Am I Betraying Myself By Staying With A Constantly Critical Partner?

Some things to consider if your partner is constantly critical & upset with you.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a woman whose boyfriend of three years is constantly critical and belittles her. He blames her for everything wrong in his life and their relationship. When she brings it up he becomes more belligerent, mean and condescending. He’s a student of my work and for the first two years their relationship was great.

She wonders if it’s fixable. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of her email.

Well, obviously if you have to ask, yes, but you also got to remember that no one will ever do or say anything to you that you don’t invite them to do. Weakness always invites aggression. That’s just a fact of life. Usually us guys, when we’re little boys, we learn that we mouth off and what happens? We get punched in the mouth. So we realize we shouldn’t do that. We shouldn’t mouth off to certain people because we get punched in the mouth. In other words, society has guardrails that will basically alter your behavior if you’re doing things that are kind of out of sorts. So whatever you’re going to tolerate, you’re going to invite more of. Respect is something that is earned. If you don’t respect, love, and value yourself, nobody else will either.

So this particular email is from a woman. She’s been with her boyfriend about three years, and she said for about the first year-and-a-half to two years, things were really great. Her boyfriend is an avid student of my work, and that’s how she found out about my work and started following it. But for like the past year, he’s just become nasty, condescending, he’s constantly insulting her, belittling her, being critical. Something else that we have to remember is no one will ever do or say anything to you that isn’t a direct reflection of how they feel about themselves in a moment. So what that means is that we tend to project what’s inside onto other people to, in essence, basically disassociate from it. That’s why the bully picks on weaker people, because quite frankly, the bully doesn’t feel too good about himself, and if he can project his self-hatred and self-loathing onto somebody weaker, he feels better about himself, he feels significant.

So clearly, whatever is going on, this boyfriend of hers obviously got some issues happening in his life. Part of the problem here is that she just puts up with it. She allows him to berate her. This is where having a strong, masculine father in the home really makes a difference. Especially when you got daughters, is that you got to make sure they respect themselves and they don’t put up with crap like this from dudes. Even though this guy supposedly is an avid student of my work, the relationship was good for about two years. Now he’s just constantly bitching and causing drama, the exact opposite of my work. If I remember right, he was an avid reader. He introduced her to it, but after a few years together, he just stopped reading the book, stopped watching videos, just, and now he’s just completely got away from what the book teaches.

As I say, if once you’ve got past your 10 to 15 reads initially and you feel like you know the material so well, you could teach a class on it, then once about every six months, you should go through the book as a refresher. Just because whatever you observe, you participate in. So if you stop paying attention to what’s in the book and in the videos, and you’re only consuming what’s on TV, the news and movies, whether you realize it or not, you’re getting brainwashed with dysfunctional archetypes. So whatever you do often, you do best. If you’re doing the traditional cultural, what’s the word, narratives, I guess if you’re consuming those through the movies and the TVs and you’re not continually in the book at least a couple times a year just to keep things fresh, you will backslide and you won’t realize it’s not something that happens in a couple of days, a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months. It usually happens in this case over the course of three years. So about basically halfway through the relationship, because I guess around a year-and-a-half is when she started noticing that he was slipping. So she’s wondering if it’s even fixable at this point because I mean, you’ll see some of the things he says, it’s not what I teach.

Masculine energy grows through challenge. Feminine energy grows through praise. So if you want your woman to do more of the things you love, praise her for the things that you love about her and it will light her up, she’ll blossom, she’ll be your joy, but if you’re constantly talking shit to her and constantly putting her down, you’re making her feel like crap, her feminine beauty and her softness are going to go away, and you’re going to force her to be more masculine, more cold, and more distant. It’s a really good email, because you get to see from the woman’s perspective of how a man’s behavior, especially when he’s behaving like this, makes a woman feel. Guys do this all the time. They argue with their girls, they have drama, they bitch, and they complain, because what typically happens when you get together with somebody, what are you focused on? You’re focused on all the things that you love about the other person, but towards the end of the relationship, you’re focused on all the things that annoy you, their idiosyncrasies, the things that you just can’t stand, and that looks like where this guy is at because again, he’s basically gone back to sleep and probably reverted back to exactly the way he was before he came across my work, because he just didn’t stick with it. In other words, he wasn’t disciplined. He was an undisciplined man.

This is what I see. I mean, I have guys that I regularly do phone sessions with, they’re like, “I have been following you for eight years, 10 years, 12 years, but I haven’t seen your content in years.” Then all of a sudden, they see when one of the ads that I run, even though they’re subscribed to my YouTube channel, they’re like, “Man, I haven’t seen your videos in years.” I was like, “Well, that’s how shadow-banning works.” That’s how the algorithm basically just eliminates your viewpoint, even when you have an audience, even when you have 600,000 plus people subscribed. I mean, you guys can go look at the video views. I had one that we did last week that had like 600 views. It was like after four or five days. It’s like I had 600,000 subscribers, but very few of those subscribers are actually seeing the videos appear in their feed. It’s just something we have to deal with. You can go to my Instagram profile and look at a couple of the pinned videos there.

When we first started doing reels, they blew up and they went viral. I had one that went over to like a couple million views and then I had another one was like around a million. After that, I didn’t get anything that got over like 8,000 or 10,000 views. Occasionally I’ll get a video that gets maybe 70,000, 80,000 views, but that’s maybe once a quarter. I’ve never had anything since those first few videos we published. Same thing with TikTok. I remember when I first started posting to TikTok four or five years ago, I had like no followers on there and I just started posting and my videos were getting 4,000, 5,000, or 10,000 views. Then I had a video go to like 100,000 views, and this obese woke idiot that lived in California that had millions of followers saw my video. It was something to the effect of red flags in women. I was talking about green-haired girls and stuff like that. You know, all the things to avoid with women that are kind of like that. So she had a negative reaction, and of course, she sent her army of followers, which complained about my videos and stuff. I remember like a couple days after that, we posted a video and one of the girls that worked for me was like, “Corey, I think you’re shadow-banned.” I was like, “What are you talking about? My videos are getting thousands of views.” I mean, there was a time like that one was going viral. It’s like you could refresh the profile every few minutes and see that, “Oh wow, I just got another thousand followers.”

So what happened was a couple days later we published a video. It had been up for six to eight hours. I go and I look, it’s got 10 views, and everything after that 10, 20, 30 views max. It was like that for a year, year-and-a-half. Then when Elon bought Twitter, things changed. I noticed my videos started getting a few thousand views again. So we started posting there. You can go look at it now. Most of the videos get a couple hundred views, but you want to see how the shadow-banning works, just go to Instagram. You can see that those first few reels I did, they blew up and they did great. Just like the Kyle Rittenhouse video that we did several years ago. It blew up, started going viral on Facebook and hit like 100,000 views in the first day. Then like a third day, it was getting like 10 views a day. So clearly it hit a ceiling.

When you looked at like the people on the left and the right, people that knew what was going on with the story, which was reported, at least the reporters were reporting it on Twitter, wasn’t making it to the mainstream media because they were pushing a narrative. Most of the people on the left only heard the mainstream media version and the narrative and all the Trust and Safety Council committees on all the social media usually has at least two or three people that are former spooks from the CIA that sit on there and moderate the content, and they all lean far left. Just like the Virginia governor who’s claimed that she was going to be a moderate, yet she’s a far left loon. You can go and look at all the policies she’s trying to institute, which are again, the complete opposite of what she promised when she was running. She’s a liar. She worked for the CIA. She’s a leftist. That’s just the world we have have to live in. So anyways, thanks for coming to my Ted talk about that.

Let’s go through this particular video here. I don’t even know why I got on that, but anyways…

Viewer Email:

Dear Corey,

I’m writing because I’m struggling to see my relationship clearly. I respect your work and want an honest answer, even if it’s the answer I am afraid of.

Well, she probably already knows what I’m going to say because she’s been following my work for a few years because her boyfriend introduced her to it.

My boyfriend (39, male) and I (27, female) have been together just over three years. For the first 1.5–2 years, it was the best relationship I’ve ever experienced.

So when a guy is applying what’s in the book and showing up and being disciplined, showing up and showing out, that’s what you’re going to get. But if he stops being disciplined and he starts only consuming TV and movies again, you just get like hypnotized and you go back to the narrative that’s being pushed. That’s why I got on the diatribe about the shadow-banning.

He showed up consistently, treated me well, and felt emotionally solid and strong. I checked off his entire “dream woman” list he had taped to his door. We felt like soul mates.

Notice she’s talking about her feelings.

He introduced me to your work and told me 3% Man helped him rebuild his life after his second divorce when he was at rock bottom and even tears up when talking about you and your work. He’s told me he read it over a dozen times before we met, but he has not read it since being together. 

Well, he’s not following instructions, so he should be going through the book at least twice a year. So that tells me it’s been three years since he went through the book. So you see how that happens. It’s not a couple of weeks, a couple of months or even a year. It took three years or really about a year-and-a-half, two years for him to start to get away from the book because again, he’s no longer reading it. He’s no longer watching the videos. He’s like, “Hey, I got this all figured out. This girl’s crazy about me. I’ve arrived. I’m a 3% Man!”

So he continues to only consume traditional media and TV, and everybody that’s in that, is just basically in a big bubble. It’s like an echo chamber. Even though if you want the real truth, you can go to Twitter, because the truth is always being reported. It’s just the media just picks what they’re going to show you. Again, it’s like 99% of them lean left. So you’re going to get the leftist point of view with no consideration of the other side at all. I’m sure there will be some lefties complaining going, “Oh, it’s not true!” You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

Over the last year, things have steadily changed.

What started as small complaints about me has turned into constant criticism. I’ve tried to take responsibility where appropriate, improve, and be more attentive, but no matter what I do, it feels like I’m now the source of all frustration in his life.

Well, part of it is you’re too nice. You’re not standing up for yourself and you’re not giving him any push-back. You’re not telling him that his behavior is inappropriate. The way he’s talking to you is unloving and unkind, and he’s causing drama. It’s not loving to constantly belittle and criticize your girlfriend. That’s definitely not what I talk about or teach in the book, but he got away from the book three years ago, and this is where he’s at now. He’s literally on the verge of totally ruining his relationship, and he’s probably clueless about it. So I’m sure she’s going to send him the video because he’s going to get roasted.

He fantasizes about being single, not because he isn’t attracted to me, but because life would be easier: More money, fewer obligations, and freedom.

So basically, the real reason why he’s pissed off is he’s not making as much money as he wants to. Maybe he might feel that he’s kind of lost himself a little bit in the relationship, because maybe he gave up some things in order to please you, and now he kind of resents it. That’s possible as well.

Until three months ago, I was completely financially self-sufficient. I recently stopped working to focus on the last two years of my engineering degree with the help of financial aid.

So that tells me you’re borrowing money to get your engineering degree finished. The only time you should be doing that is if the money you’re going to make once you graduate makes it very easy to repay that debt, because more often than not, you see people going and getting these degrees in sociology, gender studies, philosophy, and all these degrees that are just totally not going to help you get a better job.

If you’re going to go to college and you’re going to get a degree, you have to look at, what kind of job am I going to get and what’s it going to pay? Because you’re going to have to pay those loans back and you can’t, for the most part, discharge them in bankruptcy. So you’re just stuck with them, which is unconscionable to me. You should be able to discharge it in a bankruptcy, but that’s just not the case. It’s the way the law was written. It creates debt slaves of our children, which again, this is the criminals in Congress, in the Senate, that do this shit, and it’s from both parties do this. It’s really one big giant uni-party. All you got to do is look at the fact, I think it’s only like 15% of the people that Trump has appointed, have been confirmed. Even though the Republicans have control of the House and Senate, they go, “Oh, we can’t get anything done.” It’s like, no, they’re not. They don’t want to do anything. They’re just trying to run out the clock on them because again, the so-called like John Thune and all these other guys that are supposed Republicans, it’s like they’re just part of the uni-party. So they’re just a bunch of RINOs. Basically, a bunch of leftists on both parties is what you’re seeing.

I don’t restrict his freedom. I encourage him to do what he loves, see friends, pursue hobbies. I believe love should be free, not controlling.

Well, as Thich Nhat Hanh said, “You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”

The criticism has escalated over the last six months and my self-esteem is dropping quickly. I cry myself to sleep.

Well, that’s not good. That shouldn’t be happening, but again, this guy stopped following my work three years ago and look where he ended up. He’s just not disciplined. It’s just like you get fit and you get in shape, most people do that when they’re single, and as soon as they get into a relationship, they just start letting themselves go. They get lazy. They go, “Oh, I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll go in the weekend on the first of the month or the first of the year, I’ll get back into it,” and they just never do. Then they get dumped because they’re fat and lazy, and then they go back to the gym because they want to attract a new partner.

I avoid spending time with him. I feel like I’m constantly bracing for the next complaint. It feels impossible to communicate because he dives right back into why it’s my fault and how his complaints are valid.

Well, he sounds like a one way J.

I feel completely unheard.

Well, when a woman feels heard and understood, the legs open. When she doesn’t, the legs close.

He regularly compares me to his exes or other women.

That’s not loving. Again, that’s not something I teach.

He tells me I’m, “Never on the ball,” that he has to think of everything…

Well, he is supposed to be the leader and the man. So it sounds like he’s financially stressed. He’s stressed and frustrated as a man and he’s just taking it out on you because you’re too fucking nice.

…And that no one else would put up with me. When I plan thoughtful or romantic dates, the night often ends with an hour-long drive home where he berates me upset, ungrateful, and blames me for everything wrong in his life.

Yeah, that’s part of the problem, is your boyfriend is not a happy man. He probably got into the relationship thinking, “Man, once I get this dream woman, everything’s going to be great.” So he made the effort for about the first year-and-a-half, and then he started realizing the fact that he still wasn’t happy, and when he realized that he wasn’t happy, he stopped making the effort because he realized that no matter how good things were with you, he’s still a miserable, unhappy man. So that’s why he’s just not doing these little things, because he realizes no matter, even when things are good with you, it’s not making him happy because he’s unhappy. It’s not your fault. That’s his fault.

Recently, after dinner with my family, I got into an enthusiastic conversation with my mom about real estate and investing, something I’m passionate about. I did get a little loud. On the drive home, he complained again, calling me boring, annoying, and saying I took over the conversation.

So remember, no one will ever do or say anything to you that isn’t a direct reflection of how they feel about themselves in a moment. So what does this sentence tell us? He feels he’s boring, he feels he’s annoying, and he often takes over the conversation, which sounds like he did because you were excited to talk about real estate, something you’re passionate about. Instead of encouraging you to talk about that, he wants to take over the conversation and basically tell you to shut up because quite frankly, it seems like you’re pretty happy and he’s not, and he resents that.

Remember, people that are close to you in your inner circle, typically they want to see you happy. They want to see you do well as long as you’re not happy or and doing better than them. That’s probably part of what the issue is. He doesn’t like that you’re so happy and you’re excited about this because again, he’s just an unhappy man at this point in his life.

He told me my mom didn’t care about what I was saying and that I should, “Know my own mother by now,” implying it was pathetic that I didn’t see that.

In other words, he’s saying that your mom is bullshitting you about being excited. In other words, she was just humoring you. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but it’s not a nice thing to say. It’s not helpful for the relationship. Femininity grows through praise, and what’s he doing? He’s berating you. So he’s diminishing your joy or your ability to bring joy into his life, which is not good for the relationship.

He says all we do is argue anymore…

Well, a man who understands women doesn’t argue with him. If he’s arguing, that’s his fault because he’s supposed to be the leader. He is the one with the penis after all, hopefully.

…And when I said I wasn’t arguing, but that I’m tired of being constantly criticized and told I “suck.” He replied, “Well, you do suck, let’s be honest.”

You say something like that it’s like, “Well, if that’s how you feel, then you can go your own way and you can go find somebody who doesn’t suck, and I’ll go find a real man who knows how to treat me, and we can go our separate ways.” I would be like, “Don’t fucking talk to me like that. You want me to stay your girlfriend? You don’t fucking talk to me like that. You need to apologize.” If he doesn’t want to apologize, then just say, “Well, you can be single again, buddy. You can go find yourself another girl.”

I went silent after that. At this point, I’m questioning whether he truly appreciates or love genuinely who I am, or if he’s only staying because he’s very physically attracted to me.

He’s just an unhappy dude, for whatever reason. He’s clearly frustrated about his financial situation.

It would be helpful if he read Mastering Yourself because he’s basically using you as his kicking dummy, as his tackling dummy, because quite frankly, you enable it by taking it. So stop enabling his behavior. Stand up for yourself and tell him not to talk to you that way. If he won’t stop it and he won’t apologize, tell him, “Great.” You’re going to get off the phone. You’re not going to go on a date with him or whatever until he’s ready to apologize.

I feel like the more I try, the smaller I become.

Am I betraying myself and my worth by staying? Is there anything that can fix it? 

I’m not trying to vilify him, but I’m also struggling to reconcile this behavior with the kind of relationship you describe as healthy, loving, and sustainable. My love language is words of affirmation, and his cut the deepest. 

Jessica

So again, he’s not doing anything remotely close to what I teach. It’s been three years since he’s been through the book. Like I said, what it looks like is he just got to a point in his life, after the honeymoon period wore off, he realized he was still as unhappy as he was before he met you. Now he’s taking it out on you because he’s not happy and you’re allowing him to do it. So you got to set healthy boundaries. You got to tell him, “This shit’s going to stop. You got to apologize. You’re going to be nice and sweet the way it used to be. You need to get back into Corey’s work,” or he’s going to lose you because you shouldn’t put up with it. You’ve given him three years. You should be getting at the point where you guys are going to move in together or get married, and when he’s behaving this way, it’s a quick path to becoming single. If I talk to his two ex-wives, more than likely this is exactly what happened in his marriages. With them, things are good for a while. Then he became overly critical and was a dickhead, and eventually the women just get sick of it because no matter what they do, he’s a miserable, unhappy man.

So this is why it’s so important. I did a video newsletter the other day that, guys that are looking for a woman to make them happy, they need to get to a happy place himself where they love themselves, they love their life, they’re excited about it. Then a woman’s a great compliment to it. So again, I would share the video with him and tell him that his behavior needs to change. He needs to stop. He needs to talk to you in a loving way. If he thinks you’re stupid and you suck, well then he should go find a woman that he doesn’t feel sucks because you’re not going to put up with it. I give him 30 days to turn it around, and if he doesn’t tell him that he’s going to be single.

So you got to set and you got to enforce healthy boundaries. This guy’s just being an idiot. He’s being a douche-bag, and it’s disappointing that he could do that well, and this is all on him because he didn’t follow instructions. He didn’t stay reading the book and stay engaged. He’s like, as soon as he thought he had you, he’s like, “I don’t need to read the book anymore. I got this.” It’s on autopilot. Then he just slowly reverted, probably to the same behavior that led to the demise of his first two marriages. So you got some work to do.

Remember, you don’t get what you deserve in life. You only get what you negotiate. So give the dude 30 days, tell him what needs to change, and if he doesn’t change it, then he’s going to get to be single again and you’ll go find somebody else, because you’re 27 and you got a closing window of when you can have kids. I wouldn’t waste another three years on this guy if he’s not going to get his shit together.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen on any page, and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.

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