I was trying to make a point about safety and trust in relationships, so I made a video about it. In the video, I tried to flesh out one of my favorite ideas about romantic relationships, an idea based on the work of famed psychologist Abraham Maslow who published A Theory of Human Motivation in 1943. Maslow’s clinical research led to him theorizing that human actions are motivated by certain physiological and psychological needs—that human motivation is based predominantly on seeking fulfillment and positive change through personal growth.
He created a visual model to illustrate the theory in the form of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid.
I believe we can apply this model to our most important human relationships for guidance on how to help them flourish.
One of the key concepts in Maslow’s work is that we must satisfy the conditions of each need on the human-needs pyramid before we move on to, or graduate to, or climb to the next level. Therefore, we must first achieve safety and security before we pursue level three of the pyramid—the Love and Belonging level.
This pyramid is a useful way to think about repairing damage and restoring safety and trust to our relationships. I think it’s an especially useful model for men to consider, as I believe men in male-female relationships is the demographic likely to benefit the most from this (and by proxy, their female partners, and perhaps any children they might have).
My theory is simple enough: Safety and Trust disappear in relationships slowly over time because of incidents and experiences we don’t necessarily see or think of as dangerous or trust betraying. Seemingly petty conversations around house chores, and being on time, and the way someone felt about something we did or said at the party last night tend to be the types of moments and conversations that pile up over several years, which result in trust erosion.
In my experience, the most common way this plays out is that a woman married to or partnered with a man will, over several months and years, begin to feel insecure and lack trust in her relationship partner through a series of “tiny” incidents the man writes off as no big deal, and that accrue slowly over time in the mind and heart of his female partner.
As she continues to feel less safe and less secure in the relationship, she withdraws and demonstrates heightened sensitivity to the behavior patterns which brought the couple to this point. This tends to result in more arguing, more disconnection, and typically, much less (if any) sex.
These women tend to think and feel: I’m seemingly invisible to this man. After promising to love and care for me, I continue to experience judgment and rejection and him choosing his own feelings over mine any time I try to express pain I’m feeling or ask him for help with something. I feel betrayed by him. I don’t feel loved or cherished or desired by him. And now he wants me to have sex with him? That doesn’t feel safe to me. It’s impossible for me to vulnerably try to connect in an intimate way with the person whose behavior has led to all of this built-up pain I feel.
You won’t have any trouble finding sad and/or angry and/or confused men who believe the primary problem in their marriage or partnership is their partner’s disinterest in having sex with them. “Women weaponize sex,” some of the angry ones say.
As they see it, they’re the same guy she married and used to want to have sex with all of the time. And now she’s being cold. Now she’s acting indifferent and stand-off-ish. Now she’s rejecting him. She’s the one who changed—not me! they think. (This also happened to me, if you don’t already know.)
How does one get their wife to want to have sex with them? Most men, in my experience, believe it’s the same stuff that always made her want to sleep with him, or which they might experience at work, or in social circles, or out in public as the types of things that draw women to them: Appearance, Confidence, Status, Personality, Achievement, etc.
All of that stuff absolutely is attractive, as a general rule, but it will accomplish approximately jack shit with someone who is physically, mentally, emotionally experiencing pain as a result of our behavior (regardless of whether we think that’s fair or justified or rational).
If they think we look handsome and fit and are really good at our jobs yet hurt deep inside because they feel ignored or rejected or unloved because of years of feeling invalidated and unconsidered in their relationships, I think you’ll discover the wanting-to-touch-their-partner’s-penis quotient to be exceedingly low in those situations.
So, I made this video about that. The message essentially being: Reconnecting with your hurt wives or girlfriends will be achieved through slow, trustworthy relational repair work that might not seem very fun to men who believe they’ve done nothing wrong. They must learn how to validate emotional experiences of others, even if they’re confused by them, or outright disagree with them. And they must learn to show up consistently as considerate of their partners relational needs and wants, and demonstrate themselves to be capable of meeting those needs and wants.
Most guys want to go on romantic dates and vacations, believing that the same activities that used to lead to sex and romance when they first met will magically result in that same thing today. The problem of course is that they don’t know how to see the pain. They don’t know how to see the eroded trust because for them, nothing bad has happened. She’s sad or angry or complaining about nothing.
Which leads us to a couple of YouTube comments which fired me up on this particular subject.
The first commenter said this:
“There's a problem with all of this. Some guys are absolutely knocking it out of the park and are not committing these issues yet they still have absolutely terrible spouses who spend every single waking second looking for a reason to be unhappy. Some spouses have issues, mental issues, hormonal issues, generational learned behaviors that are absolutely their fault. This message can be super dangerous for people who are living in those relationships where at the tip of a hat, they have a spouse who's emotionally unstable and unable to have rational adult conversations about basic conflicts.”
This is the same bullshitty sort of thinking I was doing when I was married. I seriously believed that my wife’s reaction to me, or to events, was the problem in our marriage. If she changed her reaction—if she learned how to “interpret me” correctly—our conflict would vanish.
But first…
A little bit, it turns out. Yes.
Based on the most recent available data (2021) from the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 7 percent of women were affected by a ‘serious’ mental illness (in the United States) compared with just 4 percent of men.
Which means, statistically speaking, somewhere between 4-7 percent of you are dating or married to people who have some legitimate disorders which could be negatively affecting you and the health of your relationship.
Of course, the inverse of that is that there’s a 93-96 percent chance that that’s not the reason at all.
I’d also like to advocate for women for a moment, since I spent my first 33 or so years NOT doing that.
WHY, pray tell, might women suffer more mental and emotional dysregulation than their male counterparts?
Women are more empathetic and emotionally intelligent. This generally positive human trait (and one critical to healthy romantic relationships and effective parenting) is also closely linked to being more vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and trauma.
Society demands more of women’s appearances and personality traits than it does of men. Women, generally, report striving to “fit in” or achieve acceptance among peers as a difficult life obstacle more often than men.
Women experience gender discrimination—especially in their career pursuits, and often because of bearing and raising children—in ways most men never do.
Women are disproportionately abused (usually by men). According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), women are four times more likely (400 percent more often than men) to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. About one in four women have experienced physical violence from their romantic partner. And then there’s all of the more subtle creepy scary shit like stalking and lewd comments and unwanted come-ons, and things like that.
The perpetrators of all of this unwanted, undeserved horribleness? Pretty much always men. We’re like, the absolute No. 1 threat to women. We worry about cholesterol and heart disease. They worry about us. The blindness to or lack of acknowledging this ever-present societal condition is a huge piece of the problem.
…
A second YouTube commenter piled on after the first guy:
“This. These emotionally broken women are stuck on the lack of safety. Not because we're doing anything to make them feel unsafe, rather, because they haven't worked through their trauma. I'd do relationship check ins weekly. The answer was always fine. I pushed for emotional vulnerability, conversation, working on things. No dice. Broken people can't or won't. Then you get blamed for everything. A total mess. Glad I'm done with the insanity, I won't go back.”
For the record, not that this man or anyone else requires my approval, but I fully support people who choose to live a single-person lifestyle. My marriage ended more than 10 years ago, and I have not remarried. I’ve often said that I’m not a marriage advocate per se. That I’m not trying to encourage people to get married nearly as much as I’m trying to help two people who WANT to be married to not accidentally hurt one another and inadvertently sabotage the relationship they both hope will last forever.
But this guy feels a little more like the angry kid who is going to take his ball and go home. I might be wrong about that. It was just the vibe.
I responded to the comments this way:
“... emotionally unstable and unable to have rational adult conversations about basic conflicts.”
And therein lies the rub, and the reason this sneaky little conflict pattern in relationships is what very slowly ends them. Who decides what is an acceptable emotional reaction to something? Who decides what is and is not a rational concern?
I always calculated my ex-wife’s reactions as over emotional or hypersensitive. And I always calculated her anger, fear or sadness about something I thought of as minor as “irrational.” You and I (and almost everyone) default to the logically flawed assumption that our interpretation of life events should dictate how others think and feel about those events, or about us. We judge others as somehow being wrong because they’re experiencing sadness, anger, fear, stress, or otherwise pain of some kind. And I’m saying if you do that in your relationships, they will all eventually turn to shit and there won’t be safety and trust.
I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m not saying it’s convenient. I’m saying if we don’t speak and act in a manner that results in safety and trust for OTHERS’ diverse experiences from our own, then our interpersonal lives are going to have some unpleasant things happen. Even harder than having to validate others’ emotional experiences, is to generally be considerate of other people’s needs and wants, even if they’re different than our own needs and wants.
All of that said, we are ALSO responsible for partner selection. Imagine dating or marrying someone with type 1 diabetes and then treating their dietary needs and insulin needs as unnecessary burdens for you on account of the fact that they don’t have to worry about those same medical or dietary restrictions for you. Their health requires different things—a different standard—than yours. Maybe if you married someone who had horrible shit happen to them in their youth—betrayal and abuse by parents or other trusted people—maybe they have trauma and sensitivities you and I can’t understand because the same bad shit didn’t happen to us.
Still, I ask: How are we not responsible for consideration and need fulfillment as their partner even if they require a little more from us than our own preferences or perception of other people’s relationships? We can choose to be single. A perfectly legitimate option. Or we choose partnership. Both have conditions and tradeoffs attached to them.
Most people are predisposed and inclined to pursue partnerships. It’s been observed in human behavior as far back as history and science books go. Thus, my message. You want relational stability and health? Perhaps responding to those we live with, with language that communicates that we think they’re wrong, stupid, crazy, hypersensitive, overreacting, and that we are never responsible for the way they feel therefore we’re never going to change, might have something to do with all of the discontent and conflict.
Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.
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