Transcription
So today I want to talk to you guys a little bit about something that we struggle with as men, and that is understanding what is going through a woman's head when she decides that she wants to leave you, because it doesn't make any sense. It's not rational. Any thinking person would argue that there are a million reasons not to leave, and yet they leave. So, what the hell's going on there?
And then I want to talk to you guys a little bit about the regret that these women inevitably are going to feel. I'm making this video so you can show it to some woman who's getting ready to leave you, or leave someone that you are friends with, because I don't think they fully understand exactly what they're getting themselves into. And I've spoken to lots of women who have left their husbands, and almost all of them believe that they made a mistake. This is life 2.0. Let's talk about it.
I have mentioned in other videos how women experience fear differently than men, but I don't think we understand how much differently. There are things that cause fear in women that we men do not understand at all. Just to be politically correct here, we're not going to use the word fear. We're going to use the word anxiety. Although these words are interchangeable, anxiety is more politically correct because you can get anxiety. It's like a disease being anxious. It's a treatable condition, but fear is really what it is. Neurosis is another term that is used commonly regarding what I'm talking about here. Neurosis is having a fear of something and not being able to identify what it is. It's just a general state of fear.
Women today experience more anxiety and neurosis than probably at any other time in history. And the reason for that is that they have been given more, um, agency than they've ever been given in history. And quite honestly, a lot of them struggle with this. This is something that men have been learning to do since the beginning of time. We have benefited from observing other men and how they act with agency. Historically, women have had to look to other women for their behaviors. And prior generations of women did not have a lot of agency. And so when that agency is now hefted upon generation after generation of women, they struggle. They struggle with how to manage their own lives.
Women are drawn to men because men provide leadership. I know this is going to be controversial. I know a lot of women aren't going to like hearing this, but quite honestly, a lot of women, most probably, really need some leadership. And without it, they feel unmoored. They feel like they don't know what their life is about. They don't know where they're going or how to get there. And when they have a man with healthy leadership skills in their life, they feel comforted. They feel at ease.
So why is it they leave reasonably good men? Well, what men don't understand is that what causes women fear is when they are afraid that either their condition or their man is going to fail them at some point. And I say their condition, I mean their lifestyle, the way that they are being cared for. So if, for example, there are financial problems in your household, that is a fear that runs extremely deep for women. Men might see it as a problem that needs to be solved. Women will see it as a threat to their existence, to their well-being, to their ability to continue living in this situation. And they will bail on you when they feel anxious or neurotic about money. And if you as a man are in charge of making sure that the money is safe and that she's safe and that money is not there when she thinks she needs it, or she feels insecure about it, then you will bear the brunt of that. You will be to blame for that whole situation.
There are lots of other ways that they feel unsafe. Unironically, if you're spending more time trying to earn money, trying to build a business, or working extra time at work to push your career forward so that you guys can have a better way of life, deal with your money problems, well, she will feel like she's not the center of your universe anymore. She will feel threatened by your time away from her. She will feel like there is something or someone more important than her in your life. This is a threat. This is what she sees. She feels unimportant. And that sense of unimportance, she sees as an existential threat because she needs you to think that she is the most important thing in your life. And if any indication, regardless of how you actually feel in the real world, but any indication that she has that she interprets as you being distracted by something else or someone else will be seen as an existential threat to your relationship from her perspective. These are things that will cause her to go try to find another man.
Women always have that thought in their head because in our society, women choose and men beg. So women think that they can just bail if things aren't going the way they want them to go. If they feel that uneasiness, that little bit of anxiety of neurosis, that fear that underlies their every waking moment, then they will choose another man, someone who will make them feel safe, someone who will satisfy that. And of course, this other man only exists in their head for the most part. The vast majority of women have no idea who this man is going to be. They just know that you're not the one for whatever reason.
Other ways that women feel ignored or undervalued and thus threatened is when you don't anticipate their needs. This goes back to the whole mind-reading thing we talked about before. So, if you're not anticipating what she actually needs and thinking ahead three steps, then you're not thinking of her as the center of your universe, because she thinks and compares you to the behaviors that she would do for her for you if the situation were reversed. Even though she may never actually do these things, but she thinks that you should be the one anticipating, you know, gift-giving and, um, special nights out and date nights and, you know, maintaining the relationship and going, you know, up above and beyond to make sure that she's satisfied and happy with everything in your life.
Another thing that women do is they tear men down when that man has not anticipated her needs or has not in some way met her needs. So, if a woman tells you you need to do something and you do it once and then you forget to do it the next time or the time after that, well, she's going to start a spiral of negative thought about you. She's going to say things to you that are critical and judgmental. She is going to be, um, unknowingly emasculating you, thinking that you're not good enough. That's the message she's conveying. Even though those may not be the exact words that she's using, that is the message she's conveying. So that begins this spiral of negative thought, and she's going to ruminate on that negative thought for quite some time, convincing herself repeatedly that you just couldn't possibly love her the way she needs to be loved because you were not doing the things that she needs you to do to feel loved. So it's very clear that you're just not the man for her.
And all these things add up to her rationale for leaving you and leaving your marriage, maybe leaving your kids. She panics. She thinks that she's in danger on some very deep, visceral level. That there is something terribly, terribly wrong here. And the only way it can be fixed is for her to leave, to find a new life, find a new man, find another path forward. She hears the tick-tock of time going by, and her dream of life is not coming true, and you are the primary decision that she made to help her make these dreams come true. And because you are not meeting those expectations, you are the problem, and as a result, she is going to leave you.
Now, I may be wrong on some of these issues. Some women might want to argue with me on this, but this has been my experience that women tend to fall into this trap of negative self-talk about their partners. And once that negative self-talk starts, it never stops until the relationship is gone and over with. And then, and then comes the regret.
The thing that most women don't realize is that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. And that women typically, over age, say 45, maybe close to 50, when they get a divorce, their standard of living drops by an average of 45%. Men's standard of living on average drops only about 21%. Women have this misconception in their mind that somehow by dividing what they have by two, that they are somehow going to come out ahead. Now, there are times when that happens. There are absolutely times when that happens. But by the time you get to be 45 or 50, and your kids are grown, and you're not going to get any child support, and you're going to be dependent on alimony, which is sort of something that is being addressed in the courts and starting to go away slowly but surely. And judges are less and less likely to grant huge amounts of alimony to women. Well, they find that they are having to start over, that they are literally starting from scratch. And lo and behold, there is not a long line of men waiting for them to come become free again. That these guys are not interested in a 45 or 50-year-old retread. They're looking at 24 to 30-year-old women who are, you know, looking for someone stable and financially, um, resourceful and has some experience. They're looking for men that are, um, reliable. And too often times these divorced women realize after the fact that they have given up on something that they probably should have held on to, that there was a valuable resource in that man, and they overlooked it, and they second-guess themselves for the rest of their lives. They're thinking, "God, I wish I had done something differently."
When my ex-wife left me, I did not think that I would ever have a deep and meaningful conversation with her again. Circumstances have allowed me to spend more time than I would have wanted learning more about what was in her head when she left. And just what I described to you, anxious, neurosis, um, just general fear of our conditions, fear that her life was slipping by, fear of missing out, if you will. And now she's almost 60 years old. Um, she's still attractive for a 60-year-old woman, but she's not a 25-year-old woman, you know what I mean? She, um, doesn't even necessarily know if she wants a relationship, except that she might need one in order to make ends meet. Financially, she's in a bind. Um, retirement is just around the corner, and she doesn't have any money saved. Like, the future for her looks bleak, quite honestly. And, um, and she regrets divorcing me more than anything in the world because since the time that she left, my life has shot up. I have gotten wealthier. I have become happier. My life is more on track, and hers has become cyclically more and more tumultuous. She has more anxiety, more neurosis, more, um, financial problems than she ever had before. So thinking that she was finding a solution by leaving ended up causing her to dig the hole even deeper. She made her problem so much worse than what it would have been if she had just stayed.
Ironically though, I think if she had stayed, she would have made my problems worse. So, so her leaving was actually a huge benefit to me. It opened up the doors for me to date lots and lots of women, and me as an older guy who has my finances in order and has my life together, find it quite simple to meet younger, attractive women and go out and do fun things with them. And, um, it just doesn't seem to work the other way around. I don't think that women understand that men become more valuable as they age, and women's value tends to drop as they age. And, um, yeah, so when they are middle-aged, 45, 50 years old, and they're thinking about bailing out on a marriage, they have no idea what they're opening up to them for themselves. The experiences they're about to have are going to be more difficult and more painful than anything they could have experienced living with a good man.
The financial regret is just part of the story because when you spend 20, 30, 40 years with someone, you get to know them really, really well. Now, sometimes that, um, knowledge can become contemptuous, and people do turn that way from time to time, but more often than not with most marriages, and this was true of my own marriage, it wasn't that, um, we didn't get along or that we weren't friendly with one another. It was just that there was no romance. There was no, I don't know, intimacy, no affection. None of the underlying components that make a relationship a romantic relationship. It was a business relationship. It was a roommate relationship. It was a co-worker relationship, but it was not a romantic relationship. But despite all of that, I still knew her better than anybody else. And she still knew me better than anyone else. And when she left, I felt that pain right away. I knew right away that my best friend, really my only friend, had just left. She had done an evaluation and determined that I did not measure up. That one person knew me better than anyone in the world, said, "Nope, I think I'm going to go find someone else to hang out with," which really dug deep. That, that, that was a knife in the heart. No question about it. But I got over it. You know, six years later, I'm on my feet, doing great. Have lots of friends, lots of women in my life. Feel really good about myself. She, on the other hand, does not have that. Um, she has a handful of girlfriends, and, you know, the way women are with each other, they can be a little too two-faced. Um, she does not have that one person in the world that she can trust no matter what. And unfortunately, um, I don't think she's going to find that again. You know, I don't think she's going to find that kind of a partner again. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope that I'm wrong. But, uh, for a lot of women, that's the case. They missed that, that, uh, bond, that common history, that, um, connection that made that relationship last as long as it did. And they took it for granted. They thought that it would always be available to them no matter what. And now that they're single and they're out there on their own and they're trying to figure things out at 50 or 60 years old, they're learning that it's much more difficult to find those kinds of relationships. They're not commonplace today. And, um, and I think that hurts just as much, if not more, than the financial loss that they've experienced. So the regret is real. It's one of those things that they, um, they never quite get over, and they will second-guess themselves for the rest of their lives. They'll go to their deathbed thinking, "Why did I do that? Why did I make that mistake? What was I thinking at that moment?"
A lot of these women believe that they're going to get a lot of financial windfall in a divorce. And although there are times when that happens, more often than not, that is not the case. They think they're going to get the house. And often times they go to court to have the judge say, "No, you guys got to split it. That means you're going to have to sell it and split the resources." And once you do that, after you subtract out the realtor's commissions and all the money you got to put into making the house, right, to get it sold, well, there ain't much left over. They think they're going to get the kids. And more and more states these days are saying 50/50 custody. You know, there's not going to be one parent that has primary custody. It's going to be 50/50 straight down the the line. And when it's 50/50, guess what? There may not be any child support involved. So, that's another issue they weren't expecting. So, financially, they're expecting the courts to deliver for them. And often times, the courts don't. And of course, by the time you get to 45 or 50, most people's kids are grown. They're out of school. They're doing their thing. They're living their lives. And so, there would be none of that anyway. Um, so women think they're going to "kaching" on the financial side, and they often times learn that they just aren't, that that money isn't forthcoming.
The five biggest regrets that women have following a divorce, especially, and this doesn't happen immediately. It usually happens about four or five years after the fact. The first one is not appreciating the loyalty they had in their husband, that they could count on him, that he wasn't going to be out running around, he wasn't cheating on them. Because now that they're out trying to meet new men, there's a lot of insecurity as they try to meet somebody. And these men will tell them anything in order to get them in the sack. And then they will abandon them. They'll, they'll ghost them almost right away. So, they are experiencing a lot of that insecurity in their relationships, and you, they didn't have that with you. They had a solid foundation to build a relationship on, and they regret not keeping that, not appreciating that as much as they should have.
They believe that the grass would be greener. Well, that is a funny one. They think that they can find somebody else at middle age that's going to deliver them that princess life they think they deserve. And obviously, that's just not going to happen. I think they're living their lives from the perspective of who they were before they met you, and they think that they can, um, somehow bag some new guy who's going to make all their dreams come true, and that's just not the case. Or even if they think that the grass is greener just being single. Yeah, I don't know if they've looked at the cost of living these days, but man, it's, it's never going to be greener with half the money. So yeah, that they're, they're just delusional in their belief systems about what divorce life is going to be like.
They regret not being better at communication, which is ironic because women believe that they are the best communicators in the world. But when a marriage fails, I think when they do some personal reflection, they realize that they probably were not the best communicator. Had many conversations with my ex-wife. Whenever we would have a conflict, she would just shut up. She would just seal up her mouth and she would walk away. She did not want to talk about it. And when I would try to get her to open up and talk to me about what's going on in her head, she did not want to reveal anything. And in fact, I remember on a few occasions she would give me an answer that was the worst kind of answer you can imagine. She'd say, "John, I can't tell you what I'm thinking because if I did, I think it would hurt you more than anything." Like, really? What the [ __ ] is that? Like, what kind of evil [ __ ] answer is that? Anyway, communication not necessarily their strong suit.
Number four, listening to bad advice from their friends. Oo god, if I had a dollar every time I heard some women say that their friends convinced them to do it, that they were going to get a divorce. My ex-wife had a friend who was going to get a divorce, and she had all her plans set up, and she was going to do it. She was going to pull the trigger. She was out. She was going to live this great, wonderful life. So, my wife divorced me, and her friend six years later is still married. Isn't there some irony there? Isn't that hilarious? I mean, honest to God, she convinced my ex-wife that leaving me was the right thing to do because she was going to leave, and they could be friends together, be single girls out on the town just living life large. Yeah, not so much.
And finally, just not understanding male psychology. That's probably the biggest one. The irony of ironies is that most women leave their husbands because of some fear, anxiety, neurosis about something that was going on in their marriage or in their lives that they felt like they were no longer the center of the universe to this man. So they leave him, and now they're on their own, and they're now they're more fearful and more neurotic than they ever were before. They have made the fear orders of magnitude worse than it was before. And that's what I'm seeing in my ex-wife. I believe that her fear is a big part of the problem that she's having with her health. I think that it's an underlying, at least contributing factor to what she's experiencing. And, um, that's the irony, you know. Is that they get out of the marriage because they're afraid that they're not getting all the things that they want. And then when they get out, they realize they have no path to finding the things that they really want in their lives. And if they had just stayed with the man that they were with initially, if they had just found a better path, if they had just dug a little bit deeper into understanding and into, um, compassion and trying to make the relationship work, if they had just given a little bit more, their lives could have been completely different, and they could have gotten everything that they ever wanted. Cuz most men are willing to do what it takes to keep a marriage whole.
Anyway, that's all I got for you today. Let me know what you think in the comments. If you like the video, please like and subscribe. If you know someone who might benefit from hearing this message, please share it with them. Till next time, stay healthy, and if you can, stay single.