In episode 40 of The Authentic Wife Show, I explain to men in failing marriages exactly what’s not working and how they move forward from here (without abandoning their family in the process).
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Welcome back to the show. I’m happy to be with you here today and I am especially speaking to, who’s probably not even listening to me today, but I’m gonna hope that this podcast or the show makes its way to your ears and the person I’m speaking to today is the husband who thinks that he’s in a failing marriage, who feels unhappy, who feels.
She doesn’t love him anymore. Feels like he was never wanted, who feels like he’s not having enough sex. He’s not getting enough hugs, he’s not feeling appreciated. He just does not feel the love, and he’s starting to wonder if he’s even attracted to her and to even be with her, but he also has kids.
It’s hard for me to speak to the husband in this situation because I’m so used to [00:01:00] speaking to the wife in this situation. But I’m gonna tell you some of the things that I had to tell my husband when I was going through my growth journey and some of the things that he had to learn. And maybe sometime I’ll bring him on the show and he’ll probably have a completely different story of what happened than what I do.
And that’s okay cuz everybody’s perspective is different. But I wanna address three major things that are happening for you right now and exactly what you can do about them. So the first thing that you need to know is that if you are not happy with her, then you won’t be happy with anybody else.
Happiness is an inside job. And my wives know that. I have said this to you too. If you are not happy right now, today in your life, it’s not your wife. It’s not your job, it’s not your kids. It’s not your house, it’s not your car. It’s not your bank account. It is you. Happiness is an inside [00:02:00] job because all the negative or depleting emotions that we feel when we drop down from happiness.
Those are all messengers and they are trying to signal to you that something in your life needs to change. Something in your past needs to be healed from something that you are doing is not working. Something that you’re doing is painful to other people. Something that you’re tolerating is. Painful to you, maybe that you have abandoned yourself and you don’t listen to yourself.
And if you’ve ignored these messages for so long and now you cannot go another day without ignoring them. Your emotions, what you’re feeling anytime it’s less than happiness is a. Warning, sign a stop, sign, a barrier, um, a barricade to you continuing on the way that you have been. And that does not mean that the external circumstances in your life need to change.
It means that you need to go look in [00:03:00] the mirror. You need to understand where these depleting emotions are coming from and what they are trying to tell you. I believe it was Wayne Dyer who said, wherever you go, there you are. And that means that you could travel to the ends of the earth right now and you would not feel any different because it’s still an inside thing that needs to happen.
And we get confused about that because we go on vacation or we have a fun experience, and for a moment we feel really good. But that’s because we’ve allowed ourselves to match the vibration of that experience. We’ve allowed ourselves to match the energetic vibration of waves on the beach or the wind blowing through the trees or.
The thrill of, you know, going fast in a car or something. We’ve allowed ourselves to just for a moment, forget all of our inner psyche issues [00:04:00] and attune to that experience. And so it feels good. And so we think that, oh, if I go out and get a different thing or have a different wife or have a different something, then I’ll feel that all the time.
That’s not true because wherever you go, there you are and you’re gonna bring that with you. And if you don’t have the ability, Change your energy inside, then you are not gonna have the ability to constantly attune to what’s on the outside. Because in most of your cases, I can pretty much guarantee you that your wife walks into the room with her energy at that high vibration and you are the one who’s not matching her there.
In fact, you bring in all your negative energy, your pain body, and she, if she hasn’t done this work with me, she drops down. And matches you. Oh, not this. Again. She thinks, oh, he’s not doing this again. I can’t take this much longer. You’re bringing that with you, [00:05:00] and so you’re seeing more of it in your world because people are matching it because they don’t have good boundaries and they don’t know how to not match you there.
Well, what you’re looking for is a spiritual transformation, is an inside job, is a, an alchemical transformation of the fibers of who you are, and that has to happen through you. It can’t happen through somebody or something on the outside. It’s going to come from within. There’s no other woman. There’s no other pair of legs, there’s no other orgasm.
There’s no other fast car. There’s no amount of money that’s going to change that fiber of who you are and make you happier than you are right now. You have to understand that first. Happiness is an inside job, and your relationship is beautiful because it is awakening you to the need to do this work.
[00:06:00] Something in your past, usually your childhood, broke you, beat you, hurt you, took you down. There was some amount of pain that you did not face. Maybe your dad walked out. Maybe your mom was cruel, maybe a sibling was awful. Maybe somebody violated you or hurt you in some way. Maybe a teacher shamed you, your friends bullied you.
Or maybe you’ve just had a great loss. Maybe your parents got divorced or somebody died. Somewhere somebody didn’t see you and didn’t understand you and didn’t give you what you need. Somebody made you feel dependent on them to feel happy, and you didn’t have any boundaries and you were not respected.
And so now you go through life craving, craving this feeling of power, craving, respect, these two things that you don’t have as a child. And so your relationship is going to trigger those experiences, [00:07:00] those memories, and it’s gonna bring you back to exactly what you need to heal if you go inside and look at it.
But if you go the ego’s way, the level one consciousness way, the unconscious way, you’re gonna say it was you. You are my problem. You, you, you, you, you, the job, you the wife, you the kids, you the whatever you are the problem. It can’t be me, can’t be me. It’s you. And you’re gonna blame everybody else for the consequences of your own choices.
and you are going to feel powerless because in order, if it is everybody else in order to fix things, then you have to control the other person. You have to change the other person, make them who you want to be. You need to make them have sex with you more, or bring in more money, or really stroke your ego and make you feel good about who you are.
you need them. You have [00:08:00] dependence on them because it’s their fault. You need them to fix it, and so you are truly powerless. You’re admitting powerless. You’re admitting that this wasn’t from you, this just happened to you. And so that’s where we are. When we’re unconscious, we think we’re at the mercy of others, and we don’t realize that we are co-creating every single thing that we are experiencing.
Every choice we make leads us to a different consequence, to a different experience in life. , and it’s not until we realize that we have power over those choices, but we don’t have power other over other people, that we realize that we can actually create the exact life that we desire. When you realize that you don’t have to defer to your wife, you don’t have to do the thing that she wants to do, you don’t have to stay home because she has anxiety about you going out for a golf game with your friends.
You can understand that you have self-care needs and you [00:09:00] need to go do something, and that is her work to do. You don’t have to move to the house she wants to move to. You don’t have to buy the car that she wants to buy. You give her the freedom to do the thing that she wants to do, and you also have the freedom to do the thing that you want to do.
You both get to live authentically. Because neither of you owns the other, that would be enmeshment. You cannot own another person. You have simply agreed to come together in this life to form a partnership, to share resources, to raise a healthy family, to com continue your legacy and to make sure your genes live on these successful human beings that you have created.
You don’t own them. , you form an agreement to come together, love and support, and have each other’s backs. You as a man have a special role because [00:10:00] so, so much of who you are, whether it’s societal conditioning or just the way that a man is, so much of who you are, is expected to protect and provide. You bring in the resources and your wife does some kind of magic with it and makes a family or home or life, that’s amazing.
She raises kids who are, uh, secure in themselves and love themselves and are successful and are happy in life, and know what it means to be authentic. She takes those resources and works her magic. And maybe she’s too far in her masculine right now, and she’s very driven and doing, and she’s the one protecting and providing, and maybe you need her to come down so that you can step up into your masculine, which feels more at home for you, and that’s her work to do.
But you can help her with that by stepping in to that masculine place, by not being the one who is [00:11:00] wishy-washy. Who is waiting to be served, who’s waiting to be demanded and controlled. Healthy, masculine and healthy feminine are very different from unhealthy, masculine and feminine, and you can learn more about that.
But the most important thing is that you realize that you are creating your life. You are making these choices, not our. The second thing that you need to know and possibly the most important to many of you is. Sex is not how to know if you are worthy, wanted or valuable. Sex is not how you know that you are worthy or wanted or valuable.
So much of your life has been about sex. You’ve got the money to get the girl to have the sex. Why? To have children who would carry on your jeans. That was the goal, to pro [00:12:00] procreate, to continue the line. To live on in another thought was the goal. Maybe society has made you think that it was about power over another person.
Maybe your mother’s lack of love made you think it was about power over another person. Maybe we’re addicted to sex. Maybe it seemed to fill so many cups for you. But the most healthy goal there would have been to continue your genes and raise a healthy family. So now you’re married and you have children.
And your wife is giving everything she’s got to raising those kids well to reducing risk, to mothering them the way they need to be mothered. And in helping you to father them the way they need to be fathered. Her mission in life is to launch them successfully, and she wants you on board with that mission.
And if [00:13:00] everything is on her shoulders, Her battery is empty every day. She will be depleted. And do you know what the last thing is that she will want to do if she’s depleted, have sex? She doesn’t wanna give another drop of energy. Are you helping her to refill her battery or are you just asking to take more?
Sex is not how you know you’re worthy. You’re worthy because you exist. You’re worthy because you’re alive. Your energy from the same source, from which you came. We know you’re worthy cuz you are here. You don’t need sex to prove that your worthy wanted, desirable. You wouldn’t have your wife if you weren’t.
She wouldn’t still be in your house if she didn’t want you, if she wasn’t attracted to you, if she didn’t enjoy your company. But you may be in a season right now if you have young kids, especially you may be in a [00:14:00] season that is very hard for both of you. And you may have little children who are very demanding of all your time, and both of you may feel depleted and you may desire that emotional connection again, that you got through sex.
And you may say that, oh, that’s all it’s about. I just wanna feel connected. You have plenty of other time during the day to nurture. That connection because all of marriage is foreplay. It’s just like if you go on a date back when you were dating that date experience would lead up to relieving the tension through sex.
You’d have so much chemistry and feel so connected and wanna be even more connected. So you’d wanna be inside each other. You’d wanna be that close. That was se foreplay. Now you’re just walking the door. and you grab her ass or grope her somewhere else and say, let’s do it. Did the foreplay exist? Is she drowning in the chores of the house or whatever?
Does [00:15:00] she feel connected to you? Did you talk about her day? Did you make any effort to connect? Did you build that tension? Did she really feel like you are protector or is she afraid of you? She ha struggling to trust you because the number one thing that a woman needs to have sex is trust. They’re about to be as vulnerable as they possibly can with you, and they need to know that they can absolutely trust you, that you are their protector and you are not there to hurt them.
Check those things. I
know that many of you are gonna say that it’s so important to you. It’s like scratching an itch. And I encourage you to really question that. Maybe it is. Maybe it is. Maybe you’re overstimulated. Maybe it’s just really hard physically. Maybe there are conditions in your life that make it so that it’s [00:16:00] always aroused.
Maybe you’re addicted to adult content to porn. Maybe it just is an inner longing that is similar to a woman who feels such intense emotions but wants to pretend that they don’t exist. And so she, um, makes herself a snack, has some cake. It’s no different from the person who picks up the drink. And the next one and the next one, question, how much you really need it.
And if. A need or if it’s because you’re trying to avoid feeling something that’s been there all long for you to feel.
Third thing I wanna talk about is the idea, the false belief that the person that you have married is there to meet your needs, that you’re there to meet her needs, and that she’s there to meet yours. There [00:17:00] was a book written quite a while ago that has been debunked. It was called The Five Love Languages, and it fed right into the most unhealthy parts of society.
It actually speaks to the unhealed inner child who didn’t get what they needed from their parent, and now they’re trying to put that dependence onto their spouse. They failed to differentiate and individuate from their parents. They failed to meet their own needs, and so they’re still dependent on somebody to fill them up.
They still think that if I give you this and you’ll give me that, and it feels very transactional, and what does that do for us? That leaves us empty and depleted, longing. Desperate, dependent at the mercy of the other person. If you depend on your spouse to meet all of your needs, no matter how real they seem, or how important or how much it seems right now, they’re the only person who can meet them for you.
I want you to question that [00:18:00] because that’s not true. That’s actually called codependence. Just very unhealthy relationship dynamic. These things that you are wanting have deeper meaning. They come back to feeling like you are good enough, you’re worthy enough, you’re important. You matter. You’re heard, you’re seen, you’re listened to.
Your wife cannot possibly meet all those needs for you. Those inner child needs, the ones I just mentioned, need to be met by you first. You need to reparent yourself and heal from the relationships that you had with your caregivers. Your spouse cannot ever do enough to make you believe those things unless you believe them inside the external things.
And perhaps you need to go have fun or you need to treat yourself, or you want to be, um, you know, shown that you’re worthy with a gift or something. Those are things that you can do for you. . Other needs that you might have, like somebody to [00:19:00] go party with or somebody to go golfing with or somebody to go do these things you enjoy with your wife, cannot possibly be all those things.
So you need to find other people, have buddies, have a support network, people you can go to for those things. She can’t be everything for you, just like you can’t be everything for her. She needs the support network and so do you.
You have to get yourself care in. You have to replenish your own cup. You have to recharge your own battery. You have to do these things that you’re desiring in your life. You have to show yourself that you are worthy. Get yourself the bottle of clone you want. Get to yourself, the box of chocolates. Make yourself the beautiful dinner.
Show yourself that you are worthy. Don’t depend on her to do it. We only give for others when their burden is too great or we have an overflow from [00:20:00] which to give meaning. Her battery’s not only full, but it’s overcharged. There’s extra there to give. And if your wife is a newer mother, if you have young children, her battery is going to be near empty by the time you get home or whenever she sees you, most of the time it’s gonna be empty unless she’s had the time to fill it up and yours is going to be too.
Especially if you are chained to a job and you give up your time to earn the income, or especially if you’re doing work that’s really hard, or maybe not necessarily what you wanna be doing. You need to be focused on self-care and filling yourself up both emotionally, energetically, mentally, spiritually.
You need to be coming to her with your cup full and she needs to do the same, and then you can delight in each other’s presence. Love is not transactional. It is a state of being that you are in. You should be in a [00:21:00] state of love and then share that with your wife and she should be in a state of love and then share that with you.
Love is not care. The five love languages we’re talking about care. You must care for yourself so that you are able to care for others, namely your dependence. I’m not talking about your wife. You should be able to care for you so that you can care for your children because they are actually vulnerable.
They actually do depend on you for meeting their needs. So you fill your cup up and you give to them. And if you have extra, if there’s more, then maybe you take care of your wife in some way. Maybe you give her the foot massage or maybe her cup is full and she does the same for you or. Because you’re married.
If her burden is too great, if she gets really sick, then you’ve gotta care for [00:22:00] her. If you get really sick, then she’s gonna have to care for you. You have to be clear on what your boundaries are and knowing that you do not own each other, but take ownership of yourself. Your wife is not here to fill you up.
Just like you’ve never been here to fill her up. This relationship is a path of growth and healing, and it’s only for the brave to take that path.
It may feel like things are falling apart at times with your wife. Your thoughts may race in the night. Don’t wake her up. You need to have skills to explore those thoughts, to question them, to understand what it is that you really need beneath the surface. Why does it bother you that she hasn’t had sex with you?
Why does it bother you that she didn’t give you a hug? What is that about? Where is that coming from? What do you need to heal [00:23:00] from? How are you judging her? Which shows you how you’re judging yourself? What is it that your emotions are trying to tell you?
What is the signal that they’re trying to send you? What is your work here? How is this here for you? You need to develop mindfulness so that you can stop those thoughts and detach from them cuz you are in control of your brain and you are the director of the show. And you don’t have to go down any thought path that you’re on.
If you are in fear. It is your responsibility to understand where that fear is coming from so that you can address it and go back to a state of love. It is not your wife’s responsibility to make you feel better. It’s also not her responsibility to help you process. Though if she works with me, she’s going to learn how to, but guess what?
Almost all of us don’t know how to do that work. Almost all of us don’t know how to be empathetic to other people because we’ve never had space [00:24:00] held for us to process our own big emotions because our parents didn’t like emotions and told us to go cry in our rooms. Or they’d give us something to cry about.
They told us to stuff them down. We had zero empathy. We had zero space being held for us, and that’s why you’re struggling. That’s why your thoughts race at night. But it’s a skill that has to be learned and it’s very hard to do for another person until you’ve done the work yourself and most of your wives have not done the work themselves.
So if you need somebody to talk to and help you process, you need a coach or a therapist, somebody who’s skilled at empathy and won’t join you in blaming the other person for how you’re feeling, because that’s not the case. You have to walk inside, find the root cause and heal. I
hope you understand how much power I’ve just given. [00:25:00] I hope you understand how you can take your power back and realize that you are in control of your life. You are deeply loved. I guarantee you that your wife wants to be in a deeply loving relationship with you right now, but you can’t see it because you have too many past pains and hurts that are interfering with your perception and reality in the present moment.
And if you are getting help and you have a therapist who joins you in blaming the other person, That’s not the right one for you, and you need to find somebody else.
This is deep in a work that we’re all being called to do, and as more and more wives develop their boundaries, it’s gonna feel more uncomfortable for you because they’re gonna allow you to face your pain rather than protecting you from it. So I hope you buckle up. It’s time for men to do their work. , do you have any questions on this?
I actually encourage you to read the book, the Seed of the Soul, [00:26:00] by Gary Zov. It’s written by a man, so perhaps it will best resonate with you. I encourage you to follow his work, and if your wife is ready, have her join my Happily Ever After Program and I’ll do the work with her. Thank you for being here.
Thank you for being you, and I’ll see you next time.
To Learn More About Using Your Marriage to Become More Authentic, Click Here
Understanding your emotions is really a first step to healing because if you’ve been ignoring their wisdom all of this time, you will feel groundless and unsure of reality. You can start with my free emotion assessment called The Princess and the Peeve, and I highly encourage you to take my emotional mastery course, Royally Guarded. 
To start understanding your emotions right now, CLICK HERE to download The Princess & The Peeve Emotion Assessment!
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