I was on the phone to this gentleman last week, he had been going to see a marriage counsellor for a few months about a severe marriage problem and he was concerned that they were not making the progress he expected and was going to lose his marriage.
He had come across my service online saw it was very different and wanted to have an initial call with me to understand how my offer worked in more detail.
Before I answered his question I wanted to see if I could help him understand why they were in trouble.
So I asked him what problem they were facing. What he told me I had heard many times before.
He said they had been married for 20 years and his wife had told him out of the blue she was not in love with him. She said he was a good father and a nice person, but the love and attraction was no longer there for her.
What struck me as important was even through a big part of her wanted to escape the relationship, another part was hoping that the relationship could be fixed and their children would not be affected.
I started to explained why she had gone through this detachment process and what had to happen to correct it, as I was talking I noticed the phone had gone silent.
Upset at the other end and frustrated he blurted “Why is this knowledge not mainstream?”
He was right to be upset, that’s exactly how I felt when I discovered this. You see what I said to him should be mainstream knowledge, however even though he now knew the real problem he didn’t have the skills to solve it, so he would now have to be taught.
He then told me the way I had explained it was exactly what his partner had been saying but he had missed her core message. The challenge for all men is how to listen to what’s really important for her.
The way I explained her problem to him was in a way a man could understand, this way he could connect with the possibility of fixing it, now their situation had a path to a solution.
You see even though she had told him what was going on for her, he was never going to connect with the magnitude of her problem, he had no frame work he could connect to. You see he was trying to connect to her problem from the perspective of a man. He needed to learn a female perspective before he could solve her problem.
He said he had no idea how bad the problem was and was so sorry she had gone through this. I told him he was not alone, many men come in metaphorically holding divorce papers not really understanding why they have them, much to the dismay of their wives.
My message today is this. We are not taught critical information growing up about the significant differences between men and women and this affects intimate relationships dramatically. More specifically we are not given the skills needed to understand each other. One of the casualties is that individuals can detach from their relationship because they assume their partner just doesn’t care.
There are many roads to this assumption, but the key is to understand it is an assumption. You see it’s totally possible to reconnect to seemingly dead feelings once the couple learn how to connect to each others most critical needs.
This does however require a shift of perspective, you see the moment you can see the world from your partners perspective and what they really need that’s the moment they can feel you actual do care.