A while back she saw an ad on Instagram for a book about masculinity. Something about being solid in yourself. She ordered it and handed it to her husband.
He was offended.
Years later he handed her a course. He'd found a therapist who ran a program for women, and he put it in front of her and told her he wanted her to take it.
She was offended.
She calls it “a full circle moment” now and she laughs about it. Both of them got handed the thing that would eventually help. Both of them treated it like an insult. Neither one opened it right away. She sat on his course for weeks.
A lot of you are standing on the other side of that handoff right now, waiting on a reaction you are not going to get.
I had Kate on the show recently. Her husband Tyler was on a while back telling his side of it. He was Mr. Anxious. She was the avoidant one, and she says so herself with no hedging. Three years ago the two of them sat in therapy and talked about whether to end it. Now she cancels plans so she can be around him.
Where she went
She grew up the youngest of five. Her parents split when she was two. Her closest sibling was six years older and her mom was always at work, so the family joke was that she raised herself. She mostly did.
She came out of that not needing anybody. That was the whole identity. Independent, and fine on her own.
Then they got married and both of them worked, and none of it showed up yet, because she still had her own thing going. Then the kids came and she became a stay-at-home mom.
She calls that the death of her independence. From the outside she was living the version everybody says they want. Good husband, kids, didn't have to work. She says her soul was dying.
She'd bring up school. A part-time job. Something that was hers. And she got the response most of you would give, because it is a reasonable response. “If you go to school and it costs sixty thousand dollars, and then you get a job that's only paying eleven an hour, you're going to have to work for years. That's not worth it.”
She says she got talked out of it, logicked out of it, or guilted about it. The church culture they grew up in had its own version of the same message about what a woman's job was. So she stopped bringing it up.
The more she disappeared, the more she wanted out of the house. The more she wanted out of the house, the more he panicked, because his parents had a long ugly divorce with cheating in it and his whole nervous system was built around never letting that happen to him. So he pulled her closer. And the closer he pulled, the harder she leaned away.
Neither one of them was doing anything crazy. He wanted his wife. She wanted a self. Those two things should not be in a fight, and for fifteen years they were.
The night he dropped the bombs
He read my book. He read a few others. He started looking inward, and she had no idea any of it was happening.
Then they went out on a date night and he unloaded. He'd read all these things. He'd been living inside covert contracts, doing the dishes so she'd be less stressed so maybe there'd be sex later, and he could finally see it. He told her he was putting sex on hold for ninety days to get his own head straight.
And the one that mattered most. Their whole marriage he had told her divorce was his biggest fear. Now: “I'm not afraid of divorce anymore. I don't want to get divorced, but I'm okay with it.”
Her reaction, in her words: “Who is this person?”
She looked at the man across the table, did not recognize him, and went straight to suspicion.
She didn't believe him
For a long time.
She says it plainly to any man listening. “If you've been in a pattern for five, ten, fifteen, twenty plus years, it ain't going to change overnight or in a week or a month. It takes so much time and consistency. You have to be so patient.”
She also tells you exactly what was running through her head while he was doing all that work. “You just want to have more sex. You don't actually care about me.”
Which she admits is partly true, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise either. He went looking and he found a book about sex. That's why he was in the room. Wanting your wife is not the crime here.
But that is what he was up against. He was making real changes and she was reading them as a strategy.
It got worse before it got better
They started working on it. Both of them, seriously, at the same time. And about four months into that work is when the divorce conversation happened. In therapy, he told her he didn't want to be married to her anymore. The two of them talked about whether they should end it.
Four months after they started fixing it.
She explains it better than I can. Working on the marriage brings everything up to the surface. You start digging into yourself and she starts digging into herself, and for a while you are two strangers doing homework in separate rooms. It creates distance before it creates anything else.
If you are three months in and it feels like you made it worse, you may have just reached the bottom of it. That is a different thing than losing.
What finally flipped her
Language. Not his effort. I'll be straight with you about that, because you should know what you are actually waiting on.
She finally opened that course, and two videos in the woman teaching it described how women disappear into their roles. Mother. Wife. Whatever they are at the school or the church. And she sat there and thought, “I don't have a self. I don't know who I am.”
She'd been saying that for fifteen years in a hundred different ways. He'd been hearing it as “I need to get the hell away from you, dude.” Same information, no shared words for it. The second she had the words, she could show it to him, and he said, “Oh, that makes sense.”
Then came the retreat.
She raised her hand to ask the teacher a question, and she admits she raised it hoping to get validated. “How do we get past this? I've never given him a reason not to trust me, and he makes me feel guilty for wanting to go outside the home.”
The teacher went the other direction and asked whether she had ever shown him any empathy for his wound. The parents. The divorce. The thing he had been carrying the entire time.
She got called out in a room full of people. She says that was the turning point. That's when she stopped keeping score and looked at her own half of it.
The lie
For fifteen years her story was this. “It's your fault. I'm stuck here. I can't work outside the home. I can't do anything. I don't have a sense of self because you won't let me.”
She says now that was a lie she told herself. She could have gone and gotten a job. She could have done any of it. She just wasn't brave enough to have the fight.
He wasn't holding her down. She didn't want the argument.
You have spent a lot of nights convinced you were the problem because she told you that you were, and she believed it when she said it. Some of that was never yours to carry.
Where they are now
She'll tell you it is not a honeymoon phase and she gets a little annoyed at the suggestion. They still fight. Nothing is perfect. The difference is that they hit things head on instead of letting them pile up.
She tells him she's going on a girls weekend for four days and he says, “Okay, cool.” That's the whole conversation now.
And they keep one rule that people argue with her about. Divorce stays on the table. They never threaten it and they don't talk about it. But both of them know that if staying meant shrinking, they would choose themselves. Which is exactly why neither one of them is staying out of obligation.
Her line: “I wouldn't even call it a honeymoon phase. I just call it healthy.”
What to do with this
Give it real time. Their rule of thumb is one month of hard work for every year you have been married. Fifteen years married and you are looking at more than a year of it. She says it took about a year before she wanted to be around him all the time.
Expect the dip. Four months in was their worst moment. Know it's coming so it doesn't take your legs out.
Stop reading her silence as her verdict. She was suspicious of him for months while he was doing everything right.
And get out of the way of her having something of her own. His panic about her leaving the house is the most understandable reaction in this entire story, and it was also the thing keeping her half gone.
Two people handed each other a book neither one asked for. Both got offended. Both read it anyway.
She was offended and it still worked. Hand it over, then go do your own work while she decides.
P.S. Tyler found his way into this through The Dead Bedroom Fix. If you're the anxious one in your house, start there: deadbedroomfix.comP.
P.S. Kate and Tyler tell their own story at deeplyintimate.com and on the Love Alive podcast.