Dad Starting Over

Men get told the marriage gets happier again once the kids move out. Researchers checked. They followed the same married couples for seventeen years and asked them five times how happy they were. Happiness went down early, kept going down through the middle, and was still going down at the end. It never came back up. So if your plan is to wait until the kids leave, the waiting is the plan. The hope is that it stops being something happening to him. He’s been treating the empty nest as the thing that arrives and fixes it; the number says it doesn’t arrive, which puts the choice back in his hands today. No promise about how it turns out.

It's a common scenario. She's going through perimenopause, he's 48 just like she is, and her libido and overall sense of well-being are down here while his libido and energy for life are up here. A lot of women go looking for an outside reason for that gap. It's the gym. It's the gym bunnies. It's the adult entertainment. It's his new testosterone therapy, because he's no he-man, so why does he need it? Guys, the gym and the testosterone therapy are things for your health. They are not the explanation for the gap. Decades of research show a real split between the average male and female libido, and it holds up even after accounting for all those outside factors. And the men who dropped all of it to keep her happy? Things got worse. Now he's angry, because he gave everything up and it didn't change a thing. If this is your marriage, check out my book, The Dead Bedroom Fix.

A lot of men are anxiously attached, and that was me too. He's preoccupied, always needing reassurance. He wants to talk every problem out and fix it so she's happy, because when she's unhappy it wrecks his whole week. If that sounds exhausting, it is. To an avoidant wife it's too much, too needy. That's why these guys fail.

The wife tells the husband that slowing down is normal in a relationship. And she's right, it is. But slowing down has a floor. It doesn't keep dropping into nothing. Going from once a week to once every four months is not sustainable.

You booked the hotel on the water for your anniversary. King bed. No kids down the hall. None of the reasons she gives at home applied here. She read for fifteen minutes and fell asleep at ten. You lay there working out what the trip had cost you to learn the house was never the reason.

Men think their kids never knew the marriage was bad. Fair enough - he and his wife never fought in front of them. But his daughter ate at that table every night for years. She saw who got talked over and who went quiet. He can ask her what she remembers, or keep believing she remembers nothing.