On today’s episode, we hear about: · A wife struggling to save her marriage after giving her husband an ultimatum · A husband seeking advice on how to support his wife following a miscarriage · A wife wondering if it’s time to end her marriage Next Steps: 📞 Ask John a question! Call 844-693-3291 or send us a message. 📚 Building a Non-Anxious Life 📝 Anxiety Test 📚 Own Your Past, Change Your Future ❓ Questions for Humans Conversation Cards 💭 John's Free Guided Meditation 🤘🏼The Dr. John Delony Show T-Shirts Connect With Our Sponsors: 🌱 Get 10% off your first month of BetterHelp. 🌿 Get up to 40% off at Cozy Earth with code DELONY. 🔒 Get 20% off when you join DeleteMe. 😇 Go to Hallow for a 90-day free trial. 💤 Visit Helix Sleep for special offers! 💪 Get 25% off your order at Thorne. 🥤 Get 20% off at Organifi with code DELONY. 🏔️ Use code DELONY at Poncho Outdoors. Listen to More From Ramsey Network: 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💡 The Rachel Cruze Show 💰 George Kamel 💼 The Ken Coleman Show 📈 EntreLeadership Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy https://www.ramseysolutions.com/company/policies/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happens when you give your husband an ultimatum?
There may be rebuilding. There's maybe building something totally new, but I mean, you said if you cross this line, this thing's burned to the ground, and he crossed the line, and then it burned to the ground, and now you're like, oh, just kidding. Is that what happened?
Um, kind of. Tell me all about it. Yeah, so I gave him the ultimatum, and it had kind of been, like, Just really our entire relationship, but most of our almost four-year marriage, him crossing lines and rules that I felt like we had set pretty much in our relationship. What lines and rules?
That language kind of makes me feel weird.
Okay, yeah, that's fair. I call it a rule instead of a boundary because I don't feel like it fits the definition of a boundary. But we had more of like a rule in our relationship that neither of us would... um, watch porn or kind of consume things that were just overtly sexual. Um, and he never watched porn at least while we were married.
Um, but he would look at things really sneaky and behind my back that we both felt like just crossed that line. Um, and there were times where I would, I would catch him or he would tell me, um, which is great, I guess. But, um, Yeah, so I just kind of had felt like I didn't really want to deal with that anymore. And I don't know, he just had a very adverse reaction to it.
At first, he really understood and was like, I'm trying my best and I have a lot of respect for you and I want to be better for you. And then a few weeks later, he came home and told me that He didn't think he wanted to be married anymore and he felt like he couldn't look at me the same after the ultimatum.
And me doing that, you know, giving him an ultimatum while he felt like he was trying his best to figure this out, made him lose like respect and attraction for me. And it made him realize that he wasn't super happy in our marriage because he felt like he was being controlled.
Okay.
And so just as you're describing this, it sounds very much like me talking to the parent of a teenager.
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Chapter 2: How can you rebuild trust after a relationship ultimatum?
And you all have to go, and this isn't about watering down your boundaries or watering down your values. It's you saying, I value us together. And the way I've been trying to keep us together is by increasingly becoming your mom, and that's not working.
Yeah.
And so you need to go sit with somebody and learn some new skills.
Yeah.
Right? And I think telling him that. That I value monogamy in all of its forms. And I value you and I want to be the recipient of that laser focus of your sexual energy. And by the way, I've got to learn how to hold that.
Right.
And underneath all of that, this sounds troubling and hard to hear, but my guess is his continued going down rabbit holes has very little if nothing to do with you.
Yeah.
And he has to make a commitment to, I want to get to the bottom of these fetishes. I want to get to the bottom of curiosity. I want to get to the bottom of just opening these accounts and clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking down these rabbit holes. And he has to decide if he wants to stay with you. Because he may not want to give that stuff up. He may not want to give up the illusion.
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Chapter 3: What are the impacts of a miscarriage on a marriage?
Um, women talk about it, uh, and their experience and, um, then the, what, what you've talked about with them of, of, um, that was able, you know, I was able to already do some things with her and, and kind of talk about some things, but let me, let me hop in here.
Let me hop in here. Um, all right. So I may not have talked about my experience and I've been through this a bunch. Okay. And you can tell me, no, not my experience at all, or yeah, dude, I totally get that. First miscarriage and especially second miscarriage, I didn't get it. It was a loss, and I was sad, and I was bummed out. But it wasn't my body that was changing. And it wasn't me.
I wasn't staying up all night researching what's about to happen to my body and what's happening to this baby and what stage are we in and what it looked like. And here's sonogram picture number one and sonogram picture number two. For me and for many, many, many of the men I've sat with over the years, it didn't register there with me.
In fact, I kicked into, okay, how much money are we going to have? Are we going to be able to afford? It just became very practical for me. I also did not immediately start thinking of – I didn't grow up with a lot of little kids around me, and I didn't babysit. I didn't have these images already in my head of toddlers and middle school kids and dances. I didn't have that.
My experience has been that countless women find out they're pregnant, and they immediately start living into this picture, imagining, what's it going to be like? What's this going to be like? Oh, my gosh, this will be cool. Here's what the nursery will look like. Here's what first grade are they going to go to? I just didn't go there. I didn't even know to. Not an excuse, just is. And so...
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Chapter 4: How to support a partner through grief and loss?
Miscarriage number one, miscarriage number two. I was unprepared for the disproportionate loss that was felt in my house. I was very sad. I was heartbroken. I was not prepared for my wife's devastation. Does that make sense?
Oh, it's... Perfect sense, because that's my experience as well. I had no idea. There you go. I like you. What's that? Heartbroken.
Stop right there. Just saying out loud, I didn't know. I'm sorry. That's huge. Here's number two. There is a sense of loss, like being betrayed by your own body. It's disorienting. Does that make sense?
Yes.
This idea that you and I will never be able to, we can hear the story. We'll never know internally what that feels like. Like my body's supposed to do this thing to create life. and not take life or not be inhospitable to life or what was going on or what happened. Like it's this, it's this real quick loop. And this is almost every woman I've ever talked to has experienced.
This has sat down and asked that question. What, what did I do? What happened? And it can get, um, um, I mean, it gets very in the weeds. Did I eat something? Did I run? You start going down every variable because you have this picture and you don't want it to ever happen again and your body starts creating stories. Here's the big thing. What's important here is her story. Okay?
And you saying, I can't be in your body. I can't be in your experience, but I want to know. And I'll sit here with you in the discomfort. And here's a couple of ways you can do that. Did y'all give this child that you lost, did you give him or her a name?
After hearing you speak with some others, I had just brought it up to, you know, what would you have done? What would I have done? And we just, you know, it was nothing direct, but just like, hey, what name is the first one that popped into your head? Mm-hmm.
Did y'all come up with one?
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Chapter 5: What should you consider before deciding on divorce?
We waited a while. Then I, when I was, um, went through two miscarriages before my daughter, which let me just lead by saying all three of my kids are IVF babies, but we're not having lots of sex to have those.
Those are, I was going to say, if you, if you were in person with me just to lighten the mood, I was going to be like, well, at least you're three for three. Right. But you, you weren't even that right.
No, no, no, exactly. So, um, So I went to another counselor because I basically... I had two miscarriages and I was like, I'm not going to be complete unless I have one more kid. So knowing... That was a wrong decision. I mean, it wasn't a wrong decision. I love my children. But I basically told him, if it's not you, it's going to be somebody else. I want to use my eggs.
My body doesn't work before. There's no opportunity. And that therapist ended up leaving, sending us to a guy to see if he was more comfortable. And that guy gave up too. He was just like... This is not working. You two have two different things. You need to work on him.
All right. If you circle back and listen to this call, and it'll be hard because it's weird when you hear your own voice, right? That's always weird. But for the people listening and for you, if you want to discern it, when you talked about you, I hear a strength and a resolve at the beginning of this call.
Okay.
When you start talking about him, your whole cadence changes, your voice pitch changes. You're mad and you're angry that this dude has taken a decade and a half of your life. What I want to tell you is if you make decisions when you are angry, those are by definition going to be decisions that are not involving all the variables in the next right move.
Okay.
So what I want you to do is to feel empowered, but I want you to own the last decade and a half. Here's what I mean by that. I want you to say the words, I have put up with this for a decade and a half. I have...
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Chapter 6: How to communicate effectively in troubled relationships?
Chapter 7: Why is it important to acknowledge grief in a relationship?
Mm-hmm.
If we've been together 15 years and we've created humans, how many kids you got? Two, three?
Three. Three.
Three. Gosh, this may be the worst marriage thing I've ever said. If you get a hit in baseball three out of ten times, they put you in the Hall of Fame. So, it's a bad analogy, but you get what I'm saying. If he had one bad year, his dad dies, he just blew it. The other 14 years have been fine. It's been all right. That's one thing.
And I would challenge you to explore a guy who's begging you to go to therapy. Please go to a counselor with me. I blew it. You had surgery. I didn't show up for you. My mom got sick or my dad died, whatever. I just went bananas and I blew it.
But he'd have to actually feel that way. He doesn't feel that way.
Okay. But that tells me that either... You're annoyed by him because it's bad. I mean, you hate him. That's the past year you've put you through hell. Or this is the cap on 15 years worth. So walk me before this year. What has been going on for the last 15 years?
It's been a sexless marriage from the get-go. Like he told me before we got married, it's because of his religious reasons, which we had sex. But, you know, he felt better when we were married. But even when we got married, it was one time... the entire year. And then it was exactly like that after that once every few years.
And it was so bad for me because it made me feel horrible as a person that I was cutting. And because of his upbringing, he had zero responses like, okay. And I just wanted him to hear me, how it's affecting me. I made him go to couples counseling. We did three different couples counselors. We've been kicked out of everyone. And I'm just kind of, why have you been kicked out?
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Chapter 8: What role do boundaries play in relationships?
And that's preventing you from taking the next step. I'm not going to tell you to divorce your husband. I'm not going to do that. That's your call.
Right.
I'm not going to tell you to leave your husband. I'm going to tell you behavior is a language.
Yeah.
And if you go back and listen to this, you seem very resolved in your next step. That's what I hear.
I think so too. I think I just need to pull up my pants and just be prepared for it to be bad.
Have you written on a piece of paper, here's what must be true, and handed it to your husband?
No, I'm afraid to.
Why?
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