I work with men on the brink of divorce – these are the mistakes they all make

“Alex, I’m scared I’m losing my wife. She’s been sending me your content for ages, and I’ve mostly ignored it. I’ve started watching recently, and I get it. I thought I was doing enough, but I wasn’t. I’m trying to change, but she seems completely disengaged. I don’t know if it’s too late.” I get a lot of these messages. I run a coaching group of 450 mums, dads and couples. The women often come looking for ways to get through to their partners. The men come because they’re frightened their marriages are failing. I recognise these dads because I was one of them. I thought I was doing plenty, that my wife’s expectations were unreasonable, and that she didn’t appreciate me. It took years to realise how determined I was not to hear her. From my experience, divorce doesn’t come out of nowhere. So why do dads find it so hard to listen, and what can they do when it feels too late? The simple version of the argument I deal with most often is mum saying, “I’m doing so much more than you,” and dad saying, “No, you’re not. You just don’t count anything I do”. And from the dad’s side, this feels justified. Research published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2016 found that fathers in the West were spending more than three times as much time caring for their children as fathers had done in the 1960s. And with some pretty shocking dads still out there, it’s easy to consider ourselves above average. But just as men are doing more, the study also found that working mums are doing nearly double what their own mums did. So, despite all that progress, the actual gap between us has grown rather than shrunk.The other problem is defensiveness. I’ve been working on mine for years. It’s something I talk about almost every day as a couples coach. And even now, when my wife points out my shortcomings, the shitty little teenager inside me can come charging out, ready for a fight. I’m much better at catching him these days, but he still gets the better of me sometimes. When we’re triggered into defensiveness, we’re not thinking, “I’m going to dismiss my wife’s perfectly reasonable concerns”. We’re barely thinking at all. Our threat-response systems have kicked in, and we’re listening for ammunition rather than understanding. We combine “I feel like I’m doing a lot” with “it’s too uncomfortable to acknowledge that might not be enough”, and many dads reach the same conclusion I did: the problem is actually our partner. That can sound like saying: “Your standards are too high. You’re a control freak. Half this stuff doesn’t need doing anyway. You’ll never be happy, so I’m just going to stop trying.” Which, as strategies for maintaining a happy marriage go, is not one of the better ones. What damage does that do? Now look at it from her side. Mums often hate asking for help because they don’t feel they should have to. “It’s your family, too. Why should I have to ask?” Granted, they’re not always brilliant at communicating their needs. My wife expressed her frustration through the medium of theatrical sighing. We could both have done with learning a few skills. But behind those sighs was someone overwhelmed by the responsibility of family life. Every time I responded defensively, I was telling her she was on her own. So, like most mums, she found a way to do it herself. And I, like many men, slowly made myself surplus to requirements. And here’s the real cruelty of it. We leave women carrying seven out of 10 household management tasks, then ridicule them for being stressed, controlling or impossible to please. We create the conditions for their frustration, then use that frustration as evidence that they’re the problem. When someone repeatedly tells you they’re struggling and your response is to explain why they shouldn’t be, eventually they stop telling you. That is a very dangerous place for a relationship to be. What can you do if you think you’ve left it too late? Men are fixers. When they finally understand the mental load, they rush to take things over. “I’ll do more planning. I’ll take responsibility.” And they’re bewildered when their wives aren’t grateful. But when women say, “It’s just easier if I do it”, they’re not being bloody-minded. Anyone who’s run a small business knows that training someone to do a job you’ve mastered can be harder than doing it yourself. And if she’s already given up on the relationship, why would she want to invest more energy in training you to become the partner she’s spent years asking you to be? What these men may be missing is the step that actually starts to repair a marriage: allowing themselves to feel ashamed. Not wallowing in shame. Not indulging in how terrible they feel, so their wives end up having to comfort them as well, but being willing to sit with the deeply uncomfortable knowledge that they’ve let down someone they love and express it in an adult way. For me, the imbalance started before our first child was even born. As soon as my wife became pregnant, she started behaving like a mother. I, meanwhile, carried on behaving like a man whose wife happened to be pregnant. I kept drinking. I went out with friends. My life continued pretty much as before, while hers had changed completely. Because my actions didn’t seem to have a direct impact on the baby, I didn’t see why my life should have to change. I left her alone in that moment. And looking back, I can see how much of what went wrong between us started there. I feel deeply ashamed of that now. And it’s important that she knows I do. It wasn’t enough just to feel bad about it, of course. I had to change how I behaved. I had to take responsibility for things I’d previously left to her, and learn to listen without immediately explaining why she was wrong. But I don’t think those changes would have meant nearly as much if she hadn’t also known that I understood how much I’d hurt her. Our partnership is now stronger than it’s ever been. I don’t think we could have got here if I’d skipped that step. If your wife is still telling you what she needs, listen before she stops asking. And if she’s already stopped asking, it might be time to stop trying to prove what a good husband you’ve been and take a long, uncomfortable look at where you’ve let her down. Shame is painful. But it won’t kill you. And it might just save your marriage.