Transcription
If I were to blackmail you by threatening your safety or your financial security or a loved one of yours with violence or in some other way and I were to be caught doing that, I would go to prison. No questions asked. That's a crime in all 50 states, federally, everywhere. It's a crime.
However, emotional blackmail in a marriage is something that happens quite frequently. Other forms of coercion and manipulation are also commonplace. Yet, for some reason, these forms of emotional abuse and technically crimes um generally go under reported. In fact, most men live with this concept in their head and never get around to even dealing with it, much less talking about it with other people.
In a recent survey, it was determined that one out of three men have complained that their wives have used the withholding of affection, i.e. sex as a way to manipulate them in their relationship. By the way, this is considered by most psychologists to be emotional and psychological abuse. There isn't a survey for this, but I tried to find out and I there's evidence that there's significant percentage of men who stay in bad marriages because they fear the repercussions of divorce. And I'm not talking about the separation from this woman that they're living with, but the financial repercussions, the social isolation from their children, and the emotional upheaval that would come from it.
So today I want to talk a little bit about how women use these levers of influence and manipulation to control men in very unhealthy and uh destructive relationships and hopefully talk a little bit about how men can avoid it, get around it, or at least have it recognized so that in a divorce is proceeding this information can come to light and these women can be seen as the I don't know if they're sociopaths or you know personality disorders or whatever they are um and that can be taken into account because emotional abuse by anyone's standards u no matter who's doing it should not be allowed should not be permitted should not be condoned and our court system doesn't seem recognize it just from testimony. You're going to have to provide some evidence. Let's talk about it.
The first sign that your relationship is in big trouble usually comes when you get the silent treatment. The silent treatment is a subtle form of manipulation and coercion. You're not sure exactly what you did wrong or even if it was wrong for that matter. All you know is that she's unhappy with something. And she's expressing her unhappiness through a lack of communication by withholding her attention, affection, all of it. This is coercion. This is a unhealthy, abusive way to communicate. Yet women do it all the time. And it's mind-blowing that it gets so under reported. You know, if you do any research on emotional abuse in marriage, you will find enormous amounts of studies that talk about how men use controlling tactics in relationships with women. You'll find very little about how how frequently women use these kinds of tactics. And I think the reason why is because men generally don't report it. We just accept it.
The next thing you're going to experience in this little coercive nightmare is um lack of affection. So, you reach out for her hand. and you try to um wrap your arms around her, give her some affection to see if maybe you can break the ice and get things back on track, maybe open up some pathways of communication, and she does not want you to touch her. Don't you touch me. Like, what the hell was that? Or she just withholds her hand, pulls away, walks away, turns her shoulder. This is another one of those very common experiences that men have in marriage that go largely under reported and is truly a form of abuse, psychological control. It's a um it's a practice that women use on the regular to get what they want to express some level of disapproval in their man. Withholding affection. Now, if she did that to a child, she would go to prison. withholding affection from a child or withholding attention from a child that results in uh in as a crime. Um using coercion to get what you want by withholding affection is perfectly okay when it's to a man.
The escalation moves on to sex. Yes. And I'm not talking about just not getting it one night. I'm talking about not getting it for a long time, weeks, months, even years. This is very common. I'm not talking about situations where, you know, she's got some physical problem, you know, and she's not capable of having sex. Um there's an illness or something along those lines. I'm talking about situations where the sex is being withheld intentionally because she's unhappy with something that's going on in your marriage. There's a behavior that you're doing that she doesn't like or there's a situation in your relationship she doesn't like. And so she has decided that because she's not happy about this behavior, whatever it is, or this situation, whatever it is, that you're not getting any. And the implication, of course, is that if you fix whatever it is that she deems as broken, that she will then open up the gateway to physical intimacy. This is blackmail, plain and simple. This should be a federal crime. Women should go to prison for this. This is uh completely accepted though in our society and women do it all the time. It is so common place that it's almost a meme. You know, you could probably see it in uh sitcoms, you know, where you're just not going to be getting any for a while. I remember in my marriage, I can't even remember why. I honestly don't. It was just one day she said, "We're just not having sex anymore." I'm like, "Fuck, what do you mean we're not having sex anymore?" I just don't feel the same about you anymore. I think we're just going to have sex. We're not going to have any more sex. Like, really? Like, you think that's a good plan? Like, that's going to work out well in the long run. Like, that's going to make everybody happy. Like, that's that's a good compromise. No. No. And what's interesting is that when you get into a marriage, you agree not to have sex with other people, that you're only going to have sex with one person. So now what happens when that one person says, "I'm not going to have sex with you anymore." Yeah. If you go outside the marriage to say, "Okay, I have some physical needs that I need to have addressed." Not to mention just a general need for some physical closeness and affection from a woman. Woo! Man, now you're the bad guy. You are absolutely the bad guy. There's no winning in that situation.
Since the very beginning, there has been this unspoken implication, this unspoken sort of rule that you kind of know that if she becomes unhappy enough, she can file for divorce. And it's in that filing for divorce that she has the ultimate leverage, just even the threat of it. So do it my way or else I will file for divorce. I will take the house and the kids and you know I can do it. You can hear it. You you know you either you've heard that or you know of other guys who have heard that. That is um is that blackmail or is that a coercion? Combination of the two. I don't know. But if a a criminal did that to you, you know, you better do these things or else I'm going to cause you enormous emotional and financial pain. I'm going to take your children in your house. If a criminal did that to you, well, they could go to prison for that. You know, some guy said, "I'm going to take your crim your your house and your children," they would uh they would go to prison for it. Your wife says it and not only will she not go to prison, but the courts will actually help her do it. Really? They will help her do it. They will they will facilitate this whole crime. It'll be completely legal and above board. Yes. Yeah. It's it's an irony.
It's amazing to me these days that anybody gets married at all. Any man gets married at all. I understand why a woman would do it. All the incentives are there for her to get everything that she wants. Usually by the time you hear the words you better do this or else I'm going to divorce you, take the kids and the house and have your money. By the time you hear some threat like that, she's already got the plan in place. She's probably already got access to the money that she plans to take. In fact, she may have already been taking a lot of your money already. She may have it stashed in her own little private account. She may already have a plan to get out. she may already have people in place, including maybe even another guy. Um, this happens frequently enough that in the comments I see it almost every single day where men will tell this story almost letter for letter and uh it's hilarious that somehow women inevitably by society standards are considered the victims in many of these situations. The truth of the matter is they are uh using methods of control and communication that by anyone's standards would be considered emotional abuse. And this is almost invisible in our media in our society. Or if it ever gets to get reported, most people assume that the man is exaggerating or lying or is in some way blowing this thing completely out of proportion. The courts will certainly not give you very much sympathy in this situation. Unless you have a lot of really super strong evidence to back it up. I'm talking about video and voice recordings of her threatening you with emotional abuse. You know, maybe that would do it. Maybe you could get a witness or two. That'll do it. But yeah, women are are almost famous for using these kinds of tactics in relationship and it just goes almost completely unreported.
One of the big problems that we men face in this situation is we are always trying to fix things. And when things start going south in your relationship, you think you can fix it. But if you're seeing these kinds of controlling, manipulative behaviors, there's a really good chance that you're not going to be able to fix it. Because if she's resorting to this way of communicating with you by withholding affection, withholding sex, um behaving in a way that um threatens the relationship, threatens your finances, threatens the children, um she has gone off her rocker. These are the actions of someone who is psychologically and emotionally unstable. There is no fixing this. You need to just cut your losses and get the out as quickly as you can.
The most important thing is to recognize these characteristics as early as possible before they get a chance to escalate to a point where real damage can occur. If you don't take these steps early, take steps to defend yourself, getting legal advice, financial advice, finding ways to insulate yourself from the potential damage that may be coming, there's a very good chance that you're going to get caught off guard cuz she's going to pull the trigger on whatever plan she has in mind, and you're going to be caught flatfooted. And >> this happens most of the time because we guys think we can fix it and we can make it right. We can turn things around. we don't want to face the reality that's going that we're facing right now that we don't want to come to terms with this reality that we're facing right now. And um it's a very tough place to be. Much better to bite the bullet early, take your hits, get this thing sorted out while you can before you lose control. Because once you lose control of this situation and she's driving the bus, she's pushing the agenda with lawyers and the courts, >> um you're going to get run over. you're going to get run over by it.
So, all right you guys, that's all I got for you today. I certainly hope you've enjoyed this video. If you have, please like and subscribe. And if you know someone who might be going through this or you might be having this kind of experience in their marriage, please share this video with them. Hopefully, we can save some poor guy from the experiencing the worst of this. All right, stay healthy.
If you can be the I'll never forget it because he asked with such sincerity, such honesty. There was no sarcasm, no cynicism, nothing like that in his voice. He just asked very simply, "John, are they all crazy? Has it always been like this? Have we just been been pretending for generations, for thousands of years, that women are normal? Because every woman I've ever known, I would have to describe as clinically insane. Now, I didn't know how to quite answer that question cuz I don't think all women are clinically insane, but based on his experience, I could definitely see why he would come to that conclusion. There definitely seems to be something about the change in women when they get that ring on their finger. Don't know why it happens, but it certainly does.
So, I dove into this a little bit. Read a couple of articles in Psychology Today and things like that, and they offer some interesting perspectives on why women change so much when they get that ring on their finger. Part of it is what you think. A lot of what they suspect or what the psychologists came up with was exactly what guys on this channel have already come up with, but some of it was kind of interesting, so I thought I would share it with you. So, let's talk about it. Do wedding rings are wedding rings toxic to women? I guess we'll see, won't we?
His story could have been my story and it could be a lot of your stories too. He meets her. He dated her for a very long time. I want to say for about 5 years they were together. He knew her very well. He felt like he had vetted her as well as any woman could possibly have been vetted. Their values were on the same page. Their sexual energy was on the same page. They enjoyed doing the same kinds of things with their spare time. They had similar financial goals. Like it just seemed like it was a, you know, a match made in heaven. But there was a yellow flag, maybe a red flag. So, um, shortly after they get engaged, he notices some changes in her behavior and he called off the wedding temporarily. And now he got obviously put back on, but it was enough to shake him up. Her attitude towards him changed. Um, her personality seemed to change a little bit, but when he started talking about maybe delaying or putting off the the wedding, she changed back into phase one. So, what's going on here? What exactly is happening? Um, you guys would call it masking. Psychologists didn't call it masking. Um, they had a a better word for it. Psychology Today called it her pleaser identity, which to me is just insane. First of all, the lack of accountability just goes throughout the whole system. You know what I mean? When women act like psychopaths, everyone says, "Well, it's obviously your fault. you're obviously the one who has a problem. It couldn't possibly be her, but no, they have identified they have this pleaser identity that they go into when they're dating and um they use this pleaser identity to try to accommodate someone that they care very deeply about. So, I I understand it on one level. You can see it from a very authentic standpoint where they're just trying to be the best person they can be for you during this courtship. However, for some reason, when they enter into marriage, this pleaser identity kind of changes. I liken it to um when you give a child a toy, you know. So, for her, for example, in this particular case, imagine that um she's a child and she finds out what her Christmas gift is, say at Thanksgiving. So, she just feels very, very confident. She feels really, really good. Maybe she's not going to behave her best because she knows the gift is already in the bag. Do you know what I mean? So maybe Santa Claus isn't going to return that gift, if you know what I mean, because she her mom's already told her that's what she's getting for Christmas. Well, when she gets that gift, you know, come Christmas Day, after a while, as all toys do, they become a little boring. You know, they're not quite as exciting and fun. And usually by Easter, yeah, you're kind of done with that toy. You're not playing with it nearly as much as you used to. And I think that's kind of what happens with women in marriage. So the toy here is the commitment. And I think men need to recognize how valuable this commitment is. It's an extremely valuable commodity. And it should not be taken lightly. I think too many men don't understand how incredibly important this commitment is and they need to hold this commitment in reserve if not forever as long as humanly possible because as soon as they relinquish this this commitment which in this analogy is the gift well then there is going to become a sense of uh confidence and perhaps even um entitlement that goes with it there. It's a uh it's like they just know that this is coming say during the the engagement like this woman was with with my client. And so their behaviors start to change. They start to become more like the person that they're going to be when they no longer need to have that pleaser identity on the um but once you go actually past the wedding once the ring is on the finger that's when the pleaser identity dissolves completely and what you get is something completely different.
Marriage acts like a mirror. It reveals the true identity of the person who is in it. Part of it has to do with the pressure associated with marriage. When you apply pressure to a material, you will extract whatever is inside. And when many people, not just talking about women, but women in particular in this case, when they enter into marriage, the pressure is on now. Now they feel like they need to live up to some societal image of what it means to be a married woman and a wife and all that stuff. It also mixes in with the lack of need to be in that pleaser identity. So, they're no longer trying to be your best friend. They're not trying to win your approval any longer. They feel like they can drop that identity. They can be more themselves, but now they're taking on this new identity of what they believe or what they perceive a good wife, mother/ whatever role they're they're identifying with is. And of course, this is just a mix of cultural garbage that they have in their head. potentially whatever their parents did with them, the way their mother acted, whatever they observed in their environment over the years now is coming, you know, is seeping out of them and it is foreign to anything that you've seen before because you've never seen this side of her. This is something that seems like a complete shock. And so for many men, when this revelation occurs, they immediately think that they've been duped, like somehow this has been a bait and switch, that this woman is not the woman they married. And in many respects, she's not.
Another thing that most guys don't realize about marriage is it creates a whole new framework for your relationship. So there's a cultural framework, there's the personal framework, there's the sexual dynamic framework, there is a legal framework and all of this um external parameters will dictate a lot of the behaviors in many people. So when you're dating, you're both trying to win each other's approval. So you're both probably putting your best foot forward to some degree. I mean, it's not like she's the only one who's in the pleaser identity. Obviously, you're doing what you can to get her to relinquish some of that sexual opportunity for you. Um, but once you're past that phase and you're on to that level where um you're ready to make a commitment, and this is what's so critically important about commitments is it changes the dynamic of the relationship. So, so long as you're holding your cards, which is commitment, she's holding her cards, which are sexual opportunity. So, you can give your commitment one time. She can give and withdraw her sexual opportunity at any time. So, you may be taking advantage of the sexual opportunity right now. You know, you may be in the relationship with her, having sex on a regular basis, but she can only get that commitment from you once. Once that commitment is made, once you have spent it, it's gone. She now owns your commitment and she also owns the sexual opportunity. So you can see from a you the economics of relationship kind of dynamic, she now has all the cards and you don't have any.
But what really throws this into um a tail spin very quickly is the cultural framework which dictates essentially what the role of a woman is in our society. And it gives her a ton and ton of options. And it also restricts some of the ways that you can behave as a man in terms of limiting her behaviors or trying to put boundaries on her or trying to um create a uh a lifestyle that you feel is appropriate under the circumstances. Then you've got the um legal framework which obviously is going to very strongly defend women in family court. We've all seen that um divorce court, family court always or not always but frequently comes down on the side of the woman. Now women know this. This is not a secret. This is something that they are intimately aware of. So from the time that you make that commitment, she knows that she has it. She has the sexual opportunity. She has the social framework on her side and she has the legal framework on her side. So now all the chips on her side of the table and the only one that you have is what you walked into that relationship with and that is who you are as a man, your ability to be a strong leader, your ability to set, you know, strong um boundaries and hopefully the fact that you picked a good woman. If any of those things fall away, you're screwed. You're absolutely screwed.
So you can see when that wedding ring goes on the finger, it's not necessarily toxic to her. It gives her secret powers. It's like from the Lord of the Rings, you know, what was the the villain's name again? You know, she becomes that guy, you know, with the tower and the eyeball. That's who she becomes. She has all the power and you have none of the power or very very little of the power because all of the uh the frameworks the social framework the dynamic framework the society framework the uh legal framework all plays in her in her favor and you my man my friend are left with nothing and by the time the courts are done with you that's what you're going to have you're going to have nothing so does a ring putting a ring on a woman's finger make her toxic or is the ring toxic to her? No. But when you put the ring on her finger, it may be toxic to you. And that's the thing you need to be aware of because modern day relationships, marriage in particular, are um really dangerous environments for men to operate in. You cannot go in there thinking with your small brain. You've got to use your big brain. And you had better do an excellent job of vetting this woman.
The guy I was talking to, you know, when he went to go talk to the girl's dad about marrying her, the dad sort of let on that there was something wrong with her. Of course, my man, he was he's all in love. You know that love just clouds your thoughts. The dad said something like, "Oh my god, I'm so glad I've been worried about her." Like, "Oh my, that's not a good endorsement of your daughter." Anyway, that gave him pause as he reflected on it. He says, "I should have seen that as a red flag." So, you got to you got to really be watching for those red flags. And you got to take off those rose-colored glasses or you'll never see them. And it's hard to take the rose-colored glasses off when you're constantly dipping your wick, if you know what I mean.
All right, you guys. That's all I got for you today. I certainly hope you've enjoyed the video. If you have, please like and subscribe. If you know someone who's in that courtship stage who may be considering popping the question, please share this video with them. I think that it might give them some insights into the hazards that they're facing and give them some pause before they take that leap. Anyway, until next time, stay healthy and if you can stay single.