Signs relationship is failing for men

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Here are five signs that your marriage is in trouble and about to fail, and how you can turn it around.

Hi, I’m Cody Butler, a marriage coach and the founder of Better Marriage, where we help men save their marriages and win their wives back, even when it seems hopeless and divorce or infidelity is already on the table. If you’re interested in learning more, there are links in the description. Let’s get right into the **signs relationship is failing** and the five signs that your marriage is in trouble.

Recognizing the Signs: How to Identify When Your Relationship is Failing

If your wife is shutting down communication completely and showing a lack of emotional safety and security, then you’re in real trouble, brother. The fundamental building block of a successful marriage is emotional safety and security, and the degree to which men succeed in winning their wives back and the speed at which they do it depends on their ability to build that bed of emotional safety.

Stonewalling is the opposite of that safety and security. It’s a complete shutdown and annihilation of the emotional safety and security required for a healthy marriage. If your wife is stonewalling you, it’s an indication that she has absolutely no security whatsoever, and she feels completely unsafe and unable to talk to you. This ultimately leads to hopelessness, and when hope leaves the marriage, partners start to leave too.

If you’re experiencing this, then you need help very quickly because the end is very close. Nothing will improve in your marriage until you can have the necessary conversations to address the problems that she is experiencing and feeling right now. Injecting hope back into the marriage is crucial, and that can be achieved by bringing about emotional safety and security. When she feels safe, she will start to talk again, and that will begin to bring down the walls and turn things around.

We can’t cover everything here, but we have a free workshop in the description that goes into a lot more detail on what causes the breakdown in emotional safety and how you can start to rebuild it and save your marriage.

I suggest that if your wife is stonewalling you right now, you should definitely check that out because this is a very, very serious situation.

signs relationship is failing

Sign number two that your marriage is in real trouble is pretty obvious:

the sex has stopped, and she’s not giving you sex anymore. Again, this is a sign of a lack of emotional safety and security. To understand why this is so, we have to understand what opens up a woman to sex, and that is open and honest communication. A woman feels open to sex after honest and safe communication and patience with her partner. If she’s not open to sex, it’s because she’s not feeling that she is able to open herself to communicate honestly. She doesn’t feel as though she has that emotional safety and security to open up. Again, this is a sign that a lack of sex is a sign of that.

A lack of sex is less of a problem than stonewalling, but it nevertheless is simply a step or two before stonewalling. If your wife is not giving you sex, it’s just a matter of time before the stonewalling kicks in because it’s exactly the same cause. A lack of sex is just a lesser symptom of the problem of emotional safety. Stonewalling is a more advanced symptom of that problem; it’s developed further, and the relationship is closer to catastrophe. So again, the solution here to intimacy with your wife is one of building that emotional safety and security.

Now, I don’t want to give you the answer that “go watch the video in the description” is the answer to all of this. Let me give you some steps as well that can help break down the barriers to emotional safety. Kindness is one, gentleness is another. The solutions to the problems are very, very simple, but we simply don’t see them sometimes, or we don’t see ourselves as perpetrators of the opposite of the problem. We don’t see ourselves as being unkind; we don’t see ourselves as being harsh, but the reality is that is exactly what we’re doing. When our wife tries to communicate with us and they get an unkind response or a harsh response, this shuts down the communication and destroys emotional safety. All it does is tell your wife that whenever I try to talk to him, I receive pain, whenever I try to talk to him, I’m punished.

So she certainly isn’t going to engage in communication to talk to you, which will be required for her to have sex with you. When there’s a lack of gentleness or a lack of kindness, or a lack of humility, if you can simply add just a touch of kindness, just a touch of gentleness, it’s going to go a very long way to turning your marriage around and starting to fix the problems.

I’ve spoken to many women whose husbands I’ve been working with who are in terrible situations, and the woman has simply said, “If he would only be a little bit kinder to me, I could live with this. If he would only be a little bit more gentle with me, I could stay with this, but I can’t. It’s too harsh. It’s too unkind.” All it takes, in a lot of cases, to open up tear down the boundaries that destroy communication is kindness, gentleness, compassion, and humility. These traits are what we really need to start working towards if we want to bring our marriage back to a place of healing and restoration.

The third sign that your marriage is about to end is blaming your partner, name-calling, and labeling.

When this happens, there are real problems down the road. One of the most common and overused terms that I hear right now is “narcissist.” We’re labeling our partners as narcissists, but what qualifies us to diagnose them as such? Have we become psychological clinicians overnight after watching a few videos? I would have to question who the real narcissist is here.

Labeling our partners, calling them names, and blaming them for the breakdown of the relationship will only cause them to mirror back what we are giving to them. By blaming them and using horrible terms that are probably not true, we shut down all communication. Our partners will learn that if they do not conform to our belief system, behavior, thoughts, and attitudes, they will experience pain. Putting labels on people, calling them names, and blaming them for the relationship’s breakdown will shut down their ability to be themselves within the relationship. They know that if they be themselves, they will be labeled and blamed.

Ultimately, what our partners want when they leave the relationship is to be free. They want to experience themselves again. They have lost themselves in the marriage, become subservient to our wants, likes, and desires, and have lost their personalities. When they try to rise up and have their own personalities, views, opinions, and attitudes, we shut them down and blame them for the destruction of the relationship.

If we take the point of view that labeling, blaming, and name-calling are acceptable, it will be very difficult to restore the marriage. If we do win our partners back, it will be out of obligation, and they will not be happy within the relationship. The only way to be happy within the marriage is to give each other the freedom to be ourselves and express ourselves in any appropriate way. Even if our partners are narcissistic, it is their privilege to be that way. We promised to accept them For Better or For Worse till death do us part.

Giving our partners the space and privileges to be themselves and have different views, opinions, and attitudes will create emotional safety and bring them back into the relationship. If they can be themselves within the marriage, they will not leave it. Women are not leaving the relationship to have sex with someone else. They want the freedom to be themselves, and if we can’t give them that, we need to become the change we’re looking for.

The fourth sign that the relationship is about to end is arrogance.

Arrogance is not being cocky; it’s about knowing you’re right when you don’t know if you’re right. One of the most common things I see is men calling their wives narcissists.

My question always is: Maybe she is narcissistic, but what is your qualification to make that determination? Have you simply watched a few YouTube videos and decided that she’s narcissistic or that she has a bipolar personality disorder? If you have made these judgments, it is pure arrogance. Putting negative labels on people when you are not qualified is destructive to the relationship.

Let me be clear: I am not claiming to be qualified to diagnose narcissism. I am not saying whether your wife is narcissistic or not, or whether you are. I simply don’t know. I’m not qualified, and I don’t even know if I know what narcissism is.

However, I do know that becoming arrogant to the point of making a diagnosis and making that the fault of the relationship is destructive. There are two things I do know. I know that I don’t have the ability to diagnose, and I’m not claiming that I do. I also know that if I made that diagnosis out of ignorance and arrogance, it would be destructive to the marriage.

Many people don’t understand what they are saying. I’m using narcissism as an example because it is a word that gets thrown around too much these days in relationship breakdowns. It goes both ways, and it is destructive.

The fifth sign When you call your spouse a narcissist

It shows that you have utter contempt for them. Not only do you have the arrogance to make an unqualified diagnosis, but you also have contempt for their behavior. This is destructive.

John Gottman said that contempt is the number one predictor of divorce. When we start to see contempt in the relationship and diagnose mental disorders, it is contempt. Attributing all the motivations of your wife, the fact that she’s hurting you and not meeting your needs, to some selfish motivation coming from her is contempt.

I’m not saying that you are to blame for everything here. I’m simply showing the attitudes that will destroy a marriage. When your attitude is right, the facts don’t matter. When your attitude is wrong, the facts don’t matter either. You can take a woman who is more than willing to work things out with you, but if you can’t get over yourself, your arrogance, and your contempt, it will leave her no option but to leave.

This type of behavior is not compatible with marriage. Labels, name-calling, blaming, diagnoses, arrogance, and contempt have no place in a marriage. If you want to save your marriage, you need to identify these toxic behaviors, habits, and attitudes and replace them with the right attitudes, habits, and behaviors.

Human behavior is very predictable. When you act toward your wife with contempt, arrogance, blame, and refusal to take responsibility, I can tell you with a high level of certainty how your wife is responding. It is negatively, and it makes her want to leave. We can turn that around by replacing those attitudes with the right ones.

In conclusion, any outcome in any sport is 20% referee error, and the same is true for your marriage. Even if you are correct in your diagnosis, 20% of the behavior is an error of judgment.

We can start to replace errors of judgment. Let me finish on this. In any sport, a van, any outcome is 20% referee error, and that is no different in your marriage. When 20% of the behavior, even if you are correct in your diagnoses and evaluations, there’s a 20% error at least in that. And we have to account for that, we have to be aware of that, and we have to adopt attitudes that are going to be conducive to success, that are going to be conducive to bringing our wives back to the table, and conducive to the reconciliation process.

You can be right, brother, or you can be married. This is one of the things that we say all the time. Do you want to be right, or do you want to be married? Because you can have either one, but you can’t have both. If you want to remain married, then humility has to come in here. Coachability has to come in here. The acceptance that you might possibly have made some mistakes and some errors in judgment has to come in here. And the understanding that what we’re doing is not working right now, and something has to change.

She’s not going to change. She’s at a point where she’s not going to change. It’s incumbent upon us, brother, if you want to save your marriage, if you want to turn this around, it’s now down to earth. We have to change, and we have to show that change is possible and change is desirable. And when we do that, the chances of your wife coming back are very, very good.

That’s it from me. God bless you.

Win Your Wife Back In As Little As 8-Weeks

Discover How To Win Your Wife Back, Even If She Wants Out

Watch Our FREE Video Tutorial Class: "Your First Steps to Saving Your Marriage"

Click Here To Watch The Class Now

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