Why We Need to Get Back to First Principles in Marriage

Today we are talking about optimizing a system that shouldn't exist.

In reality, you and your wife created a system a long time ago.

And it probably happened shortly after you met, but it didn't seem really like a problem so you just kept rolling with it thinking that was just the way it was going to be from then on out and the best you could do is figure out how to make that system work.

Now what it usually looks like is that you're rolling along, having a great time, married to the person who drew you to her because she was so different from you. Right?

And everything seems to be going okay. And then she raises a concern.

Now when she raises a concern, you typically take it as some sort of an attack or a blame or a criticism. Something that you're doing wrong that she doesn't like.

And so you look for a way automatically to defend yourself.

And the first defense that most of us have, especially men, is to avoid the topic, to avoid the emotion that that interaction just evoked inside of you. You know, you've been taught never let them see you sweat.

Don't be a girl.

Don't let anybody get you to talk about your emotions.

Emotions are something to be controlled, not to be expressed.

There's nothing wrong with those things except when you're in a marriage and your wife raises a concern. Now she doesn't do it like you would think she would as a man. You know, you would think she would very rationally say, Look, I'm worried about something.

But she doesn't because her communication style is entirely different than yours.

She just tells you how she feels and assumes that you'll figure it out because, like, everybody knows that that would be a concern. Right?

But she doesn't realize how different you are from her.

So you avoid it, and she thinks, I don't think he heard me.

So she says it again where she gives you an example or she gets more emotional, she gets more emphatic with her discussion, she's still saying the same thing.

But to you, it doesn't sound like the same thing. It sounds like an entire list of complaints.

This happens so often that it's actually the norm for most marriages for this to happen.

Now what happens in your heart, your mind, is that you feel attacked, you feel blamed, you feel criticized.

And so you just knuckle down, stiff lip, hold on as tight as you can for as long as you can till you can't take it anymore.

And I've actually heard a lot of men have said that to me over the years. I took it as long as I could.

Now she doesn't know that that's your experience. She has no clue that that's your experience.

She, again, she thinks you're not listening or you just don't get it. She doesn't know that you've gone into self protection mode.

And so when you finally speak up and say something, it comes as a total shock to her because she doesn't know it's been building up for a long time.

She thinks you're just having a discussion and now all of a sudden you're angry.

Now when I say you speak up or you lash out, I'm not talking about physically. We're not talking about domestic violence here. We're talking about a good man and a good woman who just don't seem to communicate well around the idea of what concerns the woman.

Now I got to tell you, it's true.

Women have a lot of concerns that men don't have.

A few weeks ago I was in Southern California and I lived out there for more than twenty years 2025. It was quite a long time. And I did something I hadn't done. I went to visit the Queen Mary.

Now the Queen Mary's been parked in Long Beach Harbor for a very long time. And like most locals, I never made it over there to see it. But this time I decided I would, in part because I was dreaming about doing a transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary two and I thought it'd be a good reference point for me to see what the original Queen Mary looked like, even though it's much smaller than the Queen Mary two.

But I signed up for a tour and here's where our little tip comes in about women.

Our tour group was small. It was Thursday afternoon in October, not too many tourists on board.

And so our tour group was really small. We had a gentleman leading us and telling us stories about the Queen Mary and everything that happened in her role as the Grey Ghost back in World War two.

And it was just really a fascinating thing.

And he was telling us at one point about a question that a man had asked him and that the man thought he knew the answer to the question, and our tour guide didn't know the answer. So he just accepted this answer that the man gave him, which is not really the point that I'm trying to make here. I'm being such a girl in talking to you. Forgive me.

But I said to him, we had a man and his wife and a teenage girl were in the tour group with me. That was it. And so that comment about the man's question when the man thought he knew the answer and he didn't and neither did the tour guide.

I said to him, I said, so who asked the toughest questions? Men or women? Never mind that there are three women here and one man.

Who asked the toughest questions?

And he immediately said, women.

Women ask the toughest questions, according to him, because they notice things that men don't notice.

He said, women ask me questions I never even thought about, much less know how to answer.

And that's so true of how we operate as women is that we notice details. And it's in those details, the things that you don't notice, that we're kind of built to equip you with noticing a blind spot that you might totally miss otherwise.

And that's really all that conversation is about.

However, you don't know that because you are more of a big picture guy. You're more like the man said. You know, the men just look at things, take them at face value, and move on. They don't look at detail.

They look at the end goal. They look at the end game. They look at the the overall purpose which is also a huge strength. I'm not putting that down at all.

But what happens when the woman brings up a detail that you haven't considered and you shut down because it feels like she's attacking you or blaming you or criticizing you?

And when you shut down she thinks you're not listening so she will talk louder or she'll use more words.

She'll use more emotion which again you've been taught to avoid.

In other words she's trying to do something that clearly doesn't work And so are you.

Because when you shut down, you're hoping that the storm will pass.

That it'll all blow over and you get back to normal. Right?

But it doesn't. The storm gets worse.

And what do you do?

You both try harder to optimize the system that is already not working.

Now you finally get to a point and you go to marriage counseling, go to couples therapy, you go to whatever you want to call it or even coaching.

And you go in and you play out that same system in front of the therapist.

And the therapist, if he doesn't know what he's doing, he will work with you to optimize a system that already doesn't work.

That's not helpful at all. That's kind of called insanity, isn't it? When you do the same thing over and over again and expect it to turn out differently the next time, it's not going to. The same effort is going to get you the same results.

Instead what your therapist needs to do is he needs to level the playing field. He needs to change the system. He needs to teach you both what it looks like to have a healthy system and how to make it operate and get that going smoothly so you can move on with your lives and you'll stop going around in this infinite loop of attack, blame, criticize, pursue, withdraw, defend, get angry and rinse and repeat. Nobody wants to live like that and I don't want you to live like that.

So how do you stop optimizing a system that doesn't work?

Well, you know, I think Elon Musk has talked about this quite a bit. You actually go back to First Principles.

Now this list isn't the same as his list when it comes to optimizing a business or making it more profitable or getting things done more efficiently.

My list is a little different.

My first principles go back to the fact that you were attracted to one another because you're different.

And then once you get married or once you get serious in the relationship back in the day, you start developing that system.

And you repeat it. And some of the couples I work with have been repeating that same system, trying to get it to work for more than twenty years.

It doesn't have to be that way.

You were attracted to one another because you were different.

When somebody says something you don't understand, well, you you may have heard me say this before. When a man does something a woman doesn't understand, she thinks he's wrong.

And when a woman does something a man doesn't understand, he gives up and pulls back.

What I really want to encourage you to do is to step into that space. Don't pull back.

Seek to understand what's going on. And it's not going to make sense to you as a man, but it makes total sense to her as a woman.

Those differences between men and women run a lot deeper than the physical characteristics that probably brought you together in the first place.

Instead, there is an entire way of thinking about life that a woman learns and operates from than what a man learns and operates from.

Now it doesn't mean that one is right and one is wrong. I heard somebody say one time talking about the wedding vows or something from scripture that and the two shall become one.

But which one?

It's not that kind of oneness. It's the kind of harmony that flows together where you, instead of optimizing a system that doesn't work, you begin to optimize those differences in service to your joint venture which we call marriage.

She has strengths, she has things that she can contribute that you don't even notice.

Likewise, you have a way of framing things and getting to the point and getting things done that she doesn't have.

It's learning how to make those two different people work together in one system that actually functions.

Does that make sense? I hope it does because if you're not aware of those differences...

Well, I'll take that back. You are aware of those differences. How can you not be?

But if you fall into that trap of thinking it's impossible to understand a woman, it's impossible to do anything in this marriage. I just I have no option but to back up as long as I and take it as long as I can.

But you do have another option and it's not as readily available as you would think.

You know you can ask ChatGPT or Gemini or probably even Claude. I've never used Claude but I've used the other two quite a bit.

Or even, someone who's trying to do, a specific relationship with AI. You can ask the question, and you know what kind of answer you're gonna get?

You're going to get an answer that is seeking to optimize the system that doesn't work.

How do I know this?

Well back in 2025, early twenty twenty five, I decided that I was going to create Doctor Debbie AI and I was going to put all of my materials into this app.

It was Delphi actually if you want to know what it was.

And I poured all of my YouTube videos, my book, a lot of my teachings, my blog posts. I even created extra documents to kind of clarify what I was talking about.

And I set it all up and I was so glad and I took off to Europe for a couple weeks.

And while I was gone, Doctor. Debbie Aai took over. And what a mess she created!

I was monitoring it somewhat for my vacation in Europe and noticed that the answers to the questions that people were asking Doctor. Debbie Aoi were not the answers I would give.

I was so frustrated. I was going and pulling from the generic information that you can find from any AI and I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

So I did what every modern day person does and I engaged ChatGPT to help me figure it out. And we worked on it for a month at least trying to get Doctor. Debbie AI program to be able to give the answers that I would actually give and not the generic information that's available everywhere. Well it didn't work. And finally at one point ChatGPT said AI cannot distinguish who it's talking to.

It can't carry two models male and female and respond according to one paradigm for if a man's talking and another one if a woman is talking. And there was one particular couple that had hopped on there to try to figure out their particular issue and I later talked to that couple online and I said, You know, she replied to me at one point that that was the same thing her therapist had been telling them.

And when I read that, I thought, Oh my gosh, this is just taking people down to that optimizing a system that doesn't work anyway.

And in the process, I mean they were going through a tough situation.

When I got on a call with them I explained to them exactly what was wrong with the information that they were giving and that they would have received from Doctor. WAI. And then they were really confused because now I was seeing something completely different from what their therapist was saying.

And later their therapist contacted me and wanted help to understand.

And when I started to explain it to her, she shut down. So this is not something that is commonly known, which is kind of odd because it actually is all over the literature. It's in attachment theory. It's in my dissertation on attachment theory and mothers and sons.

It's available through the Gottman materials. It's available through emotionally focused therapy with couples.

The problem is that they flatline everything. All of the data, all of the evidence gets leveled, not in a good way like leveling a playing field like I mentioned before, But it gets all of the gender stuff gets factored out and what they've got left is that dysfunctional system that doesn't work anyway.

Where the woman brings something up, the man shuts down until he can't take it anymore, then he lashes out, the woman is confused, rinse and repeat.

That is not what I'm about and that's not what this channel is about. And if it's not what you're about either, then I invite you to join me in my next Marriage Masterclass for Men. I keep those groups intentionally small so that every man has a chance to ask a question.

You can even upgrade a VIP and get an entire hour with me one on one so we can talk about your particular situation. And I can give you the insight from what I've learned after more than twenty five years working with couples. First as a therapist and now as a marriage educator and coach which I love doing.

But anyway, that's what I've got for you today and I hope it helps. I hope it sparks some questions in your own mind about your own process. I'll be back soon with another video. Until then, take care.

Disclaimer: The information shared on this website is for educational purposes only and does not constitute psychological or medical advice. This content is not therapy, and participation does not establish a therapist–client relationship. Although Dr. Debi Smith is a psychologist by training, she serves here as a marriage educator and couples coach. She teaches the Psychology of Men, Women, and Marriage to help husbands and wives better understand—and love one another—in everyday life.