093|What If Nothing About Your Wife Has to Change for This to Get Better?

[00:00:00] When You Stop Being Excited to Come Home

I want to tell you about an apartment I lived in, and I want you to stay with me because what happened inside it is probably happening in your marriage right now, and it's not what you think. I was just out of grad school, and I moved into a small two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco with one of my best friends, a guy I'd known since high school, and it was just the best thing ever. Our own place in our own city, and I remember feeling like the world belonged to us.

And then slowly, and there's no single day I can point to, something started to change, not in him, in me. This guy that I genuinely really loved being around had things about him that drove me nuts, and once I saw them, I couldn't stop seeing them.

And none of it was new. He was the same guy he'd always been. The difference was now I knew him. Like, I really knew him, the way you only know somebody once you've shared a kitchen and a hallway with them for a while. And somewhere in there, without ever deciding anything, I stopped being excited to come home.

Nothing happened. Nobody did anything wrong. The apartment just wasn't the same apartment anymore. He was the same friend. It just didn't feel like it used to. I didn't feel that excitement.

Now, a roommate is one thing. You can leave a roommate, but if you've been married more than a few years, I think you recognize that turn, not the apartment, the direction. Slowly you start to see all the ways this person does things differently than you. She's messier than you are, or she's a lot neater than you are.

She runs her day in an order that makes no sense to you. She worries about the things that would never once cross your mind. She has a way of doing the dishes or packing the car or getting out the door, and it's not your way, and none of it is wrong. It's just not how you would do it.

And without ever deciding, you stop seeing those things as different and start seeing them as something that's wrong with her.

Now, that turn has a name, and it isn't, "We fell out of love," and it's not proof that you married the wrong woman. It's a phase, one of three, and today we're going to go through all of them because most of us only ever got told about the first one.

In Relational Life therapy, that first phase is called Love Without Knowledge. You've probably heard it called the honeymoon phase. That's the one everybody talks about, but nobody talks about what comes after.

By the end of this episode, you're going to know the names of all three phases and which one you're actually in.

You're going to understand why so many marriages get stuck in the second phase and why that's where the real damage gets done. And you're going to learn how to get unstuck so you can move into the third phase, which is where a marriage finally begins to thrive. Stick around. You don't wanna miss this one.

[00:02:30] When I Walked Out and It Cost Me Nothing

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.

So I wanna take you back to that apartment, because I went through it fast, and the real story is in the parts that I skipped. When we moved in, it really was the best thing ever, and this time I'm not going to rush past that part. I remember standing in that living room thinking, "Here we are," right?

We have our own apartment in San Francisco. The world felt like it was ours to walk around in. And the guy on the other side of that wall with me was one of my best friends, somebody I grew up with, knew since high school, a guy I would've told you I knew better than just about anybody. If you'd asked me in that first stretch how living together was going, I would've laughed at the question, 'cause it was perfect, obviously.

Then a while in, and I couldn't tell you when because it's not like it happened on one day, the noticing started. The sink went first. I'd come home, and it would be overflowing with dishes. Not a plate and a cup. I'm talking about overflowing. Then the bathroom, which was a total mess basically all the time.

Then the noise. The guy just generated sound everywhere he went, whatever hour it was. And then the shoes, shoes everywhere, until this small two-bedroom apartment felt like six people lived in it instead of two.

And then there was the one that's harder to put on the list. We'd be in the middle of a conversation, a real conversation, the kind you move in with your best friend hoping to have, and mid-sentence he'd be on his phone.

Not once, enough that it became a thing I watched for. Mid-sentence, he was gone. And that one landed differently than the dishes, though I couldn't have told you why at the time.

The sink was about the apartment. That one was about me standing there, half of a sentence out of my mouth, talking to the top of somebody's head.

Now, none of that is a crime, and I knew it then, too. And you know how this goes, because everybody has lived some version of it. You don't sit down and decide that from now on you're not going to enjoy somebody. There's no meeting where you vote on it.

It just happens at the speed that a sink fills up, one plate at a time, none of them worth mentioning on their own, but those little things drove me nuts. Every full sink was carrying the last 30 full sinks with it. Everything I loved about the guy was still true. He hadn't changed, not one degree. It just stopped being what I saw.

I'd walk through the door, and I didn't see my best friend. I saw the sink. I'd hear him come in, and I'd take a deep breath and think to myself, "What's it going to be today?" The apartment that felt like the center of the world started feeling exactly as small as it was. Now, we lived together for a few years, and then I left.

And I wanna be straight with you about what leaving was like, because this is the part I didn't understand until much later. It was easy. It cost me nothing. I packed my stuff up, I moved out, and every single thing that had been wearing on me stopped being my problem the moment the door closed behind me.

I didn't have to work through one of those irritations. I just got to walk away from them. And we still got to be friends. Once I wasn't living in it, I stopped seeing the things that bothered me, and I had my friend back.

[00:05:32] The Three Phases Nobody Named for You

Years after that apartment, my marriage nearly fell apart, and then came the hard work of rebuilding it.

And somewhere in all of that, learning everything I could about marriage and relationships, first for my own sake, and then so I could help other men, I came across an idea from Terry Real, the founder of Relational Life Therapy, and it gave me the first real insight I never had into the arc of my own marriage.

He says love between two people moves through three phases. Not stages of a relationship, phases of knowledge, what you know about the other person and what you do with it. Phase one he calls love without knowledge. Phase two, knowledge without love. And phase three, the one almost nobody tells you exists, knowing love.

Now, I don't know if Terry Real ever meant those three phases to cover two buddies moving into an apartment together out of grad school, but when I hold them up against that apartment, I can see it clearly. I lived the first two without ever knowing their names, and I think it's interesting to watch that same story play out again in my marriage, the same arc, the same turn, with one key difference.

This time, I wanted to work through phase two to get to phase three. Love without knowledge is the beginning. I loved living with my best friend, and part of why it was so easy is that I didn't yet know what he was like to live with. I knew him from school, from growing up, but I didn't have the kind of knowing you only get from a shared kitchen.

So the love was real. It was just running on an incomplete picture, and that's phase one. The classic love story, this is where it ends, right? The "and they lived happily ever after" moment. Every movie ends there. Every story ends there, and that's why we're never prepared for the next phase when the information arrives, and it always arrives.

You cannot share a life with somebody and stay in the dark about them. The sink, the shoes, the phone. By the end of that apartment, I knew my friend better than I'd ever known him. and what did I do with all of it? I read every single piece of information as a reason, as a mark against him, and that's phase two, knowledge without love.

In phase three, knowing love, that's the one I never got to in that apartment. From there, I just bailed. Getting through phase two would've taken work. I didn't know how to do it, and honestly, didn't much wanna learn. We're gonna go deeper into what phase three is all about, but for now, all you need to know is that it doesn't end at phase two.

[00:07:52] Why It Feels Like You Fell Out of Love

When I left that apartment, I didn't move into another one with another buddy. I moved in with my girlfriend, the woman who is now my wife. And by then, we weren't new to each other. We met in college. We'd been together for years. We traveled the world together. We'd lived close to each other for a long time, but we'd never lived with each other 24/7.

We never made the tiny decisions, never seen all the little habits you only see when you're sharing a kitchen and a bathroom, a living room, a bedroom. This was the first time.

I walked out of phase two in one home and walked directly into phase one in the next one.

Love without knowledge all over again, except this time, with somebody I was going to build an entire life with. Until we moved in together, I honestly didn't know how she handles stress or what she's like when her family wears on her, any of the 10,000 small facts you only learn by sharing a life with someone.

The love was real, but the picture was incomplete. So years went by. We moved into a new place together, and eventually, we got married. And marriage does what that apartment did except more of it for longer with everything on the line.

The information arrives year after year. It keeps arriving, how she spends money, how she doesn't, what she's like when she's worried, what leaving the house at 6:00 really means to her, the face she makes, the things she always says, until one day you realize you know her completely.

Nobody on earth knows her the way you do. And so the question this whole episode turns on, what are you doing with all of that? And if you're anything like me, because I did this in that apartment and I did it in my own marriage, this is what happens.

Every place where who she is rubs up against who you are starts to overshadow the love. And it's easy to let that become the strongest thing between you. So you spend your days with all of that instead of with her.

That's phase two. Knowledge without love in your own house. And this is exactly why it feels like falling out of love. What if the love didn't leave the marriage? What if everything you've learned about her just got louder than the love? One more thing, and then I'll leave it alone.

She knows you every bit as well as you know her. All those years you've been learning her, she's been learning you. And what she does with what she knows is hers to carry. This episode is about what you do with what you know.

[00:10:07] Does This End, or Do We Work Through It?

So let's say that's you, not the man in the apartment, but the man in the marriage. You know her completely, and what you know has become the strongest thing between you, and sooner or later, a question starts to surface. It's the one that I had to face in my own marriage. Does this marriage end, or do we work through it?

Two options. That's how it looks like from the inside of phase two, and both of them look enormous. One of them costs you everything you built, and the other sounds like something you'd have no idea how to start, so most men do neither.

Most men take a third option. Door one is the marriage ending, and for most men in phase two, that door doesn't look like packing a bag.

It looks like her. She's the one talking about leaving. What you do with that is your part of this door. You can let it be the reason the marriage falls apart and call it her decision, or you can hear that she wants out and think something you've never said to anybody, that this might be the easy way out.

I know that thought. It's the one that I had in that San Francisco apartment, And this door does here what it did there. The problem ends because the relationship ends.

Now, door two is the work, staying and learning to do something different with everything you know. That's where this episode is headed.

But door three is the one that most men take. You stay, but you don't start the work. You adjust. You stop bringing things up because bringing things up goes nowhere. You learn to let it go. You stop reacting to the things she does. You keep the peace, but the resentment builds deep inside you, and nobody really wants this door.

It just feels like the easiest one to pick because the other two feel too hard, so it becomes the default. There's no morning where a man decides, "Today, I begin just tolerating my wife." What you say to yourself is smaller than that. "I'll just deal with it."

And I wanna be fair to this door because it holds men for a reason. It works, partly. The fighting shrinks, or maybe there was never much fighting to begin with. Either way, the house seems to get a little calmer. But look at what door three actually changes.

Door one ends the marriage, and everything you know about her ends with it. Door two learns to do something different with everything you know. Door three keeps everything you know, keeps doing the exact same thing with it, and just stop saying it out loud. Nothing you know has changed. Nothing you're doing with it has changed.

The only thing that changed is the volume. And you keep learning more about her the whole time. More knowledge, more piled up on top of the love that was there to begin with, to the point where the love feels like it's gone.

That's what makes door three a trap inside of a rest stop. Once everything she does is proof of what's wrong with her, the neutral stuff counts, too. Even the kind stuff counts. It just becomes the exception. So the calm doesn't heal anything. It holds everything in place. Marriages run entire decades behind door three.

Kids get raised there, anniversaries get celebrated there, and from the outside, plenty of them look like the marriages that make it. And there's a real loyalty holding those houses up, but there's a ceiling in them, and the man inside usually knows it, and she tends to know it, too.

I can't tell you what your wife feels, but wives have a sentence for this, and some version of it gets said in a lot of homes. It feels like you just tolerate me.

Tolerate, not mistreat, tolerate. Because over enough years, a person can usually tell the difference between being put up with and being enjoyed, and no amount of staying, providing, and not fighting closes that gap on its own. So before we walk through door two, which door have you been standing in?

Because if it didn't end and you didn't start the work, you didn't avoid the choice. You've made it.

[00:13:38] Same Woman, Same Information, Different Man

So let's walk through door two, and I wanna start with the moment that opened my eyes to what's on the other side of it. About 10 years into my marriage, in our house, my wife was frustrated with me, and she had a reason to be, because I kept getting annoyed at her little quirks.

The small ways of hers that make her who she is, things that are nothing like me, the way she goes about her day so differently that I'd go about mine. She looked at me and she said, "I wish you could just love all my little quirks and accept them as me." And I want you to notice everything she did not ask for in that sentence. She didn't ask me to stop noticing the quirks. She didn't ask me to pretend they weren't there. She didn't offer to change a single one of them. Ten years in, I knew this woman completely, and she wasn't asking me for less knowledge.

She was asking me to do something different with it. Accept them as me, not as flaws stapled onto a real her, as her. And that sentence is knowing love. The whole third phase in her words. Knowing love is where you see everything, every flaw, every habit, no illusions left, and you love the actual woman you're looking at.

Not the phase one version, not the woman you wish she'd become, the one you know. Because the quirks were never standing in front of who she is, they are who she is. And look at what that does to the map of the three phases. Phase two and phase three run on the exact same knowledge. Same woman, same information, nothing added, nothing taken away.

In phase two, everything you know about her is what's wrong with her. In phase three, everything you know about her is who she is. The only thing that changes is what you choose to do with that knowledge. Which means, and I need you to hear this, this phase requires nothing from her. Not one thing about her has to change.

Door two is in your house right now and the handle is on your side. Now, I won't pretend the walk through that door is short. The couples who get to this phase are not the ones who ran out of old issues. They have the same ones. What changed is what they do with them.

That's the question my wife's sentence put in front of me. Do we work through knowledge without love to get to knowing love? That's the work. How to do that work is its own conversation. This episode is just the roadmap. And where am I on it? I'll tell you the truth, I'm still walking. That sentence opened my eyes, and I do my best now every day to love exactly the things that used to bother me.

Some days, I do it well. Some days, I catch myself right back at the sink. But I've been far enough through that door to tell you what's on the other side is real. Warmth for the actual woman you married, steady even on the days the marriage disappoints you. There's a word for that, and it's the opposite of tolerate.

It's cherish.

[00:16:22] Awareness, Action, Accountability

So that's the map. Three phases, three doors, and the whole thing turning on one question. What are you doing with what you know about her? But an idea is only an idea. It doesn't change anything until you do something with it, so let's put you on the map for real. Here's your awareness question, action steps, and accountability for this week.

To sharpen your awareness, I want you to answer one question, and answer it in writing if you can, not just in your head. Which phase is your marriage actually in right now? Not the one you were in five years ago. Is it love without knowledge? It's early and you're still learning her.

Knowledge without love, you know her completely, and what you know has become the strongest thing between you. Or knowing love, you see all of it, and you're warm toward her anyway. Pick one, write it down, and if you catch yourself wanting to answer somewhere in between, write down the one that you're closer to.

Then take these three steps this week.

Step one, name your evidence. Under the phase you wrote down, list what makes it true. Not the feelings, the moments. Things that happened this week that tell you where you are. And this paper is for you, not for her. Don't hand it to her. It's not a conversation starter. It's a locating exercise.

Step two, name your door. If you're in the second phase, you've been standing in one of three doors. Letting the marriage head for the exit, doing the work, or staying and putting up with her and letting the resentment build. If it's that third one, write it down without softening it. Nobody reads this but you.

Then step three, and this is the one I most want you to do. Write down three things you know about your wife today that you did not know the day you married her. Anything at all. Then look at what you wrote down and count how many of those you've been carrying as complaints.

Now ask yourself, what would it take for you to love her while knowing that those things are part of what makes her who she is, not something she needs to change?

And for accountability, most men will not answer that awareness question honestly on their own, and they won't follow through on those action steps.

And not because they can't, because the honest answer and the actions are uncomfortable, and there's nobody checking. That's what Better Husband Academy is for. It's where men doing exactly this work say where they are plainly with other men who won't let them soften it on live calls every single week.

If that's the kind of support your marriage could use, come join us at betterhusbandacademy.com, or just click the link in the show notes and get accountability on exactly what this episode asked you.

[00:18:44] Closing Takeaway

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

Picture the two moments this whole thing hangs on, me pulling an apartment door shut behind me, every irritation suddenly on the other side of it, feeling nothing but lighter, and me, years later, in my own house, hearing my wife say, "I wish you could just love all my little quirks and accept them as me."

The first moment cost me nothing, and it changed nothing. The second one is still changing me. Nothing about her has to change. That's the takeaway.

The quirks in phase three are the identical quirks from phase two. Same woman, same information. What changes is you. You stop seeing everything you know about her as what's wrong with her, and you start seeing it as who she is, which leaves you with the only question the map ever asks: what are you going to do with what you know?

And I won't tell you that that work is quick or painless, but I can tell you what I know from inside of it.

On the other end of all that work, there's something beautiful.

So thank you for being willing to find yourself on this map, 'cause that takes real courage. Keep going, keep looking at the whole of her, and keep walking toward the right door.

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