096|Things Are Better in Your Marriage. Here's What to Do Next

[00:00:00] I'm Doing the Work. Now What?

Let me tell you about a Better Husband Academy call I hosted recently. It was an evening call with a handful of men I work with.

They bring what they've got, and we get into it. I ask questions. I invite them to look at what's underneath the thing they brought. I share where I've been in the same spot, and then we coach it out together.

One man opened it up by asking how you repair years of damage. Not the argument from last week, the whole accumulated pile of it, the defensiveness, the years of not owning his part, the hurt he caused before he had any idea he was causing it. He wanted to know what you actually do about the things you can't go back and undo.

Another man told us he had about a month and a half where he was showing up the way he'd been working to show up, steady, present, able to stay in the room when it got hard, and then he slipped. And what he said about it is something I've heard other men say before and something I've lived myself.

He said it hurt worse than it used to because now he knows better. Now he feels like he is better, so why is this still happening? And then near the end of the call, a third man asked something completely different. His marriage had gotten good. He wasn't in trouble. He wasn't recovering from anything.

What he wanted was more from his wife, more acknowledgement, some sign every once in a while that she saw what he was doing, and he'd noticed something that bothered him. Every time he asked for it, it seemed to push her further away.

Three men, three questions that sound nothing alike, but they were all asking the same thing.

Underneath all three was one question. I'm doing the work, and things are better. Now what? That question doesn't get much airtime. There's a lot of help out there for a man whose marriage is currently on fire and almost none for the man standing in front of a house that isn't burning anymore, holding a bucket, wondering if he's allowed to put it down.

So that's what I'm doing today. I'm going to show you what actually happens in a marriage when things get better. That moment where you might feel the urge to ease off, which feels like the most reasonable thing in the world to do, and also the exact move that stalls everything.

And then I'm going to show you what it looks like to keep building on top of the progress you've already made. By the end of this episode, you're going to know why good enough is where a marriage lands when you stop doing the thing that made it better, and you're going to know the specific moves that take it somewhere past that.

If you've been putting in the work and you're seeing progress and you wanna know what comes next, stick around. You don't wanna miss this one.

[00:02:30] How I Let Off the Gas Without Noticing

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, I wanna say something about that call before I go further. The men who were on the call but weren't talking weren't checked out. I could see them. They were nodding. They were leaning in. When one guy said the slip hurt worse because he knows better now, I watched it land on every face on that screen.

Nobody had to explain it to anybody. They'd been there. They'd felt that moment, too. That's what happens when men do this work alongside other men instead of alone in their own heads. But that's not the thing I most want to tell you.

I sat on that call, and I listened to those guys, and they were describing my own marriage right back to me. And I can remember lots of moments just like the ones they described.

I remember several years back, my wife and I had a rough day. Not a catastrophe, just a rough day. We weren't on the same page about anything. Everything either of one of us did poked at the other one. Every little question felt like an attack, and I mean in both directions.

I felt attacked by her, and I know she felt attacked by me. We were just off. And what made it stand out to me was that what came before it.

We'd had months of really good times, months where it genuinely felt like everything was working. And here's the part I was most proud of, if I'm honest. When something did feel off in that stretch, we talked about it, and it got handled same week, sometimes the same night.

We'd built a marriage where a problem didn't have to sit and rot for a month before anybody would touch it. That was the new normal. That was the thing I thought we'd built and put it in the bank. In my mind, we crossed the finish line from almost divorced to having a great marriage.

Then this one day rewrote the whole script on where I thought we were. That night, I'm lying in bed. She's in the bathroom brushing her teeth. We're still not really talking, and I want to tell you exactly what was going through my head because it isn't flattering.

I thought we'd come so far. Why does this feel so hard? Is it ever going to be enough? That's it. That's what was going on in there. And I want you to notice what those three thoughts have in common because I didn't notice it for a long time.

Every one of them is a man asking to be done. I thought I'd crossed a finish line. Part of me had decided somewhere along the way, "All right, we made it. We're good. That's enough," and I let off the gas. And I want to be precise about that because I never announced it.

There was no moment where I sat down and decided I was finished working on my marriage. It never got said out loud, not even to myself. It was just a slow renegotiation of what counted as enough. Good week, no fights, nobody's upset, we're done. Checked a box I'd invented and never told anybody about it.

Now, I want to be careful here because I'm not telling you the answer is to lie in bed every night running an audit on your marriage. That's not what this is. I'm not waking up every morning in some anxious state asking myself what I have to do today to keep my wife happy. I'm relaxed. My marriage is good, and I've seen real benefit from what we've built for both her and me.

But that night, the thought that was not in my head was this one: "Okay, we've made it this far. How do I make this even better?"

That thought never showed up, not once, and it's because I was annoyed, and I was frustrated, and there was a part of me that wanted to keep the bar exactly where it was, low enough that I could clear it without trying any harder That part of me was doing all the talking, so I had to go find the other part, the part that could see this wasn't the end of the story, the part that could look at everything that had happened, all of it, and see how much good had already come out of it, and ask a question I'd stop asking: What if there's more good yet to come if I keep going, and I just don't know it yet?

I know I've said this before, but I want to say it again because nobody warns you about this part. The most dangerous moment in this work isn't the worst day of your marriage. It's in the first stretch of the good ones. When your marriage is in trouble, the motivation takes care of itself. You don't need discipline when you're scared.

You show up because the alternative is unthinkable. Fear is a terrible long-term fuel, but nobody can accuse it of being ineffective in the short term. Then things start to change. When you get serious about this, when you're actually learning the skills, catching the old patterns before they run, staying in the hard conversations instead of leaving them, it takes weeks and months of that before you see much, but over time, it works.

Things settle. She's laughing again. The house feels different. You get a week, then a month, then a long stretch where nothing feels like it's on fire, and your whole body exhales and says, "Finally."

And most of us do exactly what I did, which is not a conscious decision at all. You just stop doing the one thing, then another.

Then the check-in you used to initiate, you wait for her to bring it up. The thing you used to apologize for the same day, you let it ride until tomorrow. The conversation you used to start, you let go because tonight's fine, and why poke at it? Each one seems reasonable on its own, and that's exactly why this is hard to catch.

If easing off felt like quitting, you'd notice. It doesn't. It feels like finally getting to relax in your own house, which is the thing you were working toward the whole time, and nothing happens immediately. That's the part that fools you. You ease off in March and the marriage is still fine in April.

It's still fine in May. There's no alarm, no consequence, nothing that connects what you stopped doing to anything you can see. So you start to think, without anybody saying a word, that those things weren't load-bearing at all. And then something ordinary happens, and it goes sideways in a way it hasn't gone sideways in months.

That's what that man on the Better Husband Academy call was trying to say, and it's what I've heard from so many other men before. He said the slip hurt worse than it used to, and he's right. It does. When you were at rock bottom, a bad day was just another bad day. But then, when you've had a good stretch, a bad day is a shock to the entire system.

It makes you start believing that things haven't actually changed, and that you haven't actually improved, and maybe that things are never going to change.

If you're in that right now, I want you to hear me. The slip does not mean you've failed at becoming a better husband. The slip does not mean things are back to where you started at rock bottom. The slip does not mean that nothing's ever going to change.

The slip is information. It's telling you which specific things you stopped- Doing, and it's telling you those things were load-bearing. You didn't lose what you built. You just stopped prioritizing it.

[00:09:37] Is Good Enough the Ceiling or the Floor?

Now, some of you listening aren't in that spot at all.

Maybe nothing slipped because nothing was ever on fire. You're not recovering from anything. Things are just okay. There are good days, and there are not-so-good days, but it feels like this marriage is good enough. You get along. The kids are doing okay. She's got her friends. You've got yours. Work is stable.

You eat dinner together most nights. You get out on a date night maybe once a month, and it's nice when you do. There's a trip in the summer. There's a rhythm to the year, and you know what it is. Nothing's wrong. Genuinely, nothing is wrong. And I want to say something that I mean completely. That is a blessed life.

That is more than most people on this planet ever get. If that's your marriage, I'm not here to tell you it's broken because it isn't. You're not failing at anything. There's no crisis to fix. But I do want to ask you the only question worth asking about it. Is this how you want the rest of it to go? Not for the next year, the rest of it.

Because a man who is 40 and has a good enough marriage is not looking at a good enough year. He's looking at 40 more of them. Same rhythm, same monthly dinner, same summer trip. All of it fine, but none of it is moving. I'm not asking that to make you feel bad about a life you should probably be grateful for.

I'm asking because most men never get asked. There's no alarm that goes off for a marriage that's merely fine. Nobody stages an intervention over pleasant. The good enough marriage is the only kind that can go thirty years without a single person ever suggesting it could be more. So you're the only one who's going to ask.

Your wife probably won't raise it because what exactly would she be complaining about? Your friends won't because nobody pulls a man aside and says, "Hey, your marriage seems pretty pleasant. Are you sure that's what you wanted?" You're it. You're the only person in your whole life positioned to ask this question.

Is good enough the ceiling, or is it the floor? I'm not going to answer that for you yet. Sit in it for a second because the answer depends on something we haven't talked about.

[00:11:41] Doing This for Her or for Yourself

On that same call, one of the men said something almost in passing, and it's one of the most important thing anybody said that night.

He said he made a switch. He used to do all of this work to keep his wife, to say the right thing, to buy another week, another month, and then it changed, and he started doing it because he realized it was the right way for him to live, whatever happened to the marriage. And he said that switch relieved a huge amount of pressure and fear.

And listen to that because it runs backwards from how it sounds. Doing it for himself didn't make him care less. Focusing on how he wanted to be as a man and how he wanted to be a husband is what made the whole thing sustainable. Instead of asking, "What do I need to do so she doesn't walk out that door?"

He started asking, "What kind of husband do I want to be for the woman I love?" And I found that same thing on my own, and it took me a lot longer than it should have. I gain an enormous amount from a strong marriage. I'm a better man inside of it, I'm calmer, I'm more useful to the people around me. I like who I am.

My actions didn't just improve my wife's experience of her life, they changed the entire culture of my house, and I live in that house. Once that landed, the work stopped feeling like a debt I was paying down, and I actually wanted to do it. Now, I know exactly what some of you are hearing right now.

There's a whole chorus out there telling men that this is how you lose yourself, that wanting to improve yourself, wanting to change, wanting to open your heart because you want to love your wife more, that's you going soft, that you're handing over your spine and calling it growth, that a, a real man doesn't apologize, doesn't bend, doesn't work this hard at being agreeable.

And I think that argument is stupid, and I think it's stupid for a specific reason. It only looks at what it thinks the man gave up. It genuinely cannot conceive that any of this is good for the man doing it. It looks at a husband who takes ownership and sees a man who lost, when what's actually standing there is a man who got happier, got steadier, and got better at being a person.

And yes, it takes work. Of course it takes work. Name something worth being good at that doesn't. Sports, business, real friendships, raising kids, anything you've ever made with your hands, every single one of them costs you effort, discomfort, and being wrong in public more than once. So if the thought sitting in your chest right now is, "This should be easier.

I shouldn't have to try this hard. I shouldn't have to admit when I'm wrong. I shouldn't have to do things when I'm uncomfortable," then I want you to ask yourself an honest question. Not defensively, honestly, what are you actually aiming at here? Because if the goal is a life that asks nothing of you, that's available.

Go live by yourself. Go to work, come home, turn on the TV, play your game. Never attempt anything that could fail. That's a real option, and some men take it. You didn't. You're here. So let's talk about what you get for that.

[00:14:48] Build the Culture of Your Marriage on Purpose

And to do that, let's go back to that third man on the call, the one whose marriage was fine.

What he brought was about affirmation, and about the thing he couldn't figure out. When he asked her for it, it pushed her away instead of pulling her in, and that's true. It does, but not for the reason he thought. Listen to the difference between two sentences that contain almost the same words. The first one, "I need more from you. I need you to notice me."

The second one, "I know who I am, I respect myself, I know what I bring to this house, and I'm proud of it. I'm kind, I take care of the people I love, and I don't need anybody to confirm that for me. And you know what would absolutely light me up? If every once in a while you gave me a little wink, a hand on my back walking by.

I don't need it, but man, would I love it. Would you be up for that?" Now, that's the same request, completely different man making it. The first one hands her a job she didn't apply for, which is managing how you feel about yourself, and the second one hands her an invitation from a man who knows his worth.

And the second one only works if you actually mean the part where you don't need it, because she might say no. She might think it's a strange thing to want, or maybe she doesn't feel ready for it yet. And if you're solid, that costs you nothing. You asked, she gets to answer however she answers. That's what letting go of the outcome actually looks like in a real marriage, not as a concept.

On top of all of this, you can also turn it around and ask her the other half, which is the half most of us never get to. What would be great for you? What do I already do that you want more of, or what am I not doing that you'd love for me to do? And you're going to find out that what lights her up is not the same thing that lights you up.

It rarely is. Maybe she wants to be told she looks good, and not only on the days where she's dressing up. Maybe she wants a love note on her pillow. Maybe she wants you to reach for her hand first for once. Now, here's something I've noticed in myself and in a lot of the men I've worked with over the years.

Giving is easy for us. Being of service is easy. Taking care of people is easy. You ask a man like this to do something and he'll do it. But receiving, that's significantly harder. And this is the part worth sitting with because you cannot control whether she gives you anything, but you can control whether you're open to receiving what she does give.

I'll give you the smallest possible example. Last week, my wife wanted to make me breakfast, and everything in me wants to say, "No, I've got it. Don't worry about it. I can handle my own breakfast." And watch what I just did right there. She reached out to do something loving and I blocked it, and I told myself I was being considerate, I can take care of it.

Guys like us are doers. We handle things, so we don't recognize somebody caring for us as an opportunity. We recognize it as a task being duplicated, and we Wave it off a hundred times without ever noticing that every wave off is a small door closing. Let her make the breakfast and allow yourself to fully receive it.

Enjoy it in front of her. Appreciate the love she poured into it. That's receiving, and it's a skill, and most of us are worse at it than we are at giving. So what does it look like to allow things that are good to even get better?

Imagine your marriage is like going to a movie theater. You don't need snacks to enjoy a good movie.

The movie's good. You'd watch it happily with nothing. But popcorn? Something cold to drink? A comfortable chair? Some candy? Come on, it's better, and you know it's better. That's what we're talking about, adding to a good thing on purpose.

It's the rhythms. What you do on a Sunday morning, how you say goodbye when one of you leaves, whether there's something special in your week that belongs only to the two of you.

That's the culture of your marriage and you build it deliberately, or it builds itself out of whatever's left over.

[00:18:43] Awareness, Action, Accountability

Now let's take this from an idea in your head to a practice in your house this week, because that's the only place it counts. Here's your awareness question, action steps, and accountability for this week.

First, to get clear on where you actually are, think about this question. When was the last time you did something for your marriage that wasn't a response to a problem, and what was it? Not the apology after the argument, not the repair after the rupture, something you did on purpose when nothing was wrong because you wanted the marriage to be better than it already was. Sit with the date and sit with the thing itself. Whatever comes back, that's your answer.

Now, here are your action steps I want you to take this week.

One, name what you stopped doing. If there's something you used to do when things were harder that you don't do anymore, that's the one. The check-in, the apology the same day, asking how she's actually doing and waiting through the first answer to get to the real one.

Pick one specific thing you dropped and do it this week. And if you're still in that hard place, if things are still challenging in your marriage right now, then think back to when things were good between you and ask yourself what you were doing back then that you no longer do.

Now, two, ask her first. Ask her, "What's something I do that you'd want more of?" Or, "What's something I used to do that you'd want me to start doing again? The thing that makes you feel loved, the thing that makes you feel cherished." Then stop talking, listen. Don't defend, don't explain the reasons you haven't been doing it, don't negotiate, just get the answer and hold onto it.

Three, then ask for one thing you'd like, and ask for it in the way we talked about. Not from need, not because you'd fall apart without it. Something that fills your heart up, something that makes you feel loved and cherished. Say the whole thing out loud, including the part where you tell her you don't need it. Then let her answer however she answers, and let that be fine.

And then four, let her do one thing for you and fully receive it. Maybe it's the thing you asked for. Maybe it's something else entirely, something you would normally deflect. Take it instead. Enjoy it in front of her. Appreciate it for what it is, and notice how strongly you want to refuse it, because that reflex is the thing worth looking at.

And now for your accountability. Every man I told you about was on that call because he decided not to do this by himself anymore, and not one of them had the exact same question, which is exactly the point. The guy in year one of repair and the guy whose marriage is already good were in the same room, and each one heard something he needed from the other.

If you want that, come and get it. Better Husband Academy is where these men are with me on live calls every week doing this together. Go to betterhusbandacademy.com or click the link in the show notes for accountability on what we just talked about today.

[00:21:33] Closing Takeaway

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

Go back to me in that bed, wife in the bathroom, neither of us talking, and a man lying there thinking, "Is it ever going to be enough?" And I want you to notice that I wasn't wrong about the facts. We had come a long way. It had been hard. It was by any honest measure enough. Enough was just never the question.

A marriage doesn't stall out because a man stops loving his wife. It stalls because he crosses a line he believes is the finish and sets down the exact things that got him there, and nothing collapses immediately. That's what makes it so hard to catch. It just stops moving, and then it stays stopped for as long as you let it.

So the only thing I'd ask you is the thing I had to go find in myself, lying there annoyed with the water running in the next room. What if there's more good on the other side of this if I keep showing up for it? And what if the only reason you can't see it yet is you stopped walking toward it?

Thank you for sitting with a harder question than you had to, especially if things in your house are going fine right now. Wherever you're at, keep asking the hard questions and showing up for the answers. You're listening to Better Husband. I'm Angelo Santiago, and I'll see you on the next one