Author, speaker, creator, and founder of Help For Men. I help men become more secure and have better relationships.
Joined October 2015
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Greetings to everyone who has just discovered yours truly! I am an author, speaker, coach, and founder of Help For Men. If you're a dude struggling in relationships, you'll probably enjoy my stuff. Check out the links in my profile. My most popular book: deadbdroomfix.com
A lot of guys fix their problems the easy way. They get in shape, put on thirty pounds of muscle. Some real health wins, sure. But I always say, show me a gym full of steroid muscle heads and I'll show you a gym full of guys with daddy issues. That's where a lot of it actually comes from. @AdamLaneSmith
One of THE most common things I hear from men in dead bedroom.
Mom losing sense of independence/autonomy because of kids (avoidant women lose their minds at this point in life)
Man's work life is belittled because it's not "home with kids" therefore it is like a small vacation.
Man does a giant chunk of the domestic work, including all cooking, grocery shopping, etc. This goes against the standard trope of the "lazy husband who does nothing at home". Ironically, stay-at-home dads who do ALL the domestic labor tend to have even higher rates of dead bedrooms. But that's for another post...
Think about your dad. Either he hid and never protected you, or worse, he made you his confidant, badmouthing her so you both played victim. Then at 35 you get the thunderbolt: he facilitated it. She never could have pulled it off if he'd had a spine. Mom was Darth Vader. Dad was the emperor. He's the real villain. @AdamLaneSmith
Adam @AdamLaneSmith dropped a stat that reframes everything. Anxiously attached men are 33% more sensitive to oxytocin, the approval hormone. Pair that with dopamine and you get intermittent reinforcement, the mechanism behind gambling addiction. So these men are gambling addicts. The bet: will I get my wife to want me today? Will she like me today? Gambling, gambling, gambling.
Here's how the nice guy tries to fix it. He fluffs up like a rooster, sets a boundary: I'm tired of not having sex, I'm forewarning you, we will be having sex tonight. His wife says, are you out of your mind? His buddies, all divorced and sexless, tell him she's a bitch. He really thought that was the move. @AdamLaneSmith
A study followed 297 parents, then followed their grown kids into the kids’ own marriages. The more the parents fought, the more those kids fought in marriages of their own.
Then they checked how it got passed down. About half of it was what the kids remembered watching.
A man can keep it behind a closed door for eleven years. His kids still take it with them when they marry.
Adam nailed why husbands feel crazy. His wife is asking for a unicorn, and he has no clue. So he brings her a horse, a goat, a rhinoceros, a duck, and she cries harder. Why don't you love me enough to bring me a unicorn? What she really wants is the one thing a man is built to give. Safety. @AdamLaneSmith
Adam's @AdamLaneSmith fix: lead your wife like a CEO. She's your COO, not your coffee girl. She knocks on your door, boss, there's a fire. You don't explode, how dare you. That's bankruptcy. You take a breath. Sit down, how bad is the damage? You ask questions, you listen. The whole time you discipline your own emotions. That's leadership.
I swear all this "hypergamy" and "Chad" talk has turned an army of men into some of the most socially awkward humans ever.
A 41-year-old traveling salesman wrote in. Nine years married. Three nights a week he's out in his territory: same hotel, bad mattress, pillows are nothing, and he sleeps great. At home he stays on his side and doesn't move, because if his leg touches hers she'll think he's starting something. "And I look forward to leaving. That's a hell of a thing to type out."
Nine years of being careful not to even come close to touching his wife. Seven hours a night lying perfectly still in a house he helps pay for. The part of his marriage he looks forward to is the part he's not in.
Dude, go home tonight. Get in your bed and let your leg go wherever it wants to go. Stop living in fear. Stop fearing conflict. And check out my book, The Dead Bedroom Fix.
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.
A lot of men are still running their marriage off an outdated model: the man makes all the money and the wife stays home with the kids. For most of the couples I know, that's not the case anymore, and in a growing number of marriages the woman makes the majority of the money.
So when guys hear "she'll take you for everything you're worth and you'll pay alimony," well, alimony doesn't exist in 90% of cases. And the advice to get back at a wife who withholds sex by not paying the bills doesn't carry much weight anymore either.
All of that is a way of avoiding the tough stuff. You're going to have to face confrontation, put your foot down and be two adults about it. For a lot of you, that means you're going to have to man the F up. If that's where you are, check out my book, The Dead Bedroom Fix.
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.