This is an email exchange from "Weak Men Make Monstrous Women."
The email
Hey Rob,
That's a great video. Thanks for the very helpful info. I will be sharing this with my sons, with my wife listening. I can tell you spent a lot of time preparing your thoughts and the slides.
Where do you get this information from? Is it personal experience or revelation or both? It's incredibly valuable.
I can see things I will stop doing NOW. I have vented to my wife for a long time about issues at work. NO MORE! I couldn't see the effects. I'm just letting off steam, I'm not asking her to fix anything. Now, I know It makes me look weak and gives her future ammo. She is not my emotional strength, she is not my support, I am her rock, not the other way around. She's not my best friend. I'm her husband. She's not my mommy.
[I had a conversation with her about expectations in our marriage.]
She has already made some changes. [She continues to make comments pushing back, but at least we are having a conversation about these things now.]
I'm hopeful. I think this is good progress. What do you think?
Thanks again Rob.
What great tips on having a more abundant life.
The response
I’m glad you find it helpful.
This is the generic pattern:
- Situation exists because of weaknesses and evil in people.
- God places me in situations where he can reveal to me the light required to conquer the darkness. This usually requires me to suffer for time and intensity, seeking him for the solution, as well as looking for, filtering, testing, and integrating anything already available here.
- I process the solution into a form where others can use it.
- I organize it into content in chunks that are accessible to those who need it.
Many of the topics I need to speak on result in a radically changed life for the small fraction of those who need it who listen. But it comes at a great cost in further decreasing my access to and increasing persecution from many others.
As far as your particular situation goes, one thing I’ve learned is that the defiant nature of a wild horse is like cancer, you are never truly free. The push back that comes as you make changes can be signals to ease up the pace, but it can also just be “aftershocks” that will continue for the rest of your life. You’ll learn to identify these as personality flaws of your wife, not as signals of your inadequacy. When you make that shift, it’s easier to deal with them rationally without emotional baggage.
Of course, all repeated vestiges of defiance continually curtail emotional intimacy. You cannot be open with a woman who will unpredictably emotionally abuse you. You have to act in a high level of self awareness and withholding, as you would in front of a cop where anything you say can be used against you, and they might be there to help or they might be there as your enemy, and it can switch arbitrarily.
This sad reality and the number of modern women who are like this is one reason why it makes a needful to spend so much time talking about spouse selection. Most men with wives like this would say they would prefer to be single. All men would prefer a decent woman if they knew what it was like. Women who would never treat their husbands this way need to know how valuable they are.
And all of this exacerbates the problem of finding each other for high quality singles.