Marriages Don't Explode, They Fade—Here's What to Do

Your marriage isn't likely to end in a dramatic explosion; instead, it could slowly erode over time. What starts as love and passion can gradually shift into boredom and disinterest, leading to faded love. Understanding why most marriages fail often comes down to recognizing this subtle process, offering crucial relationship advice for those looking to build lasting connections.

- Why most marriages fade through distance and routine rather than crisis
- How a tribe of men helps you face hard truths about yourself
- Why listening to God together can bring wisdom and direction for your marriage
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Episode 070: How a Tribe Can Save Your Marriage
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Why marriages usually fade instead of exploding
03:00 Autopilot, routine, and slow marital drift
05:00 Why men cannot fix marriage problems alone
07:00 Two real stories from a tribe
10:00 Getting brutally honest with your brothers
12:00 Focusing on yourself instead of controlling your wife
15:00 Listening to God together for wisdom
18:00 Build Your Own Tribe program
19:30 Why restoration is possible

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Transcript

Don Ross 0:01

What causes a marriage to fail? Most marriages don't explode. They kind of just erode over time. Where there was, once love and passion and fun might start to change into something that feels more like boredom and disinterest and routine. From that place, the marriage just kind of fades and disappears until there's nothing left really to protect or to fight for, or that either side is interested in maintaining. Sometimes there's conflict, sometimes there's a moment of betrayal or something traumatic that happens that causes these things to come to light, but as often as not. Marriages just change over time, and we as men don't do enough to help keep them healthy and strong as they begin to change. My name's Don and here at the Manhood Tribes Channel, I want to do everything I can to help you as men to be able to fight well for your marriages, to be able to strengthen your relationship with your wife in a way that helps protect and save your marriage over time. But here's the thing, most men don't do a very good job at this, right? If we're honest, most of us guys are not all that intentional when it comes to our relationships with our wives. We, over time can tend to just sort of take things for granted, especially for those of us who have kids. We start to get into a routine of what's required of us as husband and dad to just kind of keep the family running. Right. There's obviously our full-time job that we have to give a lot of time and attention to. There's kids activities that require much of us in the evenings, especially where we are picking up and dropping off and taking kids to this and being involved in that. It just starts to become a lot, and before we know it, there's little time left in our schedules for us to prioritize our relationship with our wives, and so we start to get on autopilot. Things are kind of just cruising along, but as they're cruising along, small things start to kind of creep in. You get annoyed with your wife for how she handles a certain situation. Maybe it's the way she's dealing with one of the kids, or maybe she's decided to go back to work and the way that she's handling her job or how she's bringing her work home is starting to frustrate you. Or it could just be as simple a thing as like. When you're both at home in the evening and there isn't something to do, how you spend your free time no longer seems to line up. She wants to scroll on social media and just kind of veg out for the evening, and you would maybe like to do something together and hopefully spend a little special time together at the end of the evening. And that's the last thing that's kind of on her mind. So all of this kind of just starts to build. It starts to get to a place where,'cause there's so little time invested in each other and there's, uh, all these other little things that are starting to creep in. They cause conflict and eventually they cause withdrawal. We just start to distance ourselves from each other, husband and wife, start to choose separation. And I don't mean like legal separation, I just mean being a part, being away, doing your own thing. Because it just becomes harder to kind of fight for that time in a way that it feels fun and meaningful like it maybe used to in the early days and stages of your relationship. But with years of that over time, that's where marriages begin to fall apart. That's where things really begin to go haywire. And maybe there's a lot of conflict over that time and somebody gets tired of the conflict or maybe there's some kind of act of betrayal or infidelity or something that just kind of communicates, Hey, I'm, I'm no longer interested in this relationship. That causes a real severing of the marriage. And either you have to really deal with that and try to come back from it, or things just break apart. And then the divorce. Now, I know if you're watching this channel that none of what I've just described is really the pattern that you hope for or want to see your marriage slip into. But I bet for a lot of you watching, you're already there or maybe you've been there and you've watched your marriage fall apart in exactly the same kind of pattern that I've described. Look, I understand. I want to do what I can today to help you be able to, if you are somebody who is in that place, begin to take some steps that can help you get out of it. But, and here's the big, but the thing is, is that you're not going to be able to do this on your own. And this is where most men get into trouble, is that we try to solve this problem ourselves. There's so much baggage though between you and your wife that being able to solve this problem on your own is going to be unbelievably difficult, if not impossible. You just can't see things from any other perspective than yours, and she's gonna have a hard time hearing anything from you that doesn't just add fuel to the fire that already exists. You're going to need some help. I have been spending the past few weeks talking about the idea of what a tribe can really do for men. Now, if you've been around Man, who tribes a little bit at all, you know kind of the idea of a tribe. This is the small group of men that you need around you, that really can be the life changing community of men that you are looking for, and that can make all the difference in your life. And so for this episode, I wanna spend some time talking about how a tribe can actually be the thing that saves your marriage. How you can lean on this group of men around you in a way that can help. Pull your marriage back from the brink and actually bring it to a place of strength and health all over again. I have watched this pattern play out a few times already in my own tribe with a couple of guys who have been in really difficult places with their marriage. One guy who followed that pattern very closely of what I described, and there had been conflict for a few years, and then that conflict sort of just turned into distance and withdrawal, and the tribe tried to step in and to help this guy out and to say, Hey. We're, we're seeing you talk about some patterns in your marriage that don't sound healthy and we think you need to do something about it to be able to get things back to a healthy place. But after confronting this guy on several occasions and even seeing him try to make some statements of, yeah, things, here's how I'm gonna change things, or here's the conversations I'm gonna have with her, he would put those things off and he would avoid them, and he would come up with excuses of why they couldn't happen. And it just became really clear that what he was actually. Afraid of was of having those hard conversations with his wife. He was afraid that those conversations might actually push his marriage into divorce, and so he didn't want divorce, so he just stayed away from the hard conversations, but never gave his marriage a chance to get better. And because we called him on it, he eventually made the decision to just step away from the tribe. He just kind of said, Hey, I, I don't want to be pushed in this area anymore. I think the way that I'm managing it is gonna work out just fine for me. I hope that it does, but it most likely won't because he's not choosing the patterns that actually can lead to health. Another example of a guy in my tribe who chose a different way. Was that he discovered that his wife had done some things that were, uh, not altogether good for their marriage. And when he confronted her about it, things got worse. Things went from distant and just kind of in that habit of routine with that sort of like roommate's feel to it, to her actually beginning to vocalize her dis disinterest in him and her unwillingness to stay married. She actually pursued separation and wanted to go down the path of divorce, but he didn't want that at all. And he came to our tribe and he talked about it, and through tears and sadness and frustration and anger and despair and all the emotions that you could possibly imagine of a man going through that stage in life. He just said, I really do want to fight for my marriage. I don't know what it takes and I don't know what she's willing to do, but I wanna do what I can do. And so we encouraged him by listening to Jesus to where it seemed like what Jesus was saying was, Hey. Don't give up on your marriage. Just because your wife is saying that you need to separate doesn't mean that you have to see if there's a way that you can remain in the same house, even if you're not necessarily in the same room or the same bed, but just letting her know that you're going to be present. And just because she wants you to leave, you've not done anything that suggests that you need to leave. She doesn't get to dictate the terms here, so show her your strength by remaining present, but respecting her space. Now, I'm not gonna say that that's the right advice for every man, but in this particular situation and listening to God during our Tribe time, it seemed like that's what Jesus was suggesting for him to do. So we encouraged him to do that and that felt really risky on his part, but he decided to move in that direction. And long story short is that it did, it paid off. It worked for him. His wife began to see a side of him that was engaged and. Intense for his marriage and for his family that she hadn't necessarily paid all that attention to. It's wasn't, it wasn't that that side of him wasn't there before. It's just that in the midst of their routine and their family busyness, there hadn't been a way for that part of him to really get displayed in their marriage. And that was maybe on him for not showing that as much, but. When it did come to light, when that part of him did come to display, she began to see some things in him that she really did like and was drawn to. It became the foundation for them being able to rebuild their relationship, and that was a really, really good thing. So here's the thing, a tribe can help save your marriage, but only if you use that group of men well, in terms of the way that you lean into them and let them fight for you. So let's talk a little bit about what that looks like. What does it look like for a tribe to fight for you in a way that can actually save your marriage? The first thing that you're gonna have to do with your tribe is that you have to be honest and in a tribe, we call this getting naked. You've really got to be brutally honest about what is actually going on in your marriage, and not just talking about your wife and what she's doing and why things are happening from her side. What you're seeing in her, you're gonna have to be brutally honest about you. You need to be honest about the way that you've handled things, the types of conflict that you're having. Whether those arguments are looking like you exploding? Are you withdrawing or you not saying anything or you saying things in anger, you raising your voice, you cussing at her, like whatever it is, you've got to really paint the full picture of what things are looking like in the context of your marriage. And look, that's for a reason. We talk about getting naked within a tribe because the men around you need to have a clear picture of what's going on in order to be able to fight for you. I compare it to the idea of a doctor who's gonna go into surgery and has done all kinds of imaging ahead of the surgery, getting x-rays or maybe even MRIs, to be able to know what's actually going on on the inside there before you start carving into a body. That's a way to help the doctor be able to go in with knowledge and with preparation that can make him or her more successful. It's the same way with your brothers. If you're going to ask them to fight for you, you've got to give them the best picture you can of what's actually going on under the hood. They need to know what things really look like behind closed doors so that they have a better picture of how to be able to help you. They're not there to judge you. They're not there to condemn you or to necessarily even criticize you, though they may call you out into places where you're not making wise decisions. But mostly they just need to know and understand what does the picture actually look like? Okay. Then the second thing that's gonna happen within the context of a tribe is that they are going to push you to deal with yourself, not with your wife, with yourself. See, we know this intuitively, but when we get into situations with conflict like this, we tend to actually forget that this is what's going on. You can't control your wife, you can't control her actions, her attitudes, her choices, her behaviors, her words. Like any of those things. You can't control any of it. And the more that you try, the worse you're going to make things turn out. So what you do have to focus on is just you and your tribe. If they're doing their job well, and fighting for you, is going to try to explore things with you. What's going on with you, and why? Why are you acting the way that you're acting? The things that are frustrating her, why are you doing those things? The things that she's saying to you? What are you hearing when she says those things to you? What about your actions and your attitudes? Can you control? What could you do differently that might be of help to strengthening your marriage or repairing your marriage or restoring your relationship or whatever is needed in that particular moment? What could you do regardless of how your wife handles your choices? What is it that you can focus on about you? All of those kinds of questions are an important part of the tribe process of getting to what it looks like to find freedom. And in this case, freedom really looks like restoration of your marriage. You're not free to be the man that you really want to be because your marriage isn't as healthy as it needs to be. And so restoring the health of your marriage is really important, but your tribe can't do anything about your wife and her choices. They can only help you do something about your life and your choices, and they're gonna help you there. But that's gonna require fighting for you and sometimes fighting for you requires pushing you to do things that are uncom. Just like in the situation with the guy who chose to leave the tribe, we were pushing him to try to have some uncomfortable conversations with his wife that really needed to happen, but he was afraid of those conversations because he was afraid of what they might lead to if they went poorly. And so out of that fear, he avoided the possibility of them going well, and that fear really drove him to stay in a place of conflict and withdrawal with his wife. Things didn't get healthier. You need to choose differently. You need to choose a path that's going to help restore your marriage and bring it back to a place of health. All right. The third thing that you're gonna want to do within the context of your tribe, which is something that all tribes do on a regular basis, is listen to God. Now, this is a little bit counterintuitive for men because what we tend to do when we get in group settings with each other and guys bring up problems, is that we try to fix the problems. We try to offer solutions or advice as a way of being able to tell a man, here's how you can fix this. But usually that's not very helpful, especially in places of real conflict or disruption. Or where there's real stakes on the line in terms of what could go sideways. So instead, what a tribe really does well is take all of that to Jesus and say, Jesus, what do you want to say to this man? A tribe is going to submit that man's story and his situation to Jesus and try to listen for his words. Sometimes Jesus is gonna have very specific things to tell that man that he needs to do to be able to help his marriage. Sometimes Jesus is gonna have things to say to that man that are about things he needs to do for himself, to be able to get himself in a better place. Sometimes Jesus may not have anything to say at all because all that's needed is patience and time and prayer. And if that's the case, then that's the case. Most men would never offer that as the right advice for the moment. And so that's why it's so important to listen to Jesus, to really say, okay, you are our king. We are submitting ourselves to you, and we want to hear from you. This is also why it's so important to do this in the context of community. When you're a man who's in that kind of situation, your ability to listen clearly to God about how to handle it is really, really interfered with It becomes very difficult to try to hear clearly what God is saying to you because you've got so much stake in the game, right? You are invested in the outcome. You have ideas of how you think. Things should go. You're frustrated by the way she's handling it, and you're constantly trying to figure out what could I say or what could I do to help her respond in a different way. All of that is gonna be in the way of you being able to hear clearly from Jesus, but your tribe isn't having to deal with. Any of that interference, they're just there for you. And because they're there for you, they can probably hear more clearly on your behalf than you can hear for yourself, which means you're gonna get better wisdom and insight from the Lord by listening together in a group context. That's what a tribe does and does so well for each other. So you may be hearing all of that and really thinking, gosh, that sounds amazing. Like, but I don't have a group of guys like that at all. I don't have any men in my life that I can do that kind of stuff with. Now look, if that's the case, then I just want to encourage you that yeah, you're like most guys. But like most guys, you need a tribe. You need a group of men around you like this. If you don't have any idea where to start and are looking to be able to build a group of men like that around you, then I want to offer to you my coaching program called Build Your Own Tribe. It literally is designed to help you. Figure out who are the men around you that you could do this with, and how do you build a group that ends up looking like this? I promise it's not gonna happen by accident. For any of you who have been involved in church men's groups before, you know that most groups don't sound anything like what I've described. They don't fight for each other in the ways that I've talked about. They don't listen to God in the ways that become really common in a tribe. So if you want those kinds of things, if you want the life changing brotherhood that comes with a tribe, let me help you. Just go to manhood tribes.com and schedule a call with me and let's see if starting your own tribe would be the right next step for you. All right. Now, for those of you who do choose to lean into the group of men around you to follow the lead of your tribe and try to pursue the wisdom that you're hearing from the Lord in their context, I do want to encourage you that restoration is possible. It may not happen in every situation, but we do know that Jesus wants your marriage to be healed and restored far more than you do. Even though you may think, gosh, there's no one who could want this more than I do. Jesus is as invested in the health and the strength and the passion and the intimacy and the joy and the life and the fun of your marriage more so even than you are. And because of that, it's worth leaning into him through leaning into your tribe to really see what it is that he wants you to do. Restoration is possible. You can start to see healthier communication in your relationship with your wife. You'll move out of isolation and towards a more supporting interaction with one another. Even a more interested interaction with each other, where you start to find the things that she talks about more interesting just because they're coming from her and she does the same for you. You will start to take responsibility for the things that you are doing in your marriage that might be contributing to it headed in the wrong direction, and more than likely, she will do the same as you start to lead in that and stop putting the blame on her. She probably will follow suit in doing the same with you. This is how marriages begin to stabilize and out of that place of stability is how they also can grow stronger when you're able to move out of those places of withdrawal and conflict and into something healthy with time. Your marriage does actually get better. It does get to a place where it feels really good again, and you're actually enjoying being in one another's company. You will notice the difference. It will take some time, but you can get there with the help of your tribe. Okay. Amen. I hope this has been inspiring and encouraging for you, especially for those of you that are in that really rough place. If you're not in that rough place, just know that this can happen to you as well. It can happen to any man at any stage in his relationship, but it especially tends to happen for guys in the middle aged years. You've got kids and lots happening within, within your home, and so if that's you in that stage, I just want to say you're not alone. Just reach out and let's talk about what you could do to help build a tribe of men around you to be able to help you get back to a place of health in your marriage. Alright. If you've enjoyed this episode, I would love for you to like and subscribe to the channel. It helps us to be able to get our content in front of more men and to encourage them in the same ways that you have felt encouraged by watching this or listening to this episode. I also would love, if you're watching this for you to comment down below and just make a comment about what's one thing that you think could help your marriage today. What's one thing that could help your marriage today? It actually might end up being something that helps another guy who's reading through these comments as well. All right, thanks guys. I look forward to talking to you again next time here on the Manhood Tribes Channel. I'll see you then.