Many of the people who come to me for relationship coaching are women, but I also coach men who find themselves in relationships where they are heartbroken that their relationship isn’t going well, despite their best efforts. And there are some distinct differences between the way that many men experience difficult relationships and the way that women experience them.

Many of the men who come to me for coaching come broken and hurting and desperate to make things right with their wives. The first thing they often say is along the lines of “I am realizing that I have hurt my wife so badly. I am so ashamed of my abusive behavior. I think I might be a narcissist, and I really want to change, but I don’t know how. Can you help someone like me?”

First of all: Absolutely I can help. Anyone who wants to change is help-able.

Second, there is a lot of clarity that needs to happen for you, because a narcissist never says (and sincerely means) “I want to change” - so don’t diagnose yourself yet! There is hope for you!

Other men come knowing that their wife displays signs of unhealthy or narcissistic behavior, and they want to know how best to navigate that.

Regardless of how you view your relationship or your role in it, you can improve the health of your relationship and your own emotional health as you gain insight into the dynamics of what is occurring.

The Roles Of Women and Men In Challenging Relationships

It’s interesting how differently men and women who are trying to improve their relationships approach their roles:

Women

Women who are trying to improve their relationship tend to be trying to be submissive, respectful, obedient, and a good “helpmeet" to their husbands. They express that they want their husband to fulfill his godly role of good leadership and are concerned that their husband doesn’t lead (or doesn’t lead well), and they want him to.

Rather than being a protector, he is the one hurting her.
Rather than being a servant leader, he is making her into a servant.
Rather than seeing her as a helper, he rejects her help.
Rather than bringing the children up in the instruction of the Lord, he is exasperating them (Ephesians 6:4).

And the more the wife submits, respects, obeys, and helps the more the husband demands or becomes indifferent to her.

Men

On the other hand, men who are trying to improve their relationship tend to work harder at being servant leaders. They don’t express any need for their wives to fulfill their biblical role of submission or respect. Instead, they take their wife’s role as “helpmeet” seriously and ask for her feedback and work to accommodate and honor her. They work hard to provide and protect and help with the children. They try to speak her Love Language.

They also take responsibility for how their wife is feeling and feel bad that they aren’t doing enough in her eyes. They wonder how else they can honor their wife and step up to be the man she wants him to be.

What they don’t see is that even though they are trying to love her as Christ loves the church, she isn’t responding the way the church responds to Christ.

Rather than submitting, she is calling the shots.
Rather than respecting, she is dismissing.
Rather than helping, she is criticizing.
Rather than honoring, she is accusing.

And he doesn’t want to give her anything to complain about! But the harder he tries, the more he feels as though he’s failing - failing as a man, a husband, a father, and a leader.

What’s the problem?

The dynamic really boils down to the same problem for both the men and the women who are trying to improve their relationship: their spouse has a character problem.

How can you know it’s a character problem with your spouse? You can know by understanding what a healthy relationship looks like so that you can see how healthy yours is not.

In a healthy relationship, a woman who is trying to be submissive and respectful and helpful will be appreciated and honored by her husband. He will see her efforts to build him up and will feel empowered and compelled (drawn) to love her well. She will not feel any fear or uncertainty when she submits to him, because she knows that he can be trusted with her heart because he knows her and respects her.

A man in a healthy relationship who is a servant leader has the respect of his wife because he can be trusted to lead well, and his wife can see that. She will honor his leadership by doing her part rather than taking advantage of his strength, patience, and willingness to take responsibility. When he asks for her feedback, he doesn’t have to fear criticism because she is respectful and humble, and he can be confident in her sincere love for him.

In a mutual 50/50 relationship, both spouses are on equal ground in terms of authority and responsibility. They each feel heard, known, and respected (equal authority). And they each take responsibility for their part in making the relationship better (equal responsibility).

In an unhealthy relationship, a spouse that is granted authority but doesn’t take responsibility becomes a bully. And a spouse that takes responsibility but isn’t given any authority becomes a victim of the other’s authority.

Here is some evidence of an unhealthy relationship:

You feel like you are losing who you really are
You are working on yourself, but she isn’t working on herself
You feel like you don’t even know what to think anymore
She accuses you of doing things that you recognize as things that she does
She always has to be right and/or have the last word
She blames, accuses, is sarcastic or critical (and then gets upset when you react)
She puts responsibility for her emotions on you
You get angry and try to hold it in but eventually blow up and then feel bad
You believe that her responses to you are your fault (because you didn’t say something the right way, for example)
Your wife can be very sweet and nurturing and you may think she’s changing for the better, but at other times she can also be very dominant, demanding, or critical
You are hesitant to open up to your wife or be vulnerable with her

[Read my article “How Did I Just Describe Your Relationship?” And get my free resource on the 40+ tactics that emotionally unhealthy people use]

What is a man to do?

In order to have a chance to repair the relationship, a man who finds himself in this situation can lead well (not in a domineering way, but in the way that Christ demonstrated his authority) by not being afraid of what others would say or do when he spoke and acted upon the truth. [Get my resource on What Would Jesus Really Do?]

Here’s how to get started:

1. Seek The Truth

First, you have to be willing to accept the reality of your situation. I know you don’t want to make your wife look bad or say anything negative about her - you want to take responsibility for your own actions. But the reality is that YOU aren’t making your wife look bad, she’s doing it to herself. You’re working your tail off to be acceptable to her, and all she has for you is criticism. That’s not characteristic of a godly wife.

It’s OK to admit that. You have to be willing to allow your wife to make herself look bad if you are going to have a chance to make repairs. You can’t fix a problem that you deny is there or that you pretend is something other than what it is. That would be like having a leaky pipe under your kitchen sink but saying that the problem is that you’re turning on the water rather than admitting that the problem is with the pipe.

2. Consider the Results

Consider the goal of your efforts and the results that you are seeing. The results always speak for themselves. For example, it’s likely that your goal is to be a godly man as described in the Bible: considerate, faithful, temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not harsh toward his wife, not exasperating his children, showing love, praying for your wife. This is manhood and true leadership.

But the result you are getting is emasculation. Rather than being allowed to lead, you are being told what to do and how to do it - and even when you try, you are being told that you’re failing. That is not a helpful “helpmeet.” That is control. When you recognize that that is the result, you now have information that will help you know what adjustments you need to make (see the next step!).

3. Love the way Christ loves

It’s easy to understand love as something that feels good, but it takes some deeper understanding to accept the aspects of true love that don’t feel good - and God should be our model for what that looks like.

In loving people, God honors our free will and does not force himself upon us. He lets us know that he’s always there if we choose him, but if we do things that separate us from him (rebelling, rejecting, mocking, making demands, etc), he doesn’t stay in relationship with us and take that abuse. He allows the natural consequences of our actions to take their course, and we may find ourselves far from God.

God also does not enable our selfishness by continuing to give and give and give in an effort to prove his love. He gave his best for us once, for all. We can either accept that or we are free to reject it. He doesn’t try to prove something (his love) that we are committed to not accepting.

How does this translate into your relationship with your wife? The best way to love her (other than what you are already doing) is to allow her to act according to her free will. That means that she can choose to partner with you or she can choose to push you away with her criticism and rejection. Ephesians 5:21 says that we are to submit to each other out of reverence for Christ. This means that you allow her actions to speak for her mission, and as you put your mission under her mission, you refuse to control the results.

4. Heal

You likely have wounds that are driving you to be the husband you are - one who is trying to do the same (good) things over and over but expecting different results. Often those wounds are related to a fear of failure or rejection, a fear of criticism, a fear of abandonment, a fear of punishment, or a fear of not living up to your own expectations or the expectations of others.

When you live from a place of fear and woundedness, you deny the parts of reality that you don’t like or are afraid of - which means you are denying the truth. This doesn’t happen intentionally - you want to live in truth! Rather, it happens unintentionally simply because you don’t know what to do about what’s real, so it’s easier to pretend that everything is going to turn out fine.

You know what you want (a good relationship), so you know what to do to live in the hope that, by doing the right thing, your relationship will eventually become good. But you don’t know what to do when doing good things isn’t getting good results.

That’s what you have to learn: What to do when doing good things isn’t getting good results. It may simply be a matter of learning how to do the right things at the right times instead of the right things at the wrong times with a spouse who may claim to be a Christian but doesn’t appreciate those right things.

The result

When you learn what those wounds are and how healing them can make your relationship healthier, you discover that…

hope isn’t found in our situation changing; it’s found in our situation…

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For Men Only (Relationship Help For Husbands)