084|You'll Never Be the Perfect Husband — and That's Exactly Where the Wins Start
[00:00:00] When You Can't Name a Single Win
Every week I ask the men I work with to do something that sounds pretty simple. At the start of the week, I have them set an intention. They pick one thing they wanna work on in their marriage, and they commit to it. Then they make a plan for it.
They think through what's likely to get in the way, the moments that usually trip them up, and they get clear on why it matters, what following through on this one thing would actually do for them, for their wife, for the marriage that they're trying to build. And by the time they're done, they don't just know what they're going after, they know why they want it.
Then at the end of the week, I have them come back and tell me about a win, something that went right, Something that happened because of the commitment they made and the intention they set, just one thing, big or small.
And you'd think that would be the easy part, right? Tell me one good thing that happened this week. But week after week, I watch good men sit down with that question and come up empty. They'll say something like, "Uh, I don't really have a win this week," or, "Honestly, nothing good happened." And then in the very same message, they'll go on to describe something that was absolutely a win.
They just can't see it. Other guys, they do find a win, but they shrink it down before they can even get it all the way out of their mouth. They'll say something like, "It was a small thing. It probably doesn't even count, but..." And then they tell me about something that's actually a big deal, a hard conversation that didn't blow up, a moment with their wife they've been missing for months.
They hand it to me wrapped in an apology like they need my permission to feel good about it. I've seen this so many times now that I started paying real attention to it, because it was never really about the size of the win. It was about the bar these men are measuring themselves against, and that bar is the very thing keeping them from seeing how far they've already come.
In this episode, I wanna talk about a pattern I see in so many of the men I work with, one I know I've fallen into myself and still do at times, and I imagine you might too. We buy into this idea that the goal is to be the perfect husband with the perfect marriage, and that anything short of that doesn't really count.
Most men don't even realize they're doing it, but it shapes how you see yourself, how you see your marriage, and whether you can recognize progress when it's sitting right in front of you. I wanna show you where that bar comes from, why it keeps you from seeing the good work you're already doing, and what happens when you stop measuring your marriage against an impossible standard.
By the end of this episode, you're going to know how to actually see the wins you're already making at home, the ones you've probably been waving off as too small to matter, and you're going to understand why being a better husband, not a perfect one, is the goal that actually gets you where you wanna go.
If you catch yourself chasing perfection, not just in your work and the things you get done, but in your marriage too, then this episode is for you. Stick around. You don't wanna miss this one
[00:02:44] The Engineer Who Couldn't Clock Out
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, before I get into teaching anything, I wanna tell you a little bit about me, because I'm not standing on the other side of this thing telling you how to fix it. I'm right in it with you. I am a recovering perfectionist, and I say recovering because it's not something I've beaten. It's something I work on.
Even now, I catch myself wanting to make the perfect podcast episode. I'll sit down to reply to one of the men I coach, and I wanna give him the perfect piece of advice, the exact right thing he needs to hear in that exact moment. I want to be the perfect father to my son, the perfect husband to my wife.
Some part of me still believes that if I just try hard enough, I can actually get there. And I know rationally that it's not possible, but knowing something in your head and believing it in your gut are two different things. And to understand why this is wired so deep in me, I have to take you back to before I ever was a firefighter.
Before all of that, before I ever put on a badge, I was a mechanical engineer. I got my Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and then my Master's of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford. Now, if you're not from the US, those names might not mean much to you.
They're not Harvard, Yale, Princeton type schools. They're all right and, you know, they're not that bad and... You know, I'm kidding. They're actually top schools. Stanford's engineering program is ranked number two in the whole country, right behind MIT. Johns Hopkins is one of the best engineering schools in the world, top of the national rankings year after year.
These are not easy schools to get into, and they are not easy schools to get through. And here's why that matters for what we're talking about today. I was surrounded by some of the most competitive, hardworking, laser-focused people you will ever meet, perfectionists, every single one of them. And I was bred into the idea that my work should strive for perfection, that perfection was actually possible if I just worked hard enough, put in enough hours, fought hard enough, and wanted it more than the person sitting right next to me.
That was the world I lived in for years. Get it exactly right. A 95 wasn't 100. Anything less than perfect felt like it wasn't really finished, and I was good at it. And what really drove it home was this. I didn't just put up with that world. I loved it. I wanted it. I wasn't only hoping perfection was possible, I was out to prove it, which only made the lesson sink in deeper.
Then I became a firefighter, and I did that for over a decade. If engineering is where the idea got planted, the firehouse is where it got tested because now the stakes were real. I wanted to be the guy with all the answers, the one who could walk into the worst moment of somebody's life and handle it right there on the spot.
To do the absolute best that could possibly be done, and anything short of that felt like I hadn't measured up, like I'd personally come up short, and I carried that home without even realizing it. The same guy who needed to get the equation exactly right, the same guy who needed to run the perfect call, that guy doesn't just clock out at the end of the day.
He walks in the front door and starts grading his marriage the exact same way. Did I handle that conversation perfectly? Was I a good enough husband today? And when the answer was no, somewhere in me, the verdict came back the same as it always did. Not good enough, and it was on me.
And it took me a long time and a lot of help from other people to even see that I was doing it, to realize that the same thing that made me good at engineering and good on the job was slowly making me miserable at home. Because a marriage is not an engineering problem you solve once and get right.
It's not a call you run clean and walk away from. It's a relationship, one with its own history, its own complications, unlike any other. It's two flawed people doing their best, and I had been holding it and holding myself to a standard that no human could ever actually meet, and that's what I want to talk about today.
[00:06:40] In a Marriage, There Is No Finish Line
Now let's go back to the beginning of this episode, to those men I work with who can't find a win. When I started seeing this, I figured it was about honesty. Maybe they were being humble, or maybe they just didn't have a good week, but that's not what was going on.
What's going on is the exact same thing I was doing when I walked in my own front door and started grading myself. They've set a bar, and the bar is invisible, even to them. Now, here's the thing. Most guys wouldn't even call themselves a perfectionist. When you hear that word, you picture a neat freak, the guy who alphabetizes his bookshelf and color-codes his garage, and most men think, "That's not me," but that's not the kind of perfectionist I'm talking about.
Think about where perfectionism usually shows up for a man. You clean out the garage, and at some point it's done. You sit down to write an email, and you get the wording just right. You hit send, and it's finished. You grind on a project at work until it's complete, and then you get to step back and call it good.
Every one of those has a finish line. There's a moment where you cross it, the work is over, and you finally get to rest. A man brings that exact same wiring into his marriage.
He wants to get it right. He wants it complete, handled, perfect. But here's the difference, and this is the whole thing. In a marriage, there is no finish line. The work of loving another person is never finished. You can do real good work, make real progress, and then look up expecting to see the finish line, and it isn't there.
It was never there. You get a man who is genuinely doing the work, good work, and literally cannot see it, because he's measuring every single week against a finished, perfect marriage he's never going to arrive at. Not because he's doing something wrong, but because there's no arriving. There's no done.
And somewhere in his head, he's holding a picture of what that finished marriage is supposed to look like, the most connected, the most intimate, the most peaceful and loving marriage he can imagine, the marriage he thinks she wants, the marriage he wishes he had, That picture is his finish line, and every single week he holds his actual life up against it, and of course, his real week comes up short.
Everything comes up short of a fantasy. He has set the bar at a finish line that was never real. And I wanna be honest with you about that finish line, because this is the part that actually sets you free. No one ever reaches it. Not you, not me, not the most skilled relationship or marriage experts alive.
There is no marriage with no struggle, no friction, no hard conversation left to have, no more work to do. And I'm not telling you that to discourage you. I'm telling you because it's the truth, and because there's something beautiful in it once it really lands. The work was never the thing standing between you and the marriage you want.
The work is the marriage. It's what keeps it growing. It's what changes the two people inside it, and it's what cracks the door open to a deeper kind of connection than you had before. So when I ask one of these mens for a win, he isn't really scanning his week for something good that happened. He's scanning it for proof that he closed the gap between his real marriage and the perfect one in his head, and he can't close it because you can't reach a finish line that isn't there.
So he tells me he had no win.
But then on the other side of the man who says he had no win, there's another version. The other guy, he does see it, sort of. He says, "I had a small win this week," and then he describes something that is not small at all. He's repairing after a rough moment instead of letting it harden into another wall between them.
He's staying grounded and open when normally he'd shut down and pull away. His wife is softening toward him when usually she'd have to push him harder just to get him to hear her. He even mentions the two of them sitting next to each other at the end of the night,
Close, actually enjoying each other's company, and he files the whole thing under small because next to that perfect marriage in his head, it feels like nothing. These are two men. One says no win, one says small win, and they both have the same struggle. They're both standing in front of a bar set at a finish line no one could ever reach, and then deciding something must be wrong with them for not getting there.
The size of the win was never the problem. The bar is the problem.
[00:10:42] Why a Real Win Doesn't Register
So if the bar is the problem, the next question is, where did that bar come from? Why is it set so impossibly high in the first place? Well, for me, like I told you, it was engineering and then the firehouse. Years of being trained that my worth was tied to my results.
To get it right, you're good. To miss it, you came up short. And not just the work came up short, you came up short. That's what matters. Somewhere along the way, I stopped measuring the work, and I started measuring myself by the work. That's the thing I want you to understand, because there's a good chance you're carrying some version of that same wiring, even if your story looks nothing like mine.
Maybe it was a dad you could never quite satisfy. Maybe it was sports or the military or a job where good enough got you fired. Maybe it was just being the kid who learned early that love showed up when you got it right and pulled back when you didn't. Different roads, same place at the end. You learned that you're only as good as your last result, and when a man is wired like that, he drags it into his marriage without ever deciding to.
His worth as a husband is now tied to whether he's getting it right. So a good week doesn't feel like a good week. It feels like a test he barely passed. And a bad moment doesn't feel like a bad moment. It feels like proof that he's not measuring up as a man.
Now, think about what that does to a win. Your wife has a hard day, and instead of trying to fix it, you actually just listen. You don't jump in with solutions. You don't get defensive. You just let her have her feelings, and you stay with her in it, and maybe she feels a little better. But maybe the night doesn't magically turn around. She's not suddenly laughing and playful, and the two of you are up late talking about how much you love each other, and if you're honest, some part of you was hoping it would go exactly like that.
Some part of you thinks, "I did the right thing. I listened, so now she should feel better. She should be grateful. She should tell me what a good husband I am." That's the finish line again. And when that night doesn't wrap up in that perfect bow, it's easy to decide the whole thing didn't count. But look at what actually happened.
She's a human being. Sometimes it takes time to move through a hard day, and that has nothing to do with you. Meanwhile, the thing you did was exactly the right move. Think about where that night could have gone instead. The old you might have pulled away because she was in a bad mood or jumped in trying to fix her and gotten frustrated when it didn't work out until the whole thing tipped into a fight.
You sidestepped all of that. That is a real win. It just doesn't register because your worth is hooked to being the perfect husband, and all you can see is that you're still not there yet. So the good thing you just did slides right off you.
It doesn't count because in your gut, nothing counts until it's perfect. This is why I don't just tell these men they're doing better, I show them. I take the man who swears he had no win, and I point to the win sitting right there in his own words. I take the man who calls it small, and I show him how big it actually was.
Because somewhere along the line, these men, and probably you, learned that you have to earn your worth by getting it right, and you've been tying your value to it ever since. And here's the cruel part. The better you got at it, the more it proved the lie.
The more right and precise and dialed in you were, the more the world rewarded you. You got the praise. You got the raise, the promotion, the captain spot on the team, and every one of those rewards taught you the same thing all over again, that getting it perfect was the whole point. So look at what that does to you at home.
A hug from your wife, a peaceful afternoon where nothing goes wrong, a conversation that brings you closer instead of blowing up. To a man measuring himself against a finish line, those don't even land. But the man who can't see those things as the massive progress they actually are will stay stuck, convinced it's never going to get better, when the truth is, those are the wins.
Those are exactly the things we have to learn to see
[00:14:29] What a Real Win Actually Looks Like
So let me tell you about one of those wins. A while back, one of the men in our community shared what he called a small win. He had a good evening with his wife. They were in the kitchen, things were calm, and at some point she walked over and gave him a hug.
That was it. That was the win he almost didn't bother to mention. But what he said next, he almost tossed off like it was nothing. He said he couldn't remember the last time she had hugged him like that. Couldn't remember. We're talking months, maybe longer. Sit with that for a second.
This is a man whose marriage had gotten so cold and so distant that a hug from his own wife had become a rare thing. And then one night she crossed the room and put her arms around him. That hug was not small. That hug was the door cracking open.
That was months of him doing unglamorous behind the scenes work, showing up, keeping his temper, not pushing, not pulling away, and his wife finally feeling something thaw enough that she wanted to be close to him again. That hug was her telling him without a single word that it's working.
When he shared it, the other men saw it right away. They told him, "Brother, do you understand what just happened here?" And you could feel it land for him. He was so locked onto the marriage he didn't have yet that he nearly missed the marriage that was coming back to life right there in his arms. That's what a real win looks like. It's almost never some big breakthrough you've been waiting for. It's a hug. It's a conversation that a year ago would have ended with somebody sleeping on the couch, and this time it just didn't.
And it's an afternoon where you put the phone away and actually enjoyed each other.
Naming that as a win it's finally measuring the right thing. It's measuring what it actually took instead of the gap to a fantasy that was never real in the first place.
[00:16:13] Stop Aiming for Perfect. Aim for Better.
Now, we've talked about learning to see the wins, but I'd be lying to you if I said every week is a win. Some weeks you're going to blow it. Some weeks, you're going to lose your temper, say the thing you swore you'd stop saying, shut down right when she needed you. That's coming. So what do you do with that?
Well, this is where I went wrong for years, and I see other men do the exact same thing. When I had a bad moment, a bad day, a bad week, I'd let that inner critic loose. I'd say things to myself I would never say to another living soul. I figured if I was just hard enough on myself, I'd punish myself into being better.
That's what the engineer in me believed. That's what the firefighter in me believed. Punish the mistake, and you get rid of the mistake. But watch what actually happens when you beat yourself up like that. You don't get better. You get tired, you get discouraged, and eventually a man just quits. He decided he's never going to be the husband he's supposed to be, so why keep killing himself trying?
The self-punishment doesn't fuel the work, it ends the work
So if punishing myself only ended the work, what actually fuels it? Well, it took me a long time and a lot of help from other people to figure that out, and here's what I learned. What fuels the work is grace.
Giving myself grace when I mess up, accepting that I'm not perfect and never will be. Learning to look at the places I fell short, the moments I got it wrong, not as a verdict on who I am, but as something to learn from, a chance to understand myself a little bit better, and to be a little bit more flexible with myself the next time around. Because most things, especially in a relationship, are not black and white.
They're not right and wrong. It's not math or engineering where you get one clean answer and you're done. I had to go easier on myself. I had to love myself through it. I had to give myself grace.
Now, I wanna be careful here because I know what some of you are thinking. Giving yourself grace sounds like an excuse. It sounds soft. It sounds like letting yourself off the hook. It is not. Grace is not lowering the bar.
Grace is being honest about what you actually are, which is a human being, and a flawed one. The sooner I accepted that I am a flawed human, just like my wife, just like my son, just like the guy standing next to me at the grocery line, the clearer I could get about what real progress even looks like.
And this is what matters. Grace isn't the end of the work, it's what lets you keep doing the work. When you can have a bad week and not decide that you're a bad person, you show up again the next week. You can't run a marathon if you stop to punish yourself at every mile. You'll never finish.
Compassion isn't the soft option. It's the only one that lasts. So when I have one of those bad moments now, my goal isn't to turn that inner critic loose on myself, it's to find the people and the places where I can talk about it, process it, and let go of this idea that I'm supposed to be perfect. And then I take the next step.
One step, one day at a time, in the direction I actually want to go. Because the goal was never perfect. You're not trying to get from where you are right now to some flawless marriage, because that marriage doesn't exist, and it never did. The goal is better. Better than yesterday, better than last year, better than you were five years ago.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
[00:19:22] Awareness, Action, Accountability
If any of this hit home, let's not just leave it sitting, uh, here as a nice idea. Let's turn it into something you can actually do this week. Start with awareness because you can't count a win you won't let yourself see.
This is the question I want you to answer. Think back over this past week, just this one week. Where is the win you already decided was too small to count? Maybe it was a conversation that didn't turn into a fight. Maybe it was your wife softening towards you even a little.
Maybe it was you keeping your mouth shut when the old you would have made it worse. Find the win, write it down, and call it what it actually was: a win
Now here are the steps I want you to take this week.
Number one, start a list. At the end of each day, write down one thing that went right in your marriage that day. Just one. It can be tiny. She laughed at your joke. You didn't snap when you wanted to. You asked about her day and actually listened. Do it every day this week, and on the last day, read the whole list back. You're training yourself to see what's already there.
Number two, change what you measure against. When you catch yourself grading your marriage, Stop holding it up against the perfect version in your head. Hold it up against where you actually were a year ago or five years ago. Then name one specific way it's better now.
Number three, catch the self-punishment while it's happening. When you have a rough moment this week and that inner critic starts in on you, call it out. Say to yourself, "That's just the perfectionist talking." Then take one small step forward instead of sitting in it.
Number four, say a win out loud to somebody. Don't keep it locked in your own head where you'll talk yourself out of it. Tell your wife, tell a friend, tell another man who gets it. Let someone reflect it back to you so it actually lands.
And that brings me to the last thing. Remember those men I told you about at the very start of the episode, the ones I ask every single week to set an intention, to pick one thing in their marriage and commit to it, to think through what's going to get in the way and to get clear on why it even matters, and then at the end of the week, come back and name a win?
That ritual right there is the whole game. That's the work, and it's almost impossible to do on your own, sitting alone in your head where the perfectionist gets the only vote. And that's exactly what Better Husband Academy is for. It's where I sit down with other men every single week, and we walk through that together.
We set the intention, we name what's likely to trip us up, and at the end of one of those weeks, we help each other see the wins that are actually there, the ones we'd all talk ourselves out of on our own. We get a deeper understanding of why we're so hard on ourselves and we take the next step together.
If you saw yourself anywhere in this episode, come join us. Go to betterhusbandacademy.com or click the link in the show notes. I'd love to have you in the room.
[00:21:59] Closing Takeaway
Now, here's what I want you to take away from this episode. If you're actually applying what you're learning, taking steps towards more connection, getting honest about your own reactivity, changing the patterns that used to end in a fight, then you are very likely a better husband today than you're letting yourself believe.
The things you keep brushing off as too small to count are the actual work. It's adding up even on the weeks you can't feel it. And I know how hard that is to believe when you're the one living it, so ease up on the man who's doing the work. Give yourself a little of the same grace you'd hand anyone else who is trying this hard.
Then keep taking the next step. Better than yesterday, better than last year, better than five years ago, and that's not settling for less. It's how a man becomes who he wants to be one honest day at a time.
Now, before I let you go, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being here, for sticking with me through this whole episode, and for being the kind of man who shows up to do this work in the first place.
It matters more than you know. You're listening to Better Husband. I'm Angelo Santiago, and I'll see you on the next one.
