https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=f9Nm660mXXM
You need to talk to your wife about the domestic economy and the practicalities of your life together for about 90 minutes a week. And you need to date at least once a week for that length of time or maybe twice if you can manage that. And if you don’t do that, you will become isolated and lonely and you’ll develop a backlog of communication. And if you don’t fix that, you’ll end up divorced and then you’ll be fixing it for the rest of your life. Absolutely, absolutely. And whenever we have backlog of communication, I love that. I love that idea as though I’m just putting rocks in a backpack and eventually that backpack is going to wear me down if I don’t have a regular practice of communication. And again, somehow this became a moral or characterological issue. I think it’s the skills issue, man. I think taking some of the drama and smoke out of it and just saying, hey, I don’t know how to tell you, wife. I’ve never seen it done. I didn’t see it at my house growing up. I’ve never seen it. I don’t know how to do this. So I want to practice once a week. Let’s go over our calendar. Let’s go over our budget. Like how are we going to spend money this week? And let’s practice. I’m going to try to tell you what I need this week. About five years ago, my marriage was, I mean, we were hanging on by a spider’s web, just hanging on. And so my wife and I realized we got to, if we’re going to hang on to this thing, we’re going to have to rebuild it out of ash, right? And I can’t tell you, I’m a six foot two, 195 pound, I lived in Texas my whole life, Texas male. What it took for me to look across the table and tell my wife, I just occasionally want you to tell me that you’re proud of me. That was a hard thing for me to say. And I didn’t even realize how desperately I’d been searching for her approval for the first 15 years we’d been married. And how much I kept going out on a limb and on a limb and on a limb. And I was taking her non-response as rejection and I never put my needs out there. And I was embarrassed and ashamed to say it. And then she said, man, that would have been super helpful 15 years ago. And now she makes it a regular practice of our marriage to say, hey, I see you and I appreciate what you’re doing for our family. Golly, what a gift. And I didn’t know that doing the dishes was akin to foreplay. Great. I will knock those dishes out all day long. It’s about practicing saying your needs out loud. And then, man, get out of your head. The number of hours I’ve spent researching workout programs when I could have just gone to work out or researching how to tell your wife instead of just telling her, what a waste of time. We have too much data, man. We have too much information. We need to go do. Go do. Go act. Go act. Go act. You can have a preliminary conversation with your partner, let’s say, and say something like, look, we need to tell each other what we need and want. And we’re both too stupid to do that because we don’t really know what we need and want. And we have almost no practice at it. And worse, here’s something about that that’s really quite sad and frightening. It’s like, you know, if one of the things you wanted to hear is that your wife was grateful to you for, let’s say, providing properly for the family, so say proud of you, there’s a part of you that’s quite insecure that wants that message. And you’re vulnerable on that point. And so then if you share that vulnerability, the person with whom you’re sharing it knows exactly where to stick you if they want. And so it takes real trust to do that. But the alternative is assuming that, and people do this all the time, they’ll say things like, well, if you loved me, you’d know what I wanted. It’s like, well, first of all, that’s a pretty perfect love. And second- I’m not clairvoyant, right? Yeah. Well, right. Well, you’re not even smart enough to do that for yourself most of the time. And so, you know, you can make an agreement with your partner and say, look, here’s something I’d like to hear you say. And here’s the words I’d like to hear. Will you just say that? Another person might object and they’ll say, well, that’s- that sounds false if I do it or it won’t be real because we’re just practicing it and it’s- it’s artificial. And then you think, well, wait a second, we’re going to be together for the next 10,000 days. If it takes, yeah, yeah, or more. And if it takes 20 stupid practices to get it right, that’s not so much stacked up over 10,000 days.