099|Your Wife Walked Out. Here's What to Do Before She's Ready to Talk

[00:00:00] Why Pushing for Answers Backfires

A man I work with and his wife are living in separate homes right now, and a few weeks ago, he shared with me that they'd spent some time together. She came to visit, and it went well. They went out. They held hands. She told him she loved him, and for a few days, it felt like the marriage he remembered.

Then Friday came, and she was getting ready to leave, and he sat her down because he had to know. Where are you at? What's the story here? How do you want this to go? What are we doing? He'd been carrying those questions the whole visit. He just hadn't asked them until she was about to leave, and she didn't have answers.

And then she left, and a few days after that, she stopped responding again. He'd send a text, nothing back. Call, nothing back.

Then he shared something with me. He said, "I know I hammer her with this. I ask her how she's feeling. I ask where her head's at. I ask when the next visit is, and then I ask again." And he said, "I've even asked her if she can see how much I've changed." What he couldn't see until we talked it through is that the more he asked, the less she wanted to be asked.

She started bracing for the question before he opened his mouth. All that asking was meant to bring her closer, and it was pushing her further away.

If your wife has moved out, or she's asked you for space, or you're sleeping in separate rooms in the same house right now, you may already know that feeling. Something in you says, "Do something. Say something. Get through to her before she pulls away any further."

So today I want to talk about what that instinct is actually doing to your marriage and what to do instead. Because most of what you'll find out there for a man in your position is about what to say to her, the right text, the right conversation, the thing that finally makes her understand. But better words might not be the thing that's missing right now.

By the end of this episode, you're going to understand how your marriage actually got here, which is a different question than what do I do now, and why it comes first. You're going to know what ownership really asks of you and why it has to happen before you say a word to her. You're also going to learn how to open communication back up without pushing on her, including what to do if she isn't talking to you at all right now, and you're going to know why this work is worth doing without any guarantee about how it ends.

And if your wife hasn't gone anywhere, if she's still in the house and things are just hard, this is for you, too. What I'm going to describe is how to become someone your wife can talk to. You don't have to wait for a crisis to want that. So stick around. You don't want to miss this one.

[00:02:30] The Men I've Sat With in This Exact Spot

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 The client I mentioned at the beginning of this episode isn't unusual.

He's one of a handful of men I've sat with on calls over the past several months, and all of them are somewhere in this. Inside of Better Husband Academy, there are men living this exact situation right now, and there are men who've been through it and are really proud of the marriages they've built since.

Different calls, different weeks, different marriages, same struggle. There's a man whose wife wants to talk. She's the one bringing it up. Every time they speak, it's about the state of the marriage, where things went wrong, what it's been like for her, and he struggles during every single one of those conversations.

It's heavy, and he checks out partway through, and he knows he does it.

Then there's the man who found this podcast just before his wife left. After she was gone, he joined Better Husband Academy and started doing the work for real. And he waited a little while before he told her any of it, and when he finally did, she was glad to hear it. But he told me he wishes he'd done it sooner.

Another man came to me carrying 30-some years of it, decades of getting defensive, of not being able to take the blame for anything, and he asked me straight out, "How do you even repair that much?" And he'd been trying. He'd been telling her he recognized what he was like, naming it, acknowledging it, what he'd done, and it didn't seem like it was working.

And then there's a man whose wife walked out, and he's been careful. He's kept contact to the practical stuff, the kids, the schedule, the car. And he asked me the question you may be asking yourself right now if you're in his situation: If she doesn't reach out first, when does something have to change? A week?

A month? A year? And how do I do it without pushing? Now, I've never been in the same situation as some of these men, and maybe not the one that you're in either. My wife never walked out that door. She never asked me to leave, and we never lived in separate homes. So if you're sitting in a house by yourself right now, I'm not going to tell you I know exactly what that feels like, but what I do know is the brink of it.

My marriage got right up to the edge of divorce. We had to face things I'd spent years not facing, and they were the hardest things I've ever had to look at. There were long stretches where we weren't speaking to each other at all in the same house. We spent some nights sleeping in separate rooms, and the way we talked to each other, when we talked at all, was broken in ways I didn't know how to fix.

So I may not have your exact situation, but I do know what it's like to be unsure if your marriage is going to make it and to be the reason it's in question.

[00:05:07] The Signs Were There All Along

So let's start with where you actually are, which is probably not where you think. When a man calls me in this spot, the first thing out of his mouth is always some version of, "What do I do?

What do I say to her? Should I send her something? Should I give her space, or is that giving up?" He wants a move, and I understand why, because a move feels like being in control, and right now he doesn't have any. But there's a question underneath that one, and it has to come first. And it's not, "What do I do?"

It's, "What happened?" And I don't mean the last fight. I don't mean the night she told you she was done or the afternoon you came home and her things were gone. Those are the end of something. I'm asking about the years that built up to it. And for a lot of guys, this is genuinely confusing. You might be sitting there right now thinking you didn't see it coming, that it came out of nowhere, that she seemed fine, and then one day she wasn't.

I've heard that from a lot of men, and I guess most of them meant it. But when a man says it came out of nowhere, what's usually true is that it came from things he wasn't paying attention to. The information was there. It was in the complaints he heard as nagging. It was in the same argument showing up every month.

It was in the time she brought something up, and he explained why she shouldn't feel that way, and she stopped bringing it up. It might have been from years of her talking to him less and less, and him taking that to mean that things were fine. Most of us were never taught to read any of that. But the information was there, and that means you can go back and find it now.

And that's important because if this came out of nowhere, then there's nothing to work on. It's random, or it's her, or it's bad luck. But if it came from somewhere, then there's something you can actually look at. So before you figure out what to say to her, figure out what happened between you two.

What were the fights actually about underneath the subject? What did she ask for more than once? What did you hear as criticism that might have been a request? What did she stop asking for, and when did she stop? If you're still in the same house, you have more to work with than you think because some of it is still happening right now.

You cannot repair something you haven't looked at, and right now, you might be the only person in this marriage willing to look. And none of this happened in one moment. It's not going to be undone in one moment either.

[00:07:28] Own Your Part Before You Say a Word

So once you've looked at what happened, the next thing you'll want to do is tell her about it.

But don't, not yet. This is where I watch men lose ground they can't get back, and the reason is desperation. She's gone or she's going, and everything in you is screaming to fix it. So you take what you just figured out, and you rush it to her. "Look, I see it now. I know what I did. I'm working on it." And she's likely heard you say something like that before.

She's heard the promises that you were going to change. She's heard you tell her you understand what she's been asking for, and then watched nothing different happen. There's a good chance she's heard all of it before more than once. That's a hard moment to be in because you mean it now more than you've ever meant it, more than you've ever meant anything.

But you're saying it from a place where you'd say almost anything, and she knows that. A man who's desperate will agree to whatever gets him through the next week. She's not weighing your words against your sincerity. She's weighing them against every other time the words came and the behavior didn't follow.

So ownership has to happen before the message, alone in the mirror where nobody's watching and nobody's going to respond to it. Ownership is one of those words that gets used a lot, so let's define it. What it means is being able to say in plain language what you did and the impact it had on her and on your marriage.

Not what you meant or what was going on at the time, but what you did and what it was like to be on the other side of it.

Maybe you couldn't stay in a hard conversation, so she learned to stop starting them. Maybe you explained why she shouldn't be upset, so she stopped telling you when she was. Maybe you were there in the house, but you weren't really there, and she spent years married to a man whose attention was somewhere else.

Whatever yours actually is, that's what it takes, behavior and then impact. The behavior part you can usually work out on your own if you're honest. The impact is harder. Truly understanding it is something you can sometimes only get from her, and she may not be available to ask right now, or she may not wanna talk to you about it yet.

So start with what you can. What have the fights been about? What did she say when she was angry, the thing you dismissed at the time because of how she said it? She may not have said it cleanly. People rarely do, but conflict carries information about what's missing, and you've got years of it to go through.

Because only once you're able to see and own your part in what got you here are you ready to take the steps towards opening communication with her.

[00:10:00] Respecting Her Boundary Isn't Doing Nothing

So once you've done the looking and you've done the owning, now what? Now you have to open communication back up, and this is where it gets genuinely tricky because it depends entirely on what she's giving you to work with. Let's take the hardest version first because it's a lot of you. She's told you not to contact her, or she hasn't said it outright, but you've reached out a few times and gotten nothing back, and you got the message.

I know what that does to a man. Every day of silence feels like the marriage is getting further away, and every instinct says, "Try again. Send one more. She just needs to hear it from you one more time." But think about what she's actually receiving when you do that.

She's asked you for one thing, space. And if you're contacting her anyway every day or trying to, the message she's getting isn't, "I love you, and I'm changing," the message is, "He still isn't listening to me, and if I can't hold this line with him, what else won't he respect?" She's put up a wall. When you push on the wall, she builds it higher, and the thing you're using to prove you've changed is the same thing that proves you haven't.

I get why you're doing it. It's love, and it's fear, and it's wanting her to know how much you're willing to change. I'm not questioning any of that, but it isn't the message she's getting, and that message is the only one that counts right now. So respect the boundary. Actually respect it. Not respect it for four days and then reach out anyway.

And this is the part where men hear me wrong. Respecting the boundary is not doing nothing. There's work you do in that space. You work on yourself so that when she's ready to talk again, you're somebody she can actually talk to. Think about that. At some point, there's going to be a conversation. Maybe she calls.

Maybe you're both at your kid's game, and there's a moment. And then what happens? Who shows up? If nothing has changed in you, you'll run the same patterns that got you here. You'll get defensive when she says a hard thing, or you'll get desperate and start pleading, or you'll shut down and go quiet like you always have.

So you have to learn to do something different. The most important thing in all of this is that you don't wait to practice in the moment. You have to practice before it however you do that. On a group call with other guys, out loud looking at yourself in the mirror, in the 10 seconds after somebody cuts you off in traffic when you feel the urge to react, and you take a breath instead.

That's all the reps, and you're either putting them in now or you're not. Then there's the other side of this. For the men who have some contact, maybe it's about the kids or logistics, and you're wondering how long you keep talking about school pickup before anything real happens, that's where you plant a seed.

A seed isn't a demand or a speech. It sounds like this. "I know you asked for space, and I'm not trying to push against that. I want you to know that I've been looking hard at myself and at my part in how we got here. At some point, I'd like to talk about it, and I'm not asking you to decide anything right now."

And then you stop.

You let it sit. Letting it sit means you don't follow up the next week asking her, "Did you think about what I said?" That stops being a seed the moment you follow it. That's pushing again. So two things about that. Say it in person in a real conversation, not in a text and not in an email, because writing gets read in whatever voice she's already hearing you in, and say it when things are calm, not in the 10 minutes after a fight when you're worked up and she's already pulling away.

[00:13:26] Why Getting Her Back Can't Be the Only Goal

Now I have to tell you the hard part. None of this comes with a guarantee. You can do every bit of what I've described, look honestly at how you got here, own your part without excuses, respect her space, plant the seed at the right moment, and let it sit, and she can still decide that she's done.

I've watched men do this work all the way through and not get the marriage back, and that happens, and I'm not going to lie and tell you otherwise. So the question is whether you'd do it anyway. Are you willing to do this work without any guarantee that the marriage will be saved? I ask men that, and I usually get a long pause, because the honest first answer for most of them is no.

They're doing it to get her back, and that's why they showed up, and that's why they're listening to this.

Now, I understand why a man would want to do this work only to get her back, but having that as the one and only goal tends to backfire.

When getting her back is the only reason you're doing it, there's a deadline on it, whether you say so or not.

Every week she doesn't respond, it feels more like it isn't working. Eventually, he's doing the work and watching her the whole time for a sign that it's working, and when the sign doesn't come fast enough, he quits, or he gets angry because he did everything and nothing changed, and she notices.

A man working on himself to get a result has something anxious running underneath everything he does. She feels that pressure even when he's saying all the right things.

One of the men I work with came at this from years of defensiveness, and he found his way to something that took the weight off.

He realizes that these changes were worth making regardless of who he ends up with. Better man, better father, better friend, and he told me that once he saw it that way, a lot of the fear and pressure about saving his marriage came off him. And I know that sounds backwards, but doing it for himself didn't make him care less about his wife.

It's what made it last. It's what let him stop trying to manage her reaction and actually change. And there's one more thing, which is that you can't become a man worth coming back to as a tactic.

If the only reason you're changing is to get her back, then the man she'd be coming back to is a man who only changes when he wants something.

She'd be coming back to the same guy with a temporary better behavior, and it wouldn't last through the first real fight you have after she's home. So do the work because you want to be this man.

[00:15:49] Awareness, Action, Accountability

Now, if you're still with me and something in this made you rethink what you've been doing, then let's not leave it as an idea. Let me help you with an awareness question, action steps, and accountability for this week. To deepen your awareness on this, sit with one question this week. What has your wife asked you for more than once that you never actually changed?

Not the biggest fight you ever had, the thing that kept coming back. It might have come out as a complaint, or an argument about something else entirely, or the same tired conversations every few months. I want you to write that down, what it was, and what you did about it the last time she brought it up.

Sit with the gap between those two answers. Now, here are the action steps I want you to take this week. Number one, write down what happened. Not what she did, what you did, and the impact it had on her and the marriage. Give yourself real time with this one. An hour, alone, with a pen. For each thing you write, follow it with the effect it had on her.

"I stopped listening when she brought up money, so she stopped telling me when she was worried about it." Behavior, then impact. If you can't name the impact, you haven't finished the thought. Number two, find the requests inside the fights. Go back through the arguments you've had over the last couple of years, and for each one, ask what she was actually asking for underneath how she said it.

She may not have said it kindly, but look for the requests anyway. Most men find the same two or three things showing up over and over, and that's your list. Number three, take one thing off that list and start doing it this week. Not talking about it, doing it. If she asked you for years to handle something without being asked, handle it.

If she asked you to stop explaining and just listen, then the next time anybody in your life brings you something hard, listen without explaining. You can practice this with your kids, with a coworker, with a friend. You do not need her in the room to build the skill. And number four, decide what you're going to say when she's ready to talk and say it once.

If you have any contact at all, plant your seed now while you're calm. Say it in person, keep it short, ask nothing of her, and then let it sit. If you have no contact right now, write it down and keep it ready. The point is that you're not improvising in the moment you've been waiting for.

For accountability, I want you to notice something about every man I told you about today.

Not one of them figured this out by himself in his living room or listening to a podcast in his car. They were on a call saying it out loud to other men who are in some version of the same thing, and getting asked the questions that made them see it. That's what Better Husband Academy is. It's where those men are exactly there every single week working on this.

If you're doing this alone right now, come and join us. Go to betterhusbandacademy.com or click the link in the show notes for accountability on what we covered today.

[00:18:40] Closing Takeaway

Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. Think about the men I've told you about today. The man who kept asking his wife where they stood right until she walked out the door.

The man who struggles through every conversation his wife wants to have about their marriage. The man who found this podcast just before his wife left and waited to tell her he'd started doing the work. The man who spent years telling his wife exactly what he'd done wrong and couldn't understand why it didn't seem to be working.

And the man who keeps things to the kids and the schedule, wondering how long he's supposed to wait.

None of them thought what they were doing was making things worse.

They were scared. They loved their wives, and they wanted to know there was still a chance their marriage could survive. Every one of us would want the same thing. And that's where this whole episode comes together. What she's waiting to find out is whether anything about you is actually different. The only way to answer that is to do the work on yourself before she ever asks.

So the question isn't what do I say to her? It's this. If she called you tomorrow and said she was ready to talk, would you be ready? Would the man who picked up that phone be any different than the man she left? That's the one thing you can do something starting today.

Thank you for staying with me on this one, especially if you're in the worst of it right now, and the last thing you needed to hear was that your instincts have been working against you. That takes something, so keep going.

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