089|The Resentment You Feel Isn't About Your Marriage — Here's What It Really Is

[00:00:00] When That Voice Says "This Isn't What I Thought"

Let me paint a picture for you and stay with me because it's not necessarily a pleasant picture.

It's late, the house is finally quiet, the kids are down for now, your wife's on the couch wiped out barely talking, and you're standing in the kitchen holding a glass of water that you don't even really want. And there's this voice. You never say it out loud, but it's there and it's saying, "This isn't what I thought it'd be."

Maybe it shows up as a memory. You think about who you were a few years back before the mortgage, before the kids, before a calendar that isn't really yours anymore. You had time. You could decide on a Friday afternoon to do whatever you wanted, and nobody needed anything from you. You could be your own man, and now you love them.

You'd step in front of a truck for them, no hesitation. But somewhere in you, there's a part that's mad. Mad that it got this heavy, mad that the life you've got feels like it's standing in the way of the life you actually wanted. You don't hate your wife, you don't hate your kids, but you catch yourself resenting the whole thing, the weight of it, the way it never lets up, and then you feel guilty for resenting it, so you push it down and you don't tell a soul, because what kind of man looks at the good life he built and feels this way about it?

If any of that lands even a little, you're in the right place because I have stood in that kitchen. I have heard that voice

And today I wanna talk about what that voice actually is. I'm gonna show you where it comes from, and I'll tell you upfront, it's older than you, older than your marriage. It's not some flaw in you, and it's not proof that you married the wrong woman or built the wrong life.

Then I'm going to show you which part of you is actually holding the wheel when that voice takes over. We'll look at the trick your own mind is running on you, the way it polishes up the past until it shines, and makes your real right now life look like the thing standing in your way. And then I'm gonna hand you the way out. Not a trick, not a mindset hack, a choice, one you make on purpose, and then keep making it

By the end of this episode, you're going to know how to stop fighting the life you have and start actually wanting it. Same house, same wife, same kids, nothing on the outside has to change. What changes is you. And before we go any further, I want to say something about how to listen to this one. This is going to be an internal process.

It goes deep, and parts of it might be painful. You might have to face some things about yourself you never really looked at and get honest in a way that isn't comfortable, and it might not all land by the time this episode ends. It could take hours. It could take days. That's normal. That's the work doing its job

That's the whole point. So let's get started

[00:02:35] The Resentment I Felt When I Had It All

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.

Now let me take you back about six years, a little bit more about me. On paper, I had it. I was a firefighter. It was the coolest job I could imagine. I was doing the thing other guys only dreamed about and getting paid to live out something I actually valued: helping people when they needed it most. And I had the woman I met in college and fell absolutely in love with.

We just had our son. If you'd shown me that picture to the 18-year-old version of me, he'd have looked at it and said, "That's it. That's the whole thing. That's what a man is supposed to build." And I remember standing right in the middle of it and feeling something I was not supposed to feel.

My son was a newborn, and newborns don't care about your plans. I wasn't sleeping, and then the world locked down. This was 2020, COVID. Everybody home, nowhere to go, the walls closing in a little, and I noticed something in me I didn't like. I'd think about my old life, the freedom to do what I wanted when I wanted, go where I wanted, answer to nobody, and I'd feel this pull backwards, like the real me was back there somewhere, and this new life had me by the ankle.

I never said it out loud. You don't say, "I resent my own family," out loud, but that thought was running underneath everything. I'd be holding my son at 3:00 in the morning, and there'd be love, real love, and right next to it, this anger. Why does it have to be this hard? When do I get my life back?

And I want to be clear about this because it really matters. I wasn't a bad father. I showed up. I did the diapers. I was there. From the outside, you'd never have known a thing. The resentment wasn't in what I did, it was in what I felt while I did it. I was present with my hands and gone in my head.

And here's the honest part. This didn't turn around in a single moment. I'd love to tell you that there was one night the clouds opened up and I got it. There wasn't. It was slow. For years, I sort of knew I was doing this, holding my real life up against a, some highlight reel of the guy I used to be, and knowing it didn't fix it.

Knowing a thing and living it are two different animals. The night it actually turned in me, it was actually earlier this year. My son had been going through a rough stretch. Bad sleep, nightmares, waking up scared in the dark. And in the dark, he wasn't just calling for anybody. He was calling for me, Daddy, over and over.

And my wife was carrying a lot of her own at the same time, just stretched thin, running on empty, so it was on me night after night. And I felt the old spiral start up, the exhaustion, the familiar voice. This isn't what I signed up for. When do I get to rest? When do I get me back?

But that night, for whatever reason, I didn't reach for the resentment. I just sat in it. I sat on the edge of his bed in the dark, tired down to the bone, and instead of fighting the moment, I let myself actually be inside it. My boy, scared, reaching for me. Me, the one he reaches for, not a memory of some freedom I used to have.

This, right here, and it landed, not as a thought in my head, in my chest, in my heart. This is the most important thing I will ever do. This little kid calling my name in the dark, my wife asleep down the hall trusting me to handle it. This is not the thing keeping me from my life. This is my life. This is the life I wanted all along.

I just hadn't been letting myself want it. The line that finally came together for me, and I'd been carrying the pieces of it for years, was this: "The life I have is not keeping me from the life I want. It is the life I want."

Now it took me a long time and a kid crying in the dark to get there. I wanna save you some of that road because the resentment I'm describing isn't really about your wife or your kids or the freedom you think you handed over. It comes from somewhere a lot older than any of that, and that's where we have to start first.

[00:06:27] The Missing Initiation

So let's start there, where it comes from, because I meant what I said. This is older than you, and once you see it, a lot of what you've been feeling is going to make sense. For almost all of human history, there was a moment, a real marked moment, where a boy stopped being a boy.

It wasn't a birthday. It wasn't getting his first job. It was a deliberate thing the men of his tribe would do to him on purpose. Different cultures did it different ways. In a lot of them, the boys were taken out, pulled away from their mothers, away from everything warm and familiar and easy, and they'd spend a stretch of time out in the unknown, and they'd be given something hard to get through, a test, a trial, something that actually cost them.

And then, this is the important part, they were brought back, welcomed back in, and from that day on, everyone treated them differently. They weren't boys anymore. They were men, and the whole community agreed on it at once. Look at the shape of that. You leave the old life behind, you go through something difficult that changes you, and you come back, and you're handed a new place to stand.

The boy is finished on purpose. Everybody knows it, including him. Now, I'm not telling you this so you can go run off into the woods or sit in a circle somewhere and bang a drum. I'm telling you because of what it actually did for a man. It gave him a clean line, before and an after.

There was a day he could point to and say, "That's when I became a man." And once you crossed a line like that, you don't keep one foot back in boyhood. There's nothing back there for you anymore. You've been told by every man who matters to you that you're something new now

And here's the problem. You never got that. I never got that. Almost no man listening to this ever got that. Nobody pulled us aside. There was no line, no test, no trial, no day everyone agreed we had changed. We just got older, we got bigger, we got a license, a job, an apartment, a girlfriend, then a wife, then a kid.

We picked up the weight of a man one piece at a time with nobody ever turning to us and saying, "Okay, you're a man now. The boy is done." So a part of you never got the message. The boy is still in there, still running around. Nobody ever told him it was time to step down, so he didn't. He's still holding onto the way things were when he was the one in charge, when life was about him, his time, his freedom, his plans.

Now let me be very clear. I really need you to hear me. That's not a character flaw. It's not you being weak or selfish. It's a missing step. You were handed the full weight of a man without ever being walked across the line that's supposed to turn a boy into one.

So the boy is still in there, still expecting the old life back, and that is exactly why that voice shows up in your kitchen at night. Which brings me to the real question. If that boy is still there, how much of the time is he the one driving?

[00:09:21] The Boy and the Man Inside You

So let's talk about who's actually behind the wheel, because that boy isn't the only one in there. You've got two versions of you in you. There's the boy, the one who never got walked across that line, and there's the man, the one who did grow up, who can look at his life clearly and carry what's in front of him.

Both of them live in you, right now, today, and the question is never whether they're both there. They are. The question is which one is driving in any given moment? You can tell when the boy's got the wheel. The boy wants what he wants when he wants it. He thinks about freedom, his time, his space, his plans, and when something gets in the way of that, he doesn't get sad.

He gets mad. He sulks. He keeps a little scoreboard in his head of everything he's had to give up. He hears his wife asking him for something and feels it as somebody taking from him. He looks at his kid needing him at the worst possible moment and feels it as an interruption to his real life.

The boy isn't evil. He's just young. He still believes the whole point of life is him. The man is different. The man can want things, too, but he can also see past himself. He hears the same wife ask for the same thing and sees a person he loves who needs him. He looks at the same kid at the same bad moment and sees somebody he's responsible for.

The man doesn't keep score. He shows up because that's what he decided to be. He can hold a hard thing without throwing a fit about it, and here's what I want you to actually do with it. Start watching in real time which one is driving, because you can feel it once you're looking.

When that voice kicks up in the kitchen at night, that's the boy. When you go short and snippy with your wife over something small, that's the boy. When you're half checked out on your phone while your kid's trying to show you something, odds are the boy's got both hands on the wheel. Now, I'm not telling you to hate that kid.

He got you here. He got you going when you were young and the world was hard. But he cannot run a marriage. He cannot raise your children. He doesn't have it in him. He was never built for it. That job belongs to the man, and most of us are out here letting a boy drive a life that needs a man at the wheel.

So once you can see him, once you can catch the boy reaching for the wheel, you start to notice what he actually does with it. And the very first thing he does is lie to you about the past.

[00:11:42] The Lie the Boy Tells You About the Past

The lie the boy tells you is this. He tells you the past was better, and he's convincing because he's not making it up out of nothing.

He's using your own memories, but your memory isn't a recording. It doesn't play back what actually happened. It plays back a cleaned-up version, a highlight reel. Think about how this works. When you look back on your single days, your 20s, your life before the kids, what do you actually see? You see the freedom of the Friday nights, the trip you took that one summer, the version of you that was leaner, looser, and had nothing but time.

What you don't see is the loneliness, the aimlessness, the Sunday nights you sat in a quiet apartment wondering when your real life was going to start, the relationships that went nowhere, the part of you back then that wanted exactly what you have right now. Your mind does this on its own.

The good stuff stays sharp, and the bad stuff fades out. So when you stack today up against back then, it was never a fair fight. You're putting your real, exhausting, complicated right now life with its 3:00 AM wakeups and its bills and its hard conversations up against a past that's been trimmed down to nothing but its best moments.

Of course, the past wins. The deck was stacked. The boy stacked it for you. That's the whole trick. He shines up the past until it glows, then holds your present right next to it and says, "See what you gave up? See what they took from you?" And your present never stands a chance because you're not comparing it to the real past, you're comparing it to a fantasy.

[00:13:13] What Your Resentment Is Really Costing You

And this is where it stops being just a head game and starts costing you something real. Because when you believe that lie, when some part of you truly believes your best days are behind you and this life is the thing standing between you and them, you start to resent the people in it. Not on purpose.

You'd never say it out loud, but it leaks out of you. And let me show you what it actually looks like because it's subtler than you might think. Your wife comes in at the end of a long day and starts telling you about hers, and you're nodding. You're saying, "Mm-hmm," but you're not really there. There's a wall up.

Some part of you is filing her words under one more thing being asked of me, and she can feel that wall. She can't always name it, but she feels it, that her husband is in the room, but he's not really there. So she stops telling you the small stuff, and then after a while, she stops telling you about the big stuff too.

That distance you were feeling on the inside becomes a real distance between the two of you. Or your kid asks you to play for the 10th time, and you hear yourself sigh before you say yes. Just a small sigh, but your kid hears it.

Kids always hear it. And what he or she slowly learns is that they are a burden to dad. That's the cost. It's not one big blow up, it's a thousand small sighs, a thousand little moments where the boy in you was somewhere else, pining for a life that was never as good as he keeps telling you it was, while the real life you actually wanted was standing right in front of you, asking for your attention and slowly learning to stop asking.

That's what the resentment costs you. It doesn't just make you miserable, it teaches the people you love most to expect less of you, to need you less, to reach for you less. The boy thinks he's protecting some old freedom. What he's really doing is throwing away the only thing that was ever going to count.

So if that's the trap, the lie, the resentment, the slow cost, how do you get out of it? That's what I wanna talk about right now.

[00:15:13] How to Stop Fighting the Life You Have

Because there's a way out, and I'll be straight with you. It's simpler than you want it to be and harder than it sounds. It's a choice, really, and it comes down to two things.

The first is to let the fantasy go on purpose. You have to actually set down that highlight reel of the old life, not because it was all bad, but because it isn't real and it's robbing you. As long as you're holding your marriage up against a life that doesn't exist, you lose every single time, and your family keeps paying for it.

So you set it down. You stop letting the boy run the comparison. You decide on purpose that the old life is over, the same way it would have been over if some older man had walked you across that line years ago. Nobody did that for you, so you do it for yourself. The second is to pick this life back up, and this time to choose it.

There's a world of difference between a life that happened to you and a life you chose. Same house, same wife, same kids, but it feels completely different depending on which one it is. Most men are walking around feeling like their life just happened to them, like they got swept into it. But here's the truth.

At some point, you said yes. You asked her to marry you. You decided to have that kid. This is the life you reached for with your own hands. You just stopped choosing it somewhere along the way. So choose it again. Say it in your own head and mean it. I want this. I'm choosing this on purpose. That's the order, too.

First, you accept it. You stop fighting the fact that this is your life. And then once you're not fighting it anymore, something opens up. You start to actually see it, your kid's hand in yours, your wife laughing at something across the room. The same life that felt like a weight starts to feel like a gift, not because anything out there changed, but because you finally stopped looking past it.

And I'll tell you, that night on the edge of my son's bed, when it landed in my chest, it felt like something was being said to me. Now, I'm a man of faith, so I call that God. Maybe you do too. Maybe you don't. And honestly, it doesn't change a thing about what I'm telling you. Call it God, call it clarity, call it finally waking up.

The message is the same either way. This is the life. Stop waiting for the real one to start. This is the real one, and this is not a one-time thing. I wish I could tell you that you do it once and you're fixed. Well, you're not. The boy comes back. The old comparison comes back, especially when you're worn down.

So you make the choice again and then again. It's like a rep, like anything else worth getting strong at. You do it today, and you do it tomorrow. That's the work.

[00:17:57] Awareness, Action, Accountability

Okay, that's it. That's the idea. That's the shift. That's what you came here for. But an idea you only nod along to doesn't change a thing, so let's put this where you can actually use it

Start with awareness because you can't set down something you won't let yourself see. So I've got one question for you, and I want you to answer it honestly because no one is grading it and no one is listening. Where in your life right now are you holding your real wife and your real kids up against a fantasy of the freedom you think you gave up and making them pay the difference?

Don't rush past that question. Sit with it. Write it down if you can, and get specific. Name the actual moment it happens, and name the person who's been on the receiving end of it .

Now for the action. Here are the steps I want you to take this week, not someday, this week.

One, catch the comparison while it's happening. The next time you feel that resentment rise up, that when do I get my life back feeling, stop and name it. Right there in your head, that's the boy holding my real life up against a fantasy. Naming it is how you take the wheel back from him.

Two, make the past tell the truth. Sit down and write out three things you do not miss about your life before this. The loneliness, the empty weekends, the relationships that went nowhere. Keep that list somewhere you can find it. When the highlight reel starts playing, you'll have the real footage on hand.

Three, choose it out loud. Once a day, every day this week, look at your actual life, your wife, your kids, the house you're standing in, and say it like you mean it. I want this. I'm choosing this. That's one rep. Do it every single day, tired or not.

And four, pick a moment this week and be all the way in it. One bedtime, one dinner, one real conversation with your wife. Phone down, eyes up, all the way there. Not half gone in your head. Let yourself feel what it's actually like to want the life you're already in

And the last piece is accountability because doing this in your own head alone is the hardest possible way to do it, and you don't have to. If everything I said today landed, if you're still wrestling with that resentment, still half fighting the life you've got, and you're ready to stop fighting it and actually want the life you have, that's the exact work we're doing inside Better Husband Academy.

It's where men who are in this same fight show up every week and do it together with real support so the change actually holds. If you're ready for that and more, come join us. Go to betterhusbandacademy.com or just click the link in the show notes.

[00:20:28] Closing Takeaway

Here's what I want you to take away from this episode.

This life you're living right now, the tired one, the heavy one, the one that doesn't always look like you pictured, that's not the thing standing between you and the life you want. It is the life you want. You already reached for it. Now reach for it again on purpose and let yourself have it.

Thanks for being here and being willing to look at something most men never let themselves look at, something most men aren't willing to do.

Thank you for doing this work with me.

You're listening to Better Husband. I'm Angelo Santiago, and I'll see you on the next one.