she asks you to marry her and you said yes, you set yourself up from the get go. Right?

But if it was your choice and you stepped into this and she's a decent woman and she doesn't want to run you, you can still end up being hurt by her words.

Now, the way women talk and the way men talk and the words that we use, the words that we choose, how we see the world. All of those things are significantly different, so much so that we sometimes imply from something someone said, something that they didn't intend at all.

Mostly, I think the thing that men run into that attacks that vulnerability, however, is simply a woman expressing her worry or her fear about something.

The way she says it in the beginning can come as a shock to you. And when that shock hits and it hurts, you kind of do this little internal because you've learned how to not let your feelings show. You do this kind of internal jerk that makes you freeze up where you don't know what to say or what to do.

So you're like, she just attacked me. I don't understand. And from that point, from that moment that you feel that, you actually don't hear anything that she says beyond that point.

You just know that she's upset with you and you don't understand why.

And so your first go to, because you're a nice guy, your first go to is just to get quiet and hope the storm will pass. But the problem is that when you get quiet, she thinks you didn't hear her, you don't understand, and so she will explain it or she'll give you an example. And if that doesn't work, she'll explain it again and give you another example.

The problem with that is that as she continues to do that, you continue to back up Because it feels like she's continuing to attack you. And part of what you want to say is, I heard you the first time. You hate my guts. Why do you keep telling me you hate my guts? I already get it.

But that wasn't what she was trying to tell you. Again, if she's a good woman, if she is not psychotic, but she just happens to be female, that's not what she's trying to tell you. She's trying to tell you, I'm scared and I need reassurance. Now it would help a lot if she could just say that. I'm worried about such and such. I'm worried about what would happen if this happened.

I'm worried about, you know, do we really want to move? Do we really want to buy a new house? She doesn't say that. She doesn't say, I want to talk through it.

I want your reassurance. Help me understand. She doesn't say that because that's not how she operates. It's not even how she thinks.

She's learned that if she just puts her feelings out there that you will naturally pick them up and you'll want to explore what's behind those.

And where does she get an idea like that?

Well, she got it from her relationships with other women.

Because that's how we talk to one another. We just kind of throw out the feeling and then we explore it together And we keep talking until we magically feel better. We feel reassured.

But we're not really aware of the process that we just went through to get there. And worse than that, we don't realize that when we're talking to a man, he doesn't understand that process.

That's not how guys operate.

You don't talk about your fears out loud.

You try to keep them to yourself and think them through and come up with some sort of action that you can take.

That is, unless you're flooded by your own emotions and you just laying shut down. Right?

But she doesn't understand that. What she's really trying to say to you is, I'm worried about this. Can we talk about it?

She's not saying, I think you're stupid. I think your idea is stupid. She's not saying, Well, I'm not going along with that unless she does say that.

When she gets to the point where she's saying things like that, her anxiety is more than likely through the roof.

And more than likely, the anxiety that she's experiencing is not from you. It's from something else. It's from life. It's from pressure she feels as a mom or pressure she feels at work or pressure she feels from her family.

And she's coming to you and she's looking to you to help her figure it out.

Now you have a tendency to naturally just want to tell her, Well just don't do that anymore or That's a problem or Stop it. Because that's what you would do.

But that's not what she's asking you for. She's asking you, Are you here with me? Do you care about me?

Are you somebody I can talk to? Can you give me reassurance? Can you give me comfort?

Now that runs into a problem because you see problems very differently than she does.

If something hurts, you just don't do it anymore. Right? It seems like a really simple solution.

But for her, there's all kinds of things that are tangled up in that. And it's your kind of on your plate to figure out what's going on beneath the surface here. What is she worried about? And you can ask yourself that question from the get go.

When she says something to you that's hurtful, just pause for a minute and go, What could be really going on with her?

Another thing that falls into that line of the anxiety is fatigue.

Women go twenty fourseven.

Maybe not always physically, but mentally we do. Again, it's very like the worry, like the anxiety, but you add on to it a lot of activity, a lot of effort, effort to be perfect, effort to measure up.

Wow, the competition between women is so tough. You know the competition between men.

You know what that's like. But the competition between women really can be very vicious. And there's a concept that has become really popular in the last ten years or so. It's called mom shaming.

So sometimes even a woman's best friend can say and do things that make her feel like she's not a good enough mom.

And instead of just saying, I don't want to be friends with that person anymore, she carries that shame inside of her. Now she might get angry enough to walk away, but that kind of fatigue, that kind of constant judgment that she's dealing with can be very difficult for you to understand or even recognize that that could be what's going on. That's part of what I do in my private coaching with men as I help them understand what could be going on, what could be adding to this. Because it's not all you.

The problem that she has with you is that tend to make it worse.

And you make it worse by not being emotionally available, by not being there to comfort her, to reassure her.

Or you're there and your only direction for her is a command about what she should do.

And that's not very relationship building, You know, if you want to be close to her, if you want to be happy to see her, have her be happy to see you all the time, enjoy spending time together, you've got to be able to meet each other in that vulnerable space.

You know, for the last ten years or so, I focused primarily on helping women understand men. And I've come to realize that if the man is understood, my original hypothesis was if a man feels understood by his wife, he'll naturally step up and take leadership and be the strong man that she needs him to be. Be vulnerable. Be real.

Be intimate in every sense of the word.

But what I found is that when women start to understand men and the pressure is off, men often just sit back and do nothing.

Which is what caused the problem in the first place, is that you're pulling back.

I don't want you to pull back and I don't want you to have to guess about what's going on.

I want to be there to help you figure out what's going on with your wife, what's going on in your marriage, What's going on in your life? And what you can do to make a difference?

And that's the whole effortless marriage idea that you see plastered all over my website, my social media.

It's not that marriage doesn't require effort. It does. Everything that we do requires effort.

But if that effort is going towards more avoidance or just letting her take the lead and going along with it or arguing with her about it or sitting her down and trying to reason with her.

Those kinds of things are not going to help you create that relationship When you do the right things, when you have the correct framework for understanding how your wife thinks, what she feels, and why she behaves the way she does, then I'm pretty confident that you have the ability to respond naturally and differently than you're responding now.

And it takes a lot less effort.

And that's why I call it effortless. Because when it gets to be in the flow for you, when you begin to see things in a different way, you have a mindset change. You have a paradigm shift. But when you get into that space, it flows naturally from you.

And having what you want really takes a lot less effort than avoiding what you don't want.

I don't know if I convinced you of that in this particular video, so I'm going to come back and talk to you some more. I usually post a video every week. I also put this on a podcast. But you can get more information in the meantime at DrDebiSmith.com and help you begin to understand where things are going south, but more importantly what you can do about it.

Until then, take care and I'll see you soon!