Exhausted Wives, Bewildered Husbands: Why your marriage is hurting, and how to blossom as a couple

own need as a way to help the other person, an outwardly selfless gesture which secretly fulfills what they’ve been craving. But because the other partner is

Neither can really believe there’s any other way for them to behave and they begin to see their behavior as a natural response to their partner’s choices.

Your exhausted wife is testing how serious you are. She’s firing all around you to force you to panic and draw the hidden weapons she knows are there. She’s working hard to break you now while you’re still beyond her defensive lines and can’t do much damage.

Simmering dissatisfaction stews just under the surface of their desperate clawing for approval, and this resentment explodes to the surface in patterns of frequent displays of hurtful anger, followed by a plunge deeper into doormat behavior as they fearfully seek to avoid abandonment for having lashed out.

Rather than stating their own need for intimacy, each partner has tried offering sex to the other as a means of making up when their partner seems upset at them.

behavior, the same rules apply as before. Own the lapse. Own the mistake. Admit the mistake aloud and take full responsibility for it. Don’t even mention her behavior as the reason you lapsed.

By fulfilling the perceived needs of others, the detached person is able to build temporary worth, enough to warrant a reward. The reward they want is for their needs to be met. But they’ll never tell anyone their needs, and won’t cop to them even if asked bluntly, “Is this what you want?”

This is especially obvious when detached husbands try to have sex with their wives but believe they can’t ever explicitly ask.

Refusing to share needs with a partner means that partner will forever lack confidence and feel like a failure in their own marriage.