We Need to Talk About This

I've been troubled about something for several decades now, and I don't see it improving.

And the fact that it's not improving is the reason, I believe, that you're still struggling to figure out your wife.

You know, you figured that she was different in the beginning. You liked that about her. It's what drew you to her. You knew she was different. She was a girl. She was a woman. She was someone who just drew you to her so automatically.

And you fell in love. And you decided you were going to spend the rest of your life with her. But then something happened that you didn't understand.

And in that process of trying to figure out what you didn't understand, you've gotten caught in this loop of just thinking that you know, reinforced by a lot of stuff going on in culture, especially now.

And to speak up and to ask questions and to assert yourself just seems wrong or sometimes even dangerous to say that you have a point of view or that you have needs that are not being met. So you stay quiet and that makes sense.

But I don't understand the part about why we're not talking about the real issue that's beneath all of this.

And that is that she's more than physically different from you.

She's in many ways different from you.

I've had a lot of education. I have like, I think it was 126 units of undergrad in psychology and of course my core curriculum. And then I had another 133 units of graduate school, including a master's and a doctorate, all in clinical psychology.

And not one time in all of that did anything come up about talking about the differences between men and women.

Like, why are we ignoring that elephant in the room? I really don't understand that. I still don't understand it. It doesn't make sense at all.

You know, in graduate school, especially, we were encouraged to consider cultural differences between ourselves and our clients and even between client to client. You know, if we had someone from a different culture that was interacting with people from a main culture or the other way around. Culture was such an important piece.

And we talked a lot about diversity. We talked a lot about that different cultures have different values. And we were encouraged to keep that in mind with every single client we saw.

And that continued on into my pre doctoral internship, which was about, I think, fifteen hundred hours of supervised clinical experience and more teaching.

And then my postdoctoral experience, which was another fifteen hundred or so hours. That's a lot of time working with clients. And I was even working with couples. And still, no one talked about the differences between men and women.

So it's no wonder if the people who are actually supposed to be helping you develop happier, healthier relationships, if they're ignoring the fact that men and women are different, then what chance do you have of figuring out what's really going on beneath the surface?

You know, I believe it really is a matter of cultural differences.

We start out with very different biology from one another, male and female, and that part makes sense.

But what we don't realize is that we are socialized.

In other words, we're taught how to be healthy human beings in a way that complements our biology. It isn't just random.

You know, men are bigger and stronger and more physically capable as a whole than women are. And women tend to be much more attuned to detail, especially to detail that could be dangerous. I'll just put it that way.

And it makes sense that we would be taught how to maximize the use of our biology in service to our community, in service to our not only to our own health and well-being, but also to that of our families.

Men have been taught to think about words differently.

Men tend to use fewer words because they see language as simply a means of communicating information.

On the other hand, women are socialized, taught that words help create connection.

Now, why would that make a difference?

Well, if we're talking about well-being and we're talking about survival, it makes sense.

A man can use his physical strength, especially his upper body strength, to protect himself and also to provide for his family.

You know, back in the day when the guys had to actually go out and physically hunt to be able to bring home food for the family or to do some other kind of labor that labor so that he could provide for his family.

Those were important things.

Women, on the other hand, were geared all around the concept of bringing new life into the world.

And you can't very well physically defend yourself like a man can when you're carrying a child and you maybe have one or two little ones beside you. You've got to be on the lookout for danger from the get go.

So it isn't that women are just paranoid or that they're overly worrisome, although they do show up with higher scores on something called neuroticism on the personality traits test. We can talk about that another time.

But that tendency is there, and it's actually a survival mechanism.

But nobody tells you that. They just tell you, Oh my gosh, she talks too much. She's always worried about her emotions.

You know, she expects me to talk more. All of those things that are happening for a very good reason, and yet they get dismissed.

And here's the sad part. It's like most attempts to help someone with a marriage are founded in this idea of neutralizing the conflict.

Well, if you neutralize the conflict, side effect of doing that is you're neutralizing the people.

You're neutralizing their strengths.

You're neutralizing a woman's ability to watch out for the blind spots that you don't see.

But even there, that's still not enough because now we're neutralizing the man.

You're being neutralized by attempts to grow your marriage in service to your wife's fears.

It just jumps out at me every time I sit down with a couple, whether I've been working with them for, you know, a day or a week or a month, sometimes even a year, it's like this is so clearly what's going on beneath the surface. It's the source of major miscommunication and conflict.

Now, when you understand that and you stop trying to neutralize it and you use it to your advantage, that's when you start to grow.

You know, I'm not here to teach you how to be a man. You already know how to be a man. I've never been a man, and I've never wanted to be one, believe it or not.

But the reality is is that you are being backed into a corner constantly simply because you don't know what else to do.

And in that process, you're losing yourself. You're losing the man that you wanted to be, the man that you were becoming, the man that you dreamed of, the goals. I mean, when you get confronted on a daily basis with marital conflict, it is going to wear on you.

And that's true whether you are in the freeze mode, you know, or the flight mode, which is to neutralize yourself, in other words. Or if you go on the aggressive and you get verbal and you get demanding and now you're in the fight mode, when you're in either one of those positions, it's not healthy.

It's not good for you to constantly be in that infinite loop between pulling away and lashing out. And when I say lashing out, I'm talking about verbally. You know, domestic violence is a real thing.

And by the way, it happens on both directions. And I am totally aware of that.

But in the absence of intentional abuse in the process, just everyday conversations between men and women can really go sideways really quickly because you assign different meanings to the same things.

That's just mind boggling to me. I recently watched a video by a female entrepreneur and her husband is also an entrepreneur. Very successful.

She decided that she was going to interview her husband for her podcast.

And in that, they were going to share about their recent experience with marriage, getting a marriage coach, getting someone to help them with their relationship.

I was eager to find out what they had learned. Were they learning the same things that I teach to my clients?

Immediately, she started out. She was the one doing the interviewing. It was for her podcast. And so she started out and she said, you know, a lot of people don't know this, but I've been an entrepreneur a lot longer than my husband has.

And then the camera switched to his face, and he did not... He had like a...

From my experience, he had an interesting look on his face. It was like...

I mean, he... There was nothing he could say to that.

You know, it was competition and confrontation and one upmanship right there. And what what could he do? What could he say?

It was it was competition, And it felt disrespectful. And I could see that in his face. I could see him stiffen a little bit and just stare straight ahead waiting for an opening to talk about something else.

Unfortunately, stopped the video at that point.

 I stopped the video at that point because I was like, Woah, I can't believe I just went through six months of marriage coaching and she did something like that.

Because women don't understand men any more than men understand women.

That lady had no clue that her husband saw that as competition and confrontation and her trying to be a little bit better than him. Now from a female perspective, it just felt like to her, like just friendly banter and a fact. You know, not anything that would would challenge him and make him look like he was less than.

And yet there it was right there on YouTube.

So I get it. I get that those little things really bother you.

And when you back up because something bothers you, you're basically on the verge of giving up.

And what you're giving up is you're giving up the man that you are created to be.

And I want to help you with that. Again, I'm not going to try to teach you how to be a man. You already know how to do that. But I do want to validate your experience of being in a relationship with your wife where there's just something off and you don't want to say anything because it sounds petty. It sounds dumb.

You don't want to hurt her feelings. You don't want to make her angry. And so you just get quiet.

I'm constantly creating things to help you guys step into that space in a more powerful way Because honestly, your wife is never going to be truly happy unless you're fully participating in the marriage. That's really what she's looking for. I know it doesn't seem that way. It doesn't seem that way at all. It seems like she wants to run the show.

But when you back up, she gets the impression that you're not going to run the show and somebody has to. And so all backing up does is it just encourages her to keep stepping forward and keep taking charge of what's going on. Are you with me on that? I hope so.

The bottom line here that I'm trying to get to, but there's just... I just want you to understand that I understand.

I created a marriage masterclass for men.

And in that masterclass, I explain how this happens, why it happens, and what you need to do to be able to reengage to get yourself back in the game.

And it takes some support and it takes some unlearning and reframing of what's going on between the two of you. And that's really my passion. If you're interested in the Masterclass, I invite you to check out the link below and we'll start talking about what this is really like. I hope to see you there. Until then, take care and I'll see you soon.