Yesterday I shared a post about how women in marriages are suffering, but of course, it’s only half the story.
Men are suffering too, but women are unaware of what he is going through.
For anyone watching it’s usually easy to spot an unhappy woman, but many men will mask their true feelings.
This can lead her to think he’s unemotional and doesn’t care, but it’s not true, many men have been conditioned not to show it.
What she is not aware of is she is judging him through her own emotional filters and this means she will constantly be coming to the wrong conclusions about him and his intentions.
Sadly she ends up thinking she is right and will stack and attach resentments to him, her demands for him to change the way she wants will stress him and their relationship.
He needs her to help him, but there is a problem.
Women are not naturally good coaches for men
I keep seeing the way women try to get through to men makes them either frustrated or stressed. In many cases, the way she communicates actually helps him to see her problems as unimportant.
It’s critical she gets the best out of him, but to do that she needs to shift her thinking.
I have to help women in my sessions understand how to correctly interpret his actions.
If she gets him wrong she can bring an energy that will upset him and bring out the worst in him.
This is the way many women lose a good man.
So if you are a woman reading this please go through this post carefully because your normal is not his normal.
What you are about to read is the perspective of the many men that enter my sessions.
I will share with you what they are telling me they are experiencing with my perspective of what is happening to help you.
If you read yesterday’s post you will see that many women don’t feel their husbands understand what they are going through.
The irony of their message to me is they too without knowing are far more disconnected from his experiences than she realises.
You see she isn’t understanding him either, and in many cases, she makes him wrong because it’s not what she would have done or said.
He is designed to experience the world differently from her.
My clients have to learn that different doesn’t mean wrong and this lack of understanding in her is going to lead her to judge him, criticise him, and blame him when in fact he is simply being a normal man.
Too much of this and he will change and not for the better, he can stop caring, think she is impossible, believe she is negative, mean and simply no longer fun to be with.
Kick a man and he will exit
The message is if you keep kicking a man he will exit either physically or emotionally.
Women want to be understood, but so do men and this means women also have a responsibility to understand him so she can bring out the best in him.
Women are tending to bring out the worst in him, in their own quest to be heard and feel safe.
This means he will eventually stop protecting her and start protecting himself from her.
Some women want their men to change, but many are unaware that they also have to change to reflect what’s important to him.
She too has a responsibility to add value to him and the relationship.
The caveat is she has to bring to him what he needs in the way he needs it.
What’s great is naturally most men want their wives to be happy, but too much failure combined with no route to success will make him give up.
He is afraid
I know many men become afraid, not of his wife, he becomes afraid of her reactions and this leads him to avoid upsetting her at all costs and this means he may lie.
The thing she hates the most.
What I keep seeing is women are helping to create husbands they end up not liking in her quest to make him more like her.
Women that kill a husband’s core energy will end up not finding him attractive.
You have heard the saying, behind every great man is a great woman.
A great woman is someone that believes in her husband and creates a husband who has no need to lie because she helped him to become confident in his own decisions.
In essence, she trusts him.
The challenge is to trust him and believe in him you must understand him.
Both people want to be happy, but their route to it is very different and neither person knows what this looks like or means.
Please remember with all my posts they are speaking from a position of the majority.
With every rule, there will always be an exception, the key is to enter into a world of curiosity which is what these posts are designed to create.
So what is the biggest pain for men?
Men suffer the most when he is proven day after day that he is failing with her.
One client said to me “I’m a good man, I love my wife, I don’t drink or smoke I don’t have affairs I work hard yet she still seems so unhappy – this man was giving up.
When he knows the way he is protecting and pleasing her isn’t working he will suffer.
Unhappy wives create unhappy husbands.
Some stay and suffer, whilst others leave or have affairs.
In the early days of his relationship he wants to please her, he wants her in a good emotional state so they can have plenty of fun times together.
He knows if she is happy they have an amazing time, but if she is unhappy the fun stops dead.
For him it’s binary
As the relationship progresses he will learn some things.
He will do this in a binary fashion, all he wants to know is what works for her and what doesn’t.
He wants to make her happy and so he does his best to do more of what makes her happy and less of what makes her unhappy.
The problem is he starts to get confused because of this reason.
The thing that worked brilliantly two days ago didn’t work when he tried it again and he doesn’t know why this failed.
So for men if he does something and it works he will do it again, if it doesn’t work he will stop it.
He is a fixer
How men process the world is they see a problem and they seek to understand the problem and this understanding allows them to fix it.
I am very aware that some women reading this may think they are the fixer, if she is the question is why? Is this a naturally masculine woman or a feminine woman who had no choice but to step up?
This process of being the fixer leads men to be efficient.
He uses this efficiency model in how he communicates.
Men have a very specific reason for communicating, but it’s a totally different reason why women communicate in an intimate relationship and neither person is aware of this and this causes stress.
It’s why they go round in circles, each person misunderstanding the other.
Communication for men is about efficiency, why use twenty words when two will do it?
“How are you feeling?” “Good”
“How is your work?” “not bad”
“You don’t seem yourself do you want to talk about it? “Not really!”
These are efficient masculine responses.
So when women keep asking men to expand and share it’s not what he is designed to do, he needs a reason to share.
He needs a point to make, men feel talking without a point to make, or a problem to fix is a waste of time and will frustrate him.
So when she complains they don’t connect and he can’t find the point for connecting her upset is his failure.
“An opportunity to solve her problem – Great!”
He notices that she wants to speak to him about her problems, he wants to please her and it’s the perfect opportunity for him to help her, she presents a problem and he instantly tries to fix it for her.
His excitement turns into a surprise when he cannot understand why this conversation results in her being more upset and so here he is, failing again.
He is baffled, this process works in every other part of his, life but never works with the woman he loves, he is confused and inside frustrated.
One CEO said, “I have thousands of women working for me, they all love me, why does the one I married treat me with such disdain?”
Many men won’t show their upset unless she pushes him and then it just looks like anger, now she doesn’t feel safe, another failure.
What he learns is when he speaks she has a tendency to not be happy with what he says, another failure.
He says it wrong, or she doesn’t agree with what he did, or how he thinks, more failures.
Remember a man that keeps failing eventually gives up trying.
This is the danger zone that she rarely sees.
A problem shared is a problem doubled
So he learns an important lesson, a problem shared is a problem doubled.
This moves him into a more introverted position with her.
To be honest, most men are not people who like to share much anyway, it’s not in their nature.
In fact, if a man has had a bad day at work he’s not likely to want to share it with his wife after all he didn’t like it the first time round so what’s the point in reliving it a second time?
He will want to let it go and move on.
In fact, he knows (his perspective) that with many of her problems she will be so much happier if she just lets it go and moves on, but he can’t understand why she won’t.
Everywhere he looks he fails with her and her not being happy with him ends up weighing heavy on him.
So many men stop communicating because they will want to protect the marriage from all the upset.
The problem is he is now blamed for not communicating, so he is dammed either way.
Men let go of problems they can’t solve
In the end, some men will look at her upset and know he can’t solve it so he will let it go. He hopes with all the good he does surely she will see and appreciate that.
When men can’t solve problems he tends to just let them go.
When a man has a critical problem to solve like a wife wanting a divorce he doesn’t want he won’t be able to let it go, so he will experience stress and suffer until he gains a path to the solution.
He tries another way
Some men try to please her by helping her with the jobs she normally does.
He’ll pack the dishwasher to please her, he’ll tell he what he’s done and she barks “I do that every day, I don’t come to you for praise what do you want me to say?”
So packing the dishwasher doesn’t work either, so he won’t do that again.
Her response has not understood him at all and she has shot herself in the foot he won’t help with that again.
You have to be very careful what you teach a man.
I did nothing why is she so upset
Other men will become frustrated at her for causing problems and upsetting a perfectly good day.
Men will come to me and say I did nothing and she comes at him upset.
- She is changeable he doesn’t know what to do.
- She gets upset he hasn’t got the solution or at least one she likes.
- She talks down to him and tells him he’s like one of the children – he has no words.
- She repeats the same thing over and over and he blows because I don’t know why she does this I heard her the first time.
- She says the worst things to him.
I have to share with many wives that how men hear you is they think what you say is what you mean.
If you tell him you hate him, he will believe you and this will form the foundation of how he now acts with you from now on for the next 20 years.
Men can hold onto negative sentences for years in fact he won’t remember a lot, but he will remember that.
This shocks many wives as they flashback to all the terrible things she said in the moment, but didn’t really mean.
If he keeps failing he will collect them and attach them to her.
A suffering man will take three positions
He will either submit to her demands, or he will become secretive, lie, or have affairs, or he will mirror what he sees as her attacking him.
One lady came to me and said it was a normal summer’s day, he went out as normal he kissed her on the cheek like he did every day.
He never came back!
He moved out and filed for divorce, he never said a word.
All he heard for 20 years was what he did wrong, for him she sucked the joy out of life.
She never helped him to love her in the way she needed.
All he wanted was her happiness and the combination of her unhappiness and his failure drove him to leave her.
Many men who do exit for these reasons do tend to be shocked when their wife who has spent so many years putting him down, being negative or in his words being mean to him then tries to save the marriage.
When women prove to men they are failures either he stays and suffers or he goes
Men and women simply do not understand each other and on both sides this creates resentment.
Men need to be coached on how to understand and support her and women have no clue as to how to help him to do this.
I meet many women who think he should just know, but this is ludicrous especially when these women I speak to don’t understand themselves half the time.
So my message today is STOP thinking your perspective as a woman is the only one.
Today I have shared the tip of the iceberg – I run programs to help both men and women on their own understand these critical differences and connect to why their partner is experiencing life differently to them.
So if this is happening to you please check your interpretation is correct before anyone makes a decision they might regret.
Harley Street Expert | Founder & High Performance Coach
With two decades of experience helping couples out of crisis, Stephen the founder of The Marriage Breakthrough Program, uses his proven system for rescuing and rebuilding relationships on the edge of divorce. A trusted advisor to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders globally, his work blends emotional intelligence with strategic clarity. Known for navigating highly complex relationship challenges, Stephen helps individuals and couples find clarity and direction when everything is at stake.
Find out more >>> The Marriage Breakthrough Program