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58 - Why Your Wife Says She Does Everything Even When You Help a Lot · Masculine Containment

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I don't remember the exact day and I don't remember the exact conversation, but there was a point in my marriage where Katie turned to me and said something like, I feel like I'm doing everything around here.
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And I,
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It was confusing and frustrating, and I remember getting reactive in the moment, and this was before I understood the work of containment.
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This was before I learned how to lead with curiosity instead of judgment, and I thought to myself, like, what do you mean you do everything?
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I work, I take the kids places, I pick up groceries, I make dinner, I do dishes, I fix things, I work with our handyman, I manage things in the house, I'm constantly doing things.
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How is it that you feel like you're doing everything around here?
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And it felt invalidating.
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It felt like an attack.
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It felt like I was doing something wrong.
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And what I heard was challenging.
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Like the story I made up in my head was nothing I do counts.
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She doesn't appreciate me.
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She thinks I'm lazy.
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She doesn't think I care.
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And so what I did in the moment did not help the situation.
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Instead, I started, instead of listening to her asking questions, which I'll go into in a moment, I started, I started, I started, I started, I started, I started, I started
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I started defending.
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I started saying, I did this.
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I handled that.
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I do these things.
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I do this thing.
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You know, what about last weekend when I took the kids and drove everywhere?
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And pretty soon, I wasn't trying to understand what she was experiencing.
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I was trying to prove her wrong.
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I was trying to win the argument.
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I was trying to litigate this between the two of us to show that I wasn't in the wrong.
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And here's what I didn't realize.
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she wasn't talking about the same thing I was.
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And I'm counting the number of things that I did, and she's describing how many things she felt responsible for holding.
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And so if you've ever had a discussion like this in your relationship, the important thing to understand is that you may be arguing about how much you do while she's trying to tell you how much she feels like she has to think about, how much she's carrying, how much she's owning.
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And this was a really hard distinction for me to make, but getting past this has completely changed my relationship and eliminated a huge area of disagreement and frustration and confusion and pointing fingers and triggers and...
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you know, an area that started a lot of disagreements and started a lot of fights and caused that same pattern I talk about of trigger.
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This was a big one.
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Then there would be an escalation, like I just described.
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Then there'd be rupture, and we would both say things we didn't want to say.
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And then there would be withdrawal periods, and we'd come back and try and repair.
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But we never got to the core root of the problem as long as we stayed in that pattern and as long as I wasn't leading with curiosity.
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Yeah.
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Because here's what I now understand in my relationship, in most relationships, in the relationships of the men that I work with, there's a big difference between doing something and owning it.
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Now, like if you look at this in business, I used to be a business coach, so a lot of things go back to business for me.
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If someone is on your team and they complete everything you tell them to do, but you have to ask, did you send that?
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Did you follow up?
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Is it done?
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Did you call the client?
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Did you make the thing happen?
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They're doing the tasks, but you as the business owner still own the outcome.
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And that's a lot of mental load.
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That's a lot of frustration.
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That's a lot of having to make sure someone's doing something.
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If you were like command and control managing something you're still doing or someone you're still doing a ton of work.
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And the same thing can happen at home, you know, like.
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Let's take an example of maybe buying groceries.
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Like maybe you go to the store every week.
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That's real.
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It's effort.
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It's work.
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But who noticed that the groceries were low?
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Who made the list?
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Who planned the meals?
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Who knew what each kid needed?
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Who knew Wednesday was crazy and dinner needed to be done early?
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And who remembers someone was coming over this weekend?
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So we might be involved in a task, but completing a task and carrying responsibility are not always the same thing.
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You know, I remember feeling like, but I help all the time.
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And sometimes help means, you know, I participated.
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Sometimes it quietly means, and I didn't understand this, you own this and I'm acting as your assistant.
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And...
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when I finally figured that out, it started changing my relationship.
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I think, you know, if you really think about this and you get curious about what's underneath this, this can irrevocably change your relationship in a positive direction.
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It can make things easier for both of you.
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And,
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I want to make sure that we understand something.
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Like this work, this understanding goes both ways.
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You know, I don't want this to sound like an argument that women secretly do everything and men are oblivious.
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I hear that stuff all the time online.
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I get it in my comments.
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Men don't care.
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Men are oblivious.
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Men use the patriarchy to their advantage.
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I still have no idea.
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effing clue how I use the patriarchy to my advantage.
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I would love for somebody to show me.
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And I talk to like 18 to 25-year-old kids who have heard this thing about the patriarchy.
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Like, how do we use it to our advantage?
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So I don't want this to degrade into that.
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That's not going to move us in the right direction because we as men carry enormous responsibilities too, depending on the guy.
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There might be mortgage, taxes, insurance, car maintenance, getting cars, making sure that they're okay, home maintenance, investments, retirement, business, college.
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security, aging parents, the roof, the air conditioner, the washers making a weird noise, long-term financial planning.
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There's a lot that we do too.
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As men, and even when Katie and I started having these discussions, I had an entire operating system running in my head that Katie wasn't really seeing.
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She had one running in hers, but invisible work that the other person doesn't see goes in both directions.
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This isn't a man-woman thing.
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This is a relationship thing.
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And that's what's so important.
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Because oftentimes when we have this conversation, it feels like an attack and it feels like something that needs to be defended and it feels like something that needs to be corrected.
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And
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So the question here, like the question that comes up is who's doing more?
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And it becomes this fight to see like, hey, are we equal?
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Are we doing the same?
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But I don't think that's the right question.
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If this has come up in your relationship, the question that I would ask is what are we each carrying that the other person doesn't see?
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What are we each doing that the other person doesn't understand?
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So there was a point in my relationship with Katie where this became a real issue.
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I eventually had to recognize that she was genuinely carrying too much.
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Like if I'm honest, she really was doing more in the house with the kids on our day-to-day, especially our vacations, our travel, like she was doing all of it.
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And I started realizing there were places that I needed to step up.
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But when I looked at how we got there, and this is really important to understand,
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The answer was not that Katie was doing everything because I wouldn't.
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When we first got together, and for a lot of our relationship, there was this dynamic that may be present in your relationship, and I want you to just think about this.
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When we first got together, Katie would often notice something, organize it, take it over, build a system around it, make sure it got done correctly, move on to the next thing.
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And looking back...
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I think that a lot of that came with like hyper vigilance around things getting handled.
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Like Katie had an entire history where performance equaled recognition, performance equaled being safe, performance equaled love.
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Like her whole life was kind of like that.
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And so she had this hyper vigilance around things going wrong and making sure they went right and making sure she was doing them and she.
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Her internal feeling, because we've talked about it, was like, this has to get done.
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I have to make sure it gets done right.
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I have to make sure it gets done over and over again.
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And if I didn't act as quickly or move as quickly as she did, or if I didn't approach it the way she would, she would just step in and take it over.
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And...
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If I'm honest, and I've done a ton of thinking about this, looking backwards, because hindsight's 20-20, it got easier and easier for me to get out of the way.
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Not because I consciously decided like, hey, I'm not gonna do this anymore, but because the pattern taught us these roles that we had, and these roles that we stepped into, these roles that we kind of accidentally fell into.
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On both sides, I don't think she was doing it on purpose, I know I wasn't doing it on purpose.
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What happened is she handled more.
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I stepped back more.
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She saw me stepping back and felt more responsible.
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So I saw her taking over more and she felt more and I felt less reason to step in.
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So she felt more responsible.
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And so I stepped in less and she did more and I did.
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And so we got into this loop where honestly, she could say, eventually asked the question, why do I have to do everything?
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And the truth, there was truth in it.
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There was like real truth in it.
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And I could also honestly feel and reflect that sometimes when I step in, you've already taken it over and there's a specific way you want it done.
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And I get corrected and told I was wrong.
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And so it's just easier to let go and let you do it.
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And so here's what happened in my relationship.
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Her over-functioning made it easier for me to under-function and my under-function gave her functioning, gave her more reason to over-function.
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It allowed me to like go focus on my business, work out, run 5Ks and half marathons and stuff and do all kinds of other things.
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But it wasn't a healthy dynamic in our relationship because she took over because she didn't trust it would get handled.
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And I stepped back because she takes over and she sees him step back and says, see, if I don't do this, nobody will.
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Or she saw me step back and says, see, if I don't do this, nobody will.
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And I saw her take over and she says, see, there's no room for me here anyway.
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And when that dynamic starts to grow in the relationship, this creates this dynamic loop of moving in one direction and getting more challenging.
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And eventually that becomes this major issue because.
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You know, this isn't a loophole for the man where you're like, hey, my wife's hypervigilant, then I can jump out of the way.
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And overfunctioning on her part doesn't automatically make the other person responsible for her exhaustion either.
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Like, I know that wasn't all me.
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But here's what's important to understand.
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What I learned in my relationship, Katie's overfunctioning did not excuse my underfunctioning and my underfunctioning did not justify her overfunctioning.
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So we started creating better questions.
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And we started looking at how do we make this work?
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How do we make it so this is no longer a point of contention, a point of conflict?
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Because it was important.
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Like, I didn't realize how important it was for Katie that things get done, but there was a time where we were playing this game of cards
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that were questions about sex and intimacy and my favorite subjects.
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And one of the questions was, and I was asking Katie, it said, what are some things that I can do that makes it more likely that we'll have sex in a day?
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Or what is, what are the things, or what's important for you for, for intimacy to be possible in a day?
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And her answer shocked me.
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She's like, Oh, the dinner's done early.
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And I was like, what?
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She said, yeah, dinner's done early.
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Because if we don't have dinner done, then I'm thinking about that.
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And then there's that going on.
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And I was like, oh, okay.
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This is very different for her and very different for me.
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I would have never thought about dinner when it comes to sex.
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But man, it drove the point home.
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And I learned how to make dinner.
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Because when you start looking at your over-functioning and her under-functioning,
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Some of the better questions to ask is, how do we create a division of responsibility?
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Or how did we?
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How did we get here?
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How did we get to the place where we are today?
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Did one person slowly start taking over?
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Did the other person slowly stop stepping in?
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Did we ever consciously decide on where we are?
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Or did we drift into these roles and then start resenting each other for them?
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And if that's what's going on, then there's a fix for this.
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And there's a way to walk out of this.
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And there's a way to create harmony and joy and peace and intimacy.
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And in a place where this will, you know,
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if it continues, really drive a relationship apart.
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When one person feels like they're carrying everything and the other person doesn't understand, it's going to cause challenges.
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And so when she says, I do everything, what she's saying is, I feel like I have to do everything.
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And you may hear, this is what I heard, you do nothing, you're lazy, you don't care, you're failing.
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That's what I heard.
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But she didn't say anything like that.
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That really wasn't what she was saying.
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Sometimes in relationships, we respond to the accusation we heard of the information instead of the information or instead of what we were really told.
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So what I heard was I'm doing nothing.
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I'm lazy.
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I don't care.
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And I'm failing.
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And I'm like, that's BS.
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I do tons around here.
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But what changed this was when I started slowing down around it.
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And what changed it was when I realized how really important it was to her and to us to solve this, to not let this be this thing that comes up over and over and over again.
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I can't stand repeated conflict.
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When we have conflict over the same thing, it makes me feel like, hey, we should be fixing this.
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It shouldn't be the same thing over and over again.
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And so what I did was we slowed down.
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And instead of reacting to Katie, I would say, when you say you feel like you have to do everything, what feels like it's all on you?
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What are you carrying that I'm not seeing?
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What do you feel like you have to remind me or manage things?
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What feels heaviest for you right now?
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And instead of defending and instead of explaining and telling her she was wrong, I listened.
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And she told me some things that were genuinely legitimate.
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And I said, hey, I didn't realize that.
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I didn't see all that.
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I wasn't really seeing it all.
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Even that thing with just her wanting dinner to be done before we're intimate is like, whoa, I'm not seeing everything she's carrying and that is putting that much pressure on her.
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So what I learned was I didn't have to surrender my experience.
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to understand hers and containment and staying regulated using masculine containment in the moment means that I didn't have to litigate her expression, her wording, her choice of words, the way that she said things before I could understand her experience.
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You know, I could let her say it how she needed to say it.
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I didn't have to react to each thing.
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I didn't have to
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And so here's what we did and what I would suggest you do.
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Make the invisible that you're doing more visible.
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You know, one of the biggest challenges we have in relationships is that we fail to communicate.
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We fail to communicate because, let's be honest, none of us had a good example of relational communication growing up.
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And if you did, you'd be the first person I met.
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And so many of us are afraid to have the conversation or say the thing that we're hurt by because we are afraid we're going to be let down.
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And it's hard to say time out.
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There's a place that we need to actually like sit down and focus on our relationship and really get clear about things.
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And so if this is a recurring fight, if this is a recurring area of conflict, if this is a recurring area of escalation for you, then don't try and fix it while you're in the middle of an escalation.
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Wait until you're regulated.
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Like, you know, for you as the man, I would challenge you to find a time when you're both regulated, sit down, and look at the major areas of your life, like of your shared life.
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Might be kids, food, houses, finances, school, medical, transportation, family obligations, travel, pets, maybe you run a business together.
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What are those things?
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And for each one, ask, like, who notices this?
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Who plans this?
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Who does this?
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Who follows through?
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Who actually owns the outcome of each of these things?
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Because you, like me, might say, hey, I handle that.
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And Katie would say, you do every time I remind you.
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And I'm like, ooh, I don't own it.
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I'm like functioning as the assistant.
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I'm that command and control, so she's still carrying the load.
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And the opposite could be true, too.
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That goes in both directions.
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You may explain during this conversation, like, hey, I handle every insurance issue, every tax deadline, every car repair, every home repair.
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And she may genuinely realize, I didn't know how much you were carrying.
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I didn't realize that you had all that.
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And with what I did with Katie was...
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I ask, you're owning these things, do you actually have the room and the time to own it?
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Can you make decisions?
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Can we do it differently?
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Can we learn a different way to do this?
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Can we make a reasonable, can I take this over, make a reasonable mistake without you immediately taking it back?
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And so ownership without constant supervision and checking in and making sure everything was done exactly like you would do it isn't really ownership.
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And so that's an important thing to discuss, like who's actually going to take this over.
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And here's something that's so crucial.
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Don't sit down and try and make this a scorecard.
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You know, it's not like I have 27, you have 23, I win.
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No.
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Make the invisible visible and then consciously together decide not once and for all, for now, just for right now, for the next period of time.
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Let's make an adjustment that makes life easier on us.
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Okay.
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What should I own?
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Like, what am I going to take off the plate?
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Like, I remember doing this.
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And I mean, I took things like our house maintenance and some of the cooking, like taking responsibility for cooking a few nights a week and owning it, like getting the groceries, doing the whole thing, not just being told what to do.
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I took responsibility for our car maintenance and for making sure that, you know, the cars were where they needed to be for managing the handyman that we have.
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Like there was things that I took over and that was important.
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And then we had the conversation, what would Katie own?
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You know, we're in one of those households where Katie owns our monthly finances.
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Like I'm definitely more involved now and I have a lot more saying it, but she owns like the reconciliation and doing all that stuff.
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She's good at it.
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I can't stand it.
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The details drive me crazy.
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They make me kind of reactive.
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And so she owns that.
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And then what truly needs to be shared?
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Responsibility.
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Like, what are you going to do?
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What are we going to do together?
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And this was important.
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What can we stop doing?
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What are we doing that we don't need to?
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What can we automate and what can we outsource?
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Like, this was huge.
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Like, setting up bills on auto pay seems like such a little thing.
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But oh my gosh, it eliminates a step that you don't have to do anymore.
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And what can we outsource?
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I can't remember.
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Well, I think it was last week that Katie actually passed by the grocery store and bought something.
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I was going to say, I can't remember the last time either of us went to the grocery store.
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But she did.
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She passed by and bought like mint and basil or something for a recipe.
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But most of the time, I'd say 95% of the time, neither one of us goes grocery shopping.
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We use a service like $10 per trip.
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And that $10 is so worth it.
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$10 and a nominal tip is so worth it so that neither of us have to leave the house and go grocery shopping and we have that time back for us.
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We have that time back for other responsibilities.
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And so outsourcing is such an important thing to look at if you can, if you have that capability.
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And remember, when you're looking at these things, fair doesn't necessarily mean equal.
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But fair is very hard to create when you don't see what each other is doing.
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So that's the key, the two of you looking at this together.
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And so, you know, there's a point for Katie and for me where it would have been really easy for either of us to decide the other person was the problem.
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She could have looked at me and said, why am I carrying all this?
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You are lazy.
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You don't care.
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You're not involved.
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You don't really want to do this.
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And I could have looked at her and said, why should I step in when you're going to take it over anyway?
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You manage me like crazy, so I'm not going to own anything.
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You know, this is frustrating.
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Right.
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If we had stayed there, we would have had plenty of evidence that we were right.
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I guarantee you either one of us could have justified that position probably somewhat effectively.
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But what changed was being able to see that this pattern happened over time together.
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And there might be a pattern like this in your relationship that happened over time together.
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And what I saw was there was places where I needed to step up.
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There was places where she needed to see what I was doing.
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There was places where she needed to loosen her grip on things enough for me to actually be able to step in and take things over.
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And there was places where she needed to communicate what was really going on and where she needed help.
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And none of those things made the other person wrong.
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That's what a partnership requires.
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That's what a relationship requires.
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Not 50-50, not balancing the scales, not keeping score, nothing like that.
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It's not proving who works harder or who's doing more.
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It requires two people to look at the relationship you've created together and ask,
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Are these things still working for us?
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And if they're not, we can change it for now.
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This isn't final.
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This isn't forever.
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This isn't something you have to live with and you can't shift again.
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Because your wife should not be carrying everything.
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I learned that with Katie.
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And...
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It's just not a healthy way to have a relationship.
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And you should not feel like there's no way for you to carry anything because she's going to step in.
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And that can be reversed.
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There's relationships where I've talked to where the man feels like he's carrying everything.
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And his wife just doesn't see the emotional labor.
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Sorry, the...
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Yeah, the emotional labor, the labor he's doing, the invisible labor that he's doing.
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And so this isn't necessarily gendered.
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It wasn't my relationship.
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This was more in one direction than the other, with Katie having taken over way too much.
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But the opposite can be true as well.
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And the goal isn't that you're doing equal work.
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I think that gets a little confusing and near impossible to land.
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The goal is shared ownership, mutual trust, and a relationship where both people have room to participate.
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And the key to creating this is communication.
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Now to set things up, but moving forward in the future, continuing to communicate about how things are going.
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Is this working for me?
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Is this working for you?
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Does it feel like things are getting easier for us?
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Do we both feel supported?
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Is there anything that's really frustrating?
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Is there anything that doesn't feel right?
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And if you continue that communication, you'll get to a place where you partner on your lives and you support each other, see each other, hear each other, understand each other.
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And that creates a level of safety and security and connection and intimacy and relationship that can literally change everything.
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Try it out.
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And if you do, come back and leave me a comment.
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I'd love to understand if this works for you.
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And I'd be thrilled if you took a minute right now and subscribed, liked this video, and share it with somebody who you think could benefit from it.
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I would really appreciate it.
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And if you're a guy who's struggling in your relationship and having challenges and wants to step into regulation and containment so you can be curious, you can ask questions, you can actually understand what's going on for your wife, you can create that calm, quiet place to have this conversation without feeling like you need to react, go to the brotherhoodsociety.com.
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It's my organization where we as men learn masculine containment together so that we can show up present, regulated, and aware in a way that we lead with curiosity.
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And we can take any issue or challenge in our relationship and move it to a successful conclusion through leading through regulation, presence, and awareness.
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It is absolutely life-changing.
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Thebrotherhoodsociety.com.
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I look forward to meeting you in person.