098|How to Build the Safety That Helps You Love and Know Your Wife

[00:00:00] When Her Distance Isn't About You

A man I work with told me a few weeks ago that things were not going well at home, and the part that had him confused was that nothing big had happened. No blow up, nothing broke.

It was smaller than that, and he couldn't figure out why. She was shorter with him than usual. When he walked into a room, he could feel her pull back a little, and the easy conversations that he had worked so hard to bring back to his marriage weren't coming anymore.

He had been doing really good work in his marriage, and his wife had said that she could feel it, but now something else was happening. He told me the thought he kept coming to was, "I'm sliding. I'm slipping. Something's gone wrong. All this work I've put in, and it feels like I'm losing it." So he did what a lot of us do.

He looked at his week, he looked at himself, and he tried to figure out where he'd gone wrong. Now, a few days later, he came back, and he told me the rest. It wasn't anything he'd done. It was the anniversary of something very hard that had happened to his wife, and that's what she'd been reliving. He'd known about it, but it wasn't where his mind went when things felt like they were off in his marriage because for a long time now, the things impacting his marriage had been his own actions, and somewhere in there, what was going on inside her stopped being something he considered. He'd been reading her through the present, and this time, the present wasn't the thing getting in the way. Now, let me be straight with you about why I'm telling you that.

This man loves his wife. Like I said, he'd been putting r- in real work, he was paying attention, and he still got it wrong this time because there was a whole part of her he just hadn't been considering. Not just what she'd been through lately, but everything that made her who she is, including the parts from long before him.

That's what I wanna talk about today. The stretch where you're doing everything right on the surface and you're responding to a problem you think is about you, when it might have nothing to do with you at all. Today, I wanna walk you through the difference between knowing what your wife wants and knowing who she is.

Because you can be married a long time and know how she takes her coffee or how she sets up her schedule, know exactly what she wants for her birthday, and still not know the deeper parts of her, the parts that made her who she is, and I wanna show you what changes that.

By the end of this episode, you're going to be able to tell the difference between the picture of her you've been carrying around and the person who's actually in the room with you.

You're going to understand what happens when you stop being curious about where she came from, and why you may have started doing that in your marriage in the first place. And you'll know how to tell whether what you're seeing in her right now is something about you or something she's been going through, and how to be a partner who's there for her through it.

Stick around. You don't wanna miss this one.

[00:02:36] When I Realized I Didn't Really Know My Wife

Welcome to Better Husband, the podcast that helps you answer the question, how can I be a better husband? I'm Angelo Santiago, a men's marriage and relationship coach, and every week I bring you practical insights to help you strengthen your marriage and become the best husband you can be

I want to tell you something about myself that's a little bit uncomfortable to say out loud, but I'm gonna say it because I think a lot of you might be going through the same thing. For most of my relationship with my wife, I wasn't really interested in who she was before she met me. I wasn't avoiding it, it just never registered as something worth knowing.

She had a whole life before me, real hurts, real wins, real challenges, a relationship with her parents and with her sister that had its own history. Moments of fear, moments of doubt, moments of exhilaration. All of that happened to a person, and that person is the one I married. But I cared more about the present and about the future we were building together than I ever cared about who she was before we met.

Back then, if she started telling me something from her childhood, I'd be listening, sort of.

I'd be waiting for it to connect to something in the present, and when it didn't, it just went past me. If I'm being really honest with myself, and this is the part that's hard to admit, it kind of bored me. I'd have told you that I was a present guy. I would've told you that I live in the moment. I don't dwell on the past.

I don't drag old stuff around. I had turned that into a kind of virtue, and the thing is, that was true about me, too. I had never looked back at my own childhood. I didn't hold onto my own stories. I never sat with questions of what made me the man I was, what I'd learned ab- early on about love, about conflict, about what you do with a feeling you don't want.

I'd decided the past was the past. It was over. It didn't apply. So I want you to see what I didn't see for more than 20 years. A man who's decided his own history doesn't matter has no reason on Earth to be curious about hers. Why would he? He doesn't believe it explains him, so why would he believe that kind of thing explains anything about anybody?

Living in the present is a good thing. I still believe that. What's in front of you matters, and the moment you're in matters, but I'd taken it somewhere way too far. Because valuing today doesn't take away from what made you who you are. It doesn't take away from what made the person you love who she is, and it doesn't take away from what's happened in your marriage, the good and the bad, which is also history and also still running.

Now, let me tell you what changed. It was after my wife and I started doing the work to actually heal our marriage and after I'd started looking at myself for real. There was a conversation, and I can't tell you where we were, and I can't tell you what we were doing. I've tried to place it, and I can't, but I remember it, and I remember what we said to each other because it felt important in a way that very few conversations ever have.

It felt like the most honest thing we'd ever said to each other. We looked at each other, and we said out loud that we knew more about each other now in the last six months than we'd known in the previous two decades of being together. Two decades compared to six months. All of that didn't come from a list of questions.

It didn't come from me deciding to be curious. It came because we'd built a marriage that was safe enough for her to bring her past into the room, and safe enough for me to bring mine. And for the first time, her childhood didn't bore me. Her stories didn't slide past. They landed. They filled in a person I'd been living next to the whole time.

And the same thing was happening for her, because I was finally willing to look at my own past, to actually explore it, get curious about it, try to understand what made me the man I'd become. And for the first time, I felt safe enough to share what I found with her. She got to know me, all of me. That's what I mean when I say loving her isn't the same as knowing her.

I loved my wife the whole time. I just didn't know her, and I'd have told you that I did.

[00:06:28] Knowing the Facts Isn't Knowing Your Wife

And maybe right now you feel like you do know your wife. You know what she'll order before the waiter gets to the table. You know what she watches when she's got the remote in her hand. You know what a calm Sunday looks like for her, what actually lets her relax.

You know her thoughts on your mother, your job, the neighbors, the way you load the dishwasher. If somebody handed you a quiz about her, you'd pass, and that's the problem, because passing the quiz feels exactly like knowing her. But let me tell you what I think is actually going on. Somewhere early in the first few years, you built a picture of her.

You had to. That's how anybody gets to know anybody.

You gathered up what she liked, what she didn't, how she reacted to things, what she was about. And it was a good picture. It was mostly right.

It got you through a lot of days. Then, at some point, and you didn't notice when, you stopped adding to it. You stopped checking it against the person. The picture started answering the questions for you. She says something and the picture says, "Yeah, that's just how she is." She's off one night and the picture says, "Yeah, she gets like that."

She tells you about something from a long time ago, and the picture says, "Okay, but what does that have to do with anything right now?" And for you, that feels like familiarity. It feels like the comfortable part of being married a long time. There's no sensation that goes with not knowing your wife.

Nothing pings. The picture works fine for the dishwasher and the coffee, so you never find out it's a picture. And the problem you run into with the picture is the same problem the man I told you about at the top of the episode ran into. When her present is being driven by her past and you read it through the picture, the picture's got no entry for that.

So you make it about something from the past week. You make it about you. You make it about nothing. And you try to respond to a problem she doesn't have, and she can feel it.

What that's like on her side from what women in that position have described to me, she'd tell him things, real things, and watch them go nowhere. They weren't rejected, they just weren't received. So after a while, she stops offering them. There's just no point, and the marriage narrows down to the stuff the picture can handle: schedules, the kids, what's for dinner.

It becomes two people who talk every day and haven't told each other anything in years. So the first thing I want you to see is this. It's not that you don't know things about your wife. You know plenty. It's that everything you know sits on the surface, and a picture doesn't have anything underneath it.

There's no history. There's no depth. Nothing of what made her who she is, and it's hard to catch because knowing the facts about her feels exactly like knowing her.

[00:09:00] Why Her Past Starts With Your Own

Now, I wanna go a little bit further because I don't think the picture is really the problem. I think it's the symptom.

When I look back at why I wasn't curious about my wife's history, I could tell you it was laziness or that I didn't know how to ask a good question, and neither one of those things would be true. The honest answer is that I didn't believe history explained anybody, and I'll tell you exactly where that came from.

I didn't believe it explained me. Now, think about that for a second. If you've never looked at your own childhood, if you've never sat with what you learned early about what love looks like, what you do with anger, what happens when you need something and you don't get it, if you filed all of that under the past is the past, then you've made a decision.

You've decided where a person came from doesn't tell you much about who they are now, and a man who believes that about himself has no reason to go looking in his wife. This is why I don't think it's about skill. You can hand a man a list of 100 great questions to ask his wife about her childhood, and if he doesn't believe the answers matter, he'll ask them like he's filling out a form.

She'll feel that too. She'll give him the short version because he's clearly waiting for it to all end. So if you're anything like I was, it probably sounds something like this. "That was a long time ago. I'm not a dwell-on-it kinda guy. What's the point of digging all that up? I turned out fine." Right? Those are the same sentences, by the way, whether you're talking about your own past or hers.

That's the tell.

The man that says, "What does that have to do with now?" about his wife's story is the man who said it about his own first. Now, I don't know you well enough yet, and I don't know where this came from for you. Maybe you grew up in a house where nobody talked about anything, and not looking back is just what you learned.

Maybe you had something happen to you, and you genuinely don't wanna look at it, and living in the present was how you got through it, and it worked. Maybe it's just the water you swam in as a man. What I can tell you is that if you find yourself uninterested in her past, it's worth asking whether you've ever been interested in your own because the two open together.

That's what I've found. When I started for the first time looking at my life, actually looking at what made me, at the stuff I'd been carrying without knowing I was carrying it, her stories stopped being background noise. They became the same kind of thing mine were: evidence, explanation, the reason a grown woman does what she does.

You cannot get curious about the person she was before you if you've never been curious about the person you were before her. Your own history is the door in.

[00:11:33] Build Safety Before You Ask the Questions

So say you're with me so far, and you can see both of these things, the flat picture of her, and the fact that you've never looked at your own history either. And now the natural thing to do, the thing that every man in this situation wants to do, is go home tonight and ask her about her childhood.

Don't. I mean that, and let me tell you why. Her history isn't information sitting in a drawer waiting for the right question. The deep stuff, the hurts, the old wounds, the things from before you that still move in her, those don't come out because you asked.

They come out when it's safe enough for them to come out, and you don't get to decide when that is. She does. Her body does.

You can ask the perfect question on the wrong night and get nothing, and it'll feel like she's shutting you out, and she's not. She's doing exactly what a person does with something precious when they're not sure the room is safe. I've watched men take this and go too hard with it, men who meant well.

They hear an episode like this one, and they go home and start asking one question after another, and she can feel that it's coming from a plan and not from him. Being asked about it isn't the same as being cared about, and she knows the difference. So what does make it safe? I'll tell you what made it safe in my marriage, and I'll tell you it's the same thing I watch men I work with build in theirs.

It was consistency before it was ever a conversation, me showing up the same way over and over for long enough that she could count on it, being fully in, not hedging, not doing the work with one foot out the door. I learned actual skills, how to listen without fixing, how to not make all her feelings about me, how to stay present when it got uncomfortable, and then I practiced them as best I could over and over.

And I also had other men I could lean on, so she wasn't the only place my inner life had to go to. I started looking at my own history, and I was working toward becoming a man I could respect, which she could see. Look at that list for a second. There's not one question for her on it. Every single item is about me, and that's not an accident.

The safety that let her bring her past into the room isn't a thing you do to her. It's who you become. She's not waiting for the right question. She's waiting to see who shows up and whether he keeps showing up. And I wanna speak to the man who's listening to this in the middle of the worst stretch of his marriage.

Maybe she's already said the word divorce. Maybe she's still in the house and already gone.

If that's you, I want to be very clear. This is not the week to sit her down and ask her about her childhood. That would land like a move, and right now she may well be watching out for moves.

What's yours this week is the list I just gave you, the consistency, the skills, the other men, your own history. You build the safety first, and you build it whether or not she ever opens a single door, and if she does, you'll be a man who can hold what comes through it.

[00:14:21] Knowing Her Also Means Letting Her Know You

Now, if you feel like you've created the safe space in your marriage and you're ready to learn all about her, I have to warn you about something, because I've watched too many men take what I just told you and use it to hide.

There's a kind of husband who hears everything I just said and gets very, very curious. He asks, he listens, he asks a follow-up, he's warm about it, he's patient, he doesn't fix, and on paper, he's doing everything right, and his wife, after a while, will turn it back towards him. I've seen it go like this.

She finishes telling him something she's never told him before, and she turns it to him and says, "What do you think?" And he asks her another question. "Tell me more about that." And she says, "I've told you everything. I want you to say something." And that's the moment. Because curiosity about her can become one more way to stay unavailable.

It's a good hiding place because it looks like love, and it's easier than the alternative, which is her turning to you, and you having to show her more of yourself. A man who never looked at his own history has nothing to offer when she asks. That's why he keeps the flashlight pointed at her.

He isn't hiding on purpose. When she says, "What about you?" There's nothing back there he's ever looked at, so the only move he's got is another question for her. That's the other half of knowing her, being known. She doesn't just need you to understand where she came from.

She needs you to understand where you came from so that she can get to know you, too. And if all she ever gets is a very interested man who never says anything true about himself, she's still alone. She's just alone next to a really good listener. Because remember what I said in the story about me and my wife?

We both said that we knew each other more in the past six months than we'd known each other in the past two decades. Not that I knew more of her and she knew nothing of me. Both of us felt it. So when you start doing this, and I hope you do, watch for the moment she turns it around. What about you? What was it like for you?

That's not a test. That's the door swinging the other way, and you don't have to understand everything about your past or everything about what made you who you are to meet her there, but you have to have looked, because the man who's looked is the man she wants to know. Underneath the picture and the history and the safety, what this actually is, is two people who've been living next to each other for years finally being known by each other.

[00:16:44] Awareness, Action, Accountability

Okay, so if you're ready to go beyond the picture, beyond the facts you already know about her, and you're ready to look at your own history and what made you who you are so that you can truly get to know who she is, and you're wondering how you actually start doing that, here's your awareness question, action steps, and accountability for this week.

To get honest with yourself about this, I want you to sit with one question. Write it down if you can. What do you actually know about what your wife was carrying before she met you, and when was the last time you asked her anything about it? If the answer to the first half is not much, that's fine.

That's most of us. Just don't let it stay there. If the answer to the second half is a number of years, notice what that number does to you.

Now, here are the steps I want you to take this week. Every one of them is yours. None of them requires her to be ready.

One, pick one thing that builds connection in your marriage and do it the same way every day. I don't care what it is. Put your phone in another room at dinner. Ask her how her day was and then stay for the answer. Say good night before you go quiet. Pick one, do it for the next seven days without a miss. Consistency is what she can count on, and it's the first thing that makes a relationship safe.

Two, look at your own history. Take 20 minutes this week alone and write down three moments from your childhood that made you who you are. One thing you're most proud of from back then, one struggle you went through, something that was genuinely hard, and one time you were really hurt, along with how you learned how to handle it.

You don't have to fix anything. You can't change the past, but you have to look, because until you believe your own past explains you now, you'll never believe hers explains her.

Three, say one of them out loud. Find a man you trust and tell him about something from your childhood you've been thinking about, ideally something you've never said to anyone or never talked about out loud.

It doesn't have to be and shouldn't be the deepest, most painful thing you've got unless the man you're talking to is trained to handle something like that. But just open up a little more than you have before.

You need a support system outside your marriage. If things are hard at home right now, that isn't optional, and this is one way to start building it. And if you don't have a man like that yet, I'll get to that in a minute.

But four, notice what that did. After you've had that conversation, take a few minutes and reflect on it.

Do you feel lighter? Was it scarier in your head than it turned out to be? Did saying it out loud let you see it a little bit more clearly? And pay attention to what that does to the story you've been telling yourself, the one that said the past is the past and there's no point looking back. That story is what's kept you from knowing her. This week, you're working on that.

Now, for accountability, most men don't have anywhere to take this, nowhere to talk about their own history, nobody to tell about the new thing they're trying. Maybe you got to that third action step and realized there's nobody you can call. That's what Better Husband Academy is for.

Everything I described in the last part of this episode, the other men, the place your inner life goes to that isn't only her, the community where somebody asks you a real question and waits for the answer, all of that is inside Better Husband Academy. It's where a man learns to be known with other men doing the same thing on live group calls every week.

And if you want that, come join us. Go to betterhusbandacademy.com or click the link in the show notes for accountability on this week's work.

[00:20:08] Closing Takeaway

Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. Picture her across the table from you tonight. Same woman you've been sitting across from for years. Now, picture everything that was true about her before you walked in, the kid she was, the house she grew up in, whatever happened to her that she doesn't talk about, the first time she was proud of herself, the first time somebody let her down, all of it sitting right there with her in that chair at the table, and it's been there every night.

You loved her the whole time, I know that. I loved my wife the whole time, too. But you can love somebody for twenty years and still be looking at an incomplete picture of her. The question I want you to carry out of here isn't whether you love her, it's whether you know her. And if you're honest, and the answer is, "Not as well as I'd like to," then you already know where to start, and it isn't with her, it's with you.

Now, thanks for sticking with me through this episode. I've invited you to look a lot deeper at yourself so that you can see deeper into her. That's not an easy thing to do, so keep looking, keep showing up. You're listening to Better Husband. I'm Angelo Santiago, and I'll see you on the next one.