How To Turn Around A Failing Relationship When She Wants To Breakup

How to turn around a failing relationship when she wants to breakup.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a viewer who first came across my work about eight years ago after his 1st marriage went sideways. It was toxic and ended in divorce. He’s now in a relationship with what he considers a wonderful woman. Eventually she moved in with her two children from another relationship. However, he never bothered to read my book and only cherry picked information from some videos and then stopped watching altogether once they got serious.

She has been complaining for a long time that he has neglected her and has not provided a solid home life because he has been struggling financially and changing jobs. After reading 3% Man twice, he realized that he stopped dating and courting her properly and didn’t make her feel heard and understood. He didn’t take her complaints seriously about their problems and now she wants to end things and move out. He wants to know what he can do to turn things around. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

Well, this particular guy says he first came across my work about eight years ago after his first marriage went sideways. He said it was toxic and ultimately ended in divorce, and he’s now in a relationship with a woman that he considers a wonderful woman. She’s got two kids from a previous relationship, and he says after about four months of dating, things are going great. So she moved in with her children.

What’s interesting is that he got away from my work at some point. He never actually did read the book 3% Man. It wasn’t until recently where she started complaining, saying she wanted to break up. She wasn’t happy that he went through the book and like, all the light bulbs went off and he’s like, “Damn!”

So he recently came across my YouTube channel again, started watching videos, and then this time he’s actually read 3% Man two times and he’s really seeing where things are going. He says she was complaining for a long time about the these issues. Plus on top of that, he was struggling financially, changing jobs a lot. So obviously he wasn’t providing a very stable household financially. Understandably, she’s not going to feel safe and comfortable trusting his masculine core to be the head of the household.

What’s interesting is, like most guys, she kept complaining about it and asking him to address it, and he just didn’t take her seriously. He just kind of ignored her, and now that she wants to end things and move out now, he’s like, “OK, now I want to fix things now,” after eight years, previously, eight years ago, he came across a work. Then what’s interesting is that he obviously followed my videos for a while, got into a relationship with this particular woman, and like a lot of guys, had success, and he’s like, “I don’t need to read the damn book.”

I was talking to a guy recently. He’s been following me for a lot of years. Dude’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars, very successful. If I told you the business that he was in, you’d be like, “I know that company,” and it’s just funny talking to him. He’s a very powerful man and he’s used to pushing people around. When he hears me say, “You got to read the book 10-15 times,” he’s like, “Bro, I’m a genius.”

In business, things have always come. He’s handsome, comes from a good family. He’s fit. He’s in shape. Yet the woman he was dating is like 10-15 years younger, and he just had no idea until he actually started going through the book for the first time. After all these years of following me, he was doing and saying things that completely turn her off to the point where she was ready to not see him anymore. So now that he’s reading the book and finally starting to follow instructions, because I see a lot of these guys are usually just incels that never had a date, never got any pussy yet, and they’re in the comments going, “All you need is good looks, be six feet tall and have money, and you can get all the women you want.”

Here’s a guy worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He’s handsome and he’s smart. He’s fit, he’s in shape, he’s got everything. Yet the woman he’s dating is dipping out on him. It’s like, looks, money and success will get you in the door, but if you don’t have your act together, women are just not going to stick around, especially if you’re constantly doing and saying things that are completely unattractive, which my coaching client that I was talking about, and this latest e-mailer, got into a relationship. So after he started going through the book, he recognized that he stopped dating and courting her, he didn’t make her feel heard and understood. On top of that, he added a bunch of inconsistency because he’s changing jobs, he’s not financially stable.

On top of that, he’s not providing a stable household. Plus, he’s not making her feel heard and understood, and he stopped dating and courting her, he pretty much ignored the kids. So what happened was they basically became roommates. So the relationship was on the rocks, and now he’s like, “What do I do to turn it around?”

Viewer’s Email:

Hi Corey, 

I actually came across your YouTube videos about eight years ago when my first marriage went sideways. Long story short, it was toxic ended in divorce. I have since gotten into a relationship with a wonderful woman. Things started great and after about four months, her and her two kids moved in.

Dude, after knowing somebody for four months, you move her and her children in. That’s that’s crazy. You don’t even know what she’s like. I mean, people can hide who they are for about the first 90 days of a relationship, and you’re moving her in right around that period when you’re able to start seeing what she’s really like. But you never read the book, and you were in La La Land, and you cherry picked from the videos, and a lot of guys get that kind of success and you’re like, see, I’m a special case. I don’t need to read your damn book, Cory. I’m worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Obviously not this particular guy, but it’s like, I hear that all the time, especially guys that are really super successful, they think are. It doesn’t apply to me. I’m too smart.I just watch a few videos, pick it up. I’m a genius. And yet they still get dumped.

Things have been up and down since and now has gotten to the point of her wanting to move out.

Some things I want to go over before we really get into it. If you’re in a situation where you’re living with your girlfriend or your wife, you’ve got kids together and she wants to move out, the last thing a man should be doing is moving out. If he wants to keep the family together and the relationship together, then she’s got to be the one to leave. If they’re your kids and her kids, she has to be the one to explain to the children why she’s breaking the family up and moving out and getting a divorce. If you move out or you move into the spare bedroom and yet you want to stay in the marriage or you want to stay in the relationship, your actions communicate that you’re leaving.

If you want to keep the relationship together, you don’t leave. If you’re of the contention, like this guy is, “Hey, I want to work things out,” and she’s like, “Well, I’m moving out.” I was like, “OK well, I’m not going to stop you. If you’re serving with divorce papers and you force me to divorce you, I’ll sign them, but I want to work things out. I want to keep our family together.”

It takes two people who want to make the effort to make things right. First and foremost, you don’t want to move out. Secondly, the main thing is that, well, let me go a little further down the email before I get into the meat of things here.

I rediscovered your YouTube and have watched several videos and have just read 3% Man for the first time and started the second time! Of course light bulbs started going off and I realized what was going on.

Women want to be in a love story, and that’s what started in the beginning. They started dating. They were hanging out, having fun, hooking up. Then what happened? It’s like that’s one of the biggest complaints. It’s interesting, there was a book written years ago by a woman, and it was actually a pretty interesting book. It’s probably actually going back 20 years ago. The biggest complaint with women about the guys they’re in relationship with is that they’re romantic at first and then they stop. Then when you ask the guys, they’re like, “Well that was the courtship, I want her. We got married, we moved in together, we got kids, we got a family. So I don’t have to do those things anymore.” That’s what they think.

Women want to be in a love story and it starts out that way. Then at some point when the guys think, “Hey, I’ve won. She’s mine,” they stop. The way the woman takes that is, “If you love me and you care about me, you’ll continue to date and romance me and be in a relationship and continue to court me.” If the guy stops dating her and they become roommates, and then he doesn’t basically take the time to make her feel heard and understood, everything he does, everything he says, communicates that he doesn’t care.

He could say, “I love you,” a thousand times, but if he never takes the time to open her up and say, “Hey, how was your day babe?” And see what’s going on, or take her out on dates, get a babysitter so the two of them can have some alone time, she’s going to feel, especially like in this case where she was letting him know over and over what she wanted him to address, and he just wouldn’t he didn’t think it applied.

I got complacent, not meeting her emotional needs, not courting, and not making her feel heard and understood.

Also I have been struggling with jobs and finances.

Well, part of being a man is purpose, drive, mission, succeeding, accomplishing, breaking through barriers, overcoming challenges. That’s what a man is all about. When you can’t hold down a steady job and you’re putting financial stress on her, especially if you’re the primary breadwinner, a woman’s not going to trust your your masculine core. When you provide an unstable household, the sex is usually going to get cut off too, because she doesn’t feel safe having sex. Deep down, biologically, she’s worried about having another child or having a child with you, because if you can’t pay the bills now, there’s no way you can support another child and sex is risky. Then she doesn’t feel safe.

I’ve had clients, I remember one in particular. This guy, great dude. I remember when he first started out, he was one of the very first clients I got when I started out over two decades ago, doing this full time. I was with him several years. I coached him off and on. Eventually met a really cool girl, beautiful. I remember we were laughing about it. He’s like, “When I walked down the street, Corey,” he’s like, “People look at my girlfriend,” and later his wife or his fiancee, and “They look at me and they look at her and they’re like, the look on their face is like, ‘What is she doing with that dude? What’s she doing with that chump? Come on.'”

He’s really punching above his weight, which made him feel like a million bucks. She loved the hell out of him because he was a really good student and really applied what was in the book. He was so grateful and so appreciative, so is she that when they got married, they made it a point to spend their honeymoon in the city where I live at the time. So we got together, I got to meet her, and I obviously met him in person after talking to him for many years. It was beautiful.

They later had a bunch of kids, and things were great. She was very good with accounting and numbers and math. Him not so much. So she budgeted, all the bills were paid on time. One of the things that he did was like, “Wait a minute.” He didn’t like being put on an allowance or a budget. He’s like, “I’m going to take over the finances,” because she wasn’t working. She was a stay at home mom, and he’s like, “I’m going to handle this from now on,” and he just sucked at it. He didn’t pay the bills on time. He spent too much money. He didn’t stick to a budget. Then, her cell phone would get turned off, the cable would get turned off. All of a sudden the electrical would get turned off, and it just just made her feel incredibly unsafe.

I remember he sent me an email and he’s like, “I got to do a phone session. Can my wife and I do it together?” He’s like, “I got this issue and I want you to settle for it for us once and for all.” I was like, “OK, that sounds great.” We scheduled our coaching session with the two of them. So obviously, ladies first. I asked her what’s been going on. She started telling me that basically what was going on is he’s not paying the bills. Things are getting turned off. She’s stressed about money because she put it all in his hands because he was the man of the house.

She submitted to him, followed his lead, says, “OK, you’re the man. I trust your judgment. I don’t feel good about it.” If you say you’re going to do it, then do it. For like four or five months, she was on pins and needles all the time, because he was in the military and he was deployed. So there’s times where she can’t get a hold of him, and she doesn’t know how much money is in the bank account anymore because he took all that stuff away from her.

She was telling me how when she was running, everything was great. All the bills were paid. They had plenty of money in the bank. They had extra money in case of emergencies. She felt good. Sex life was amazing. His complaint was that she didn’t want to have sex with him anymore. She didn’t feel safe. She’s like, “I love doing it. I was really good at it.” I asked him. I was like, “Was she was she really good at it? Bill’s always paid? Was there always money in the in the bank? “He’s like, “Yep.” After that, because he’s expecting me to say, “Hey, you need to start sleeping with your husband again.” I said, “You got to create the conditions where she feels safe. I think he had three kids at the time. It was like, “She’s not going to feel safe if you’re going to constantly have bill collectors calling and things getting behind because she never ran things that way.”

After all was said and done, what they agreed to do was that he admitted he sucked at it. He knew he sucked at it. He was just terrible with money. He was terrible with finances, and she was great at it. I think that was what her background was. Anyways, I think she majored in accounting or something. So she took it over and got everything straightened out. She felt safe. She felt comfortable. Sex life returned back to normal because now she felt safe. They had more kids. Last I heard, they’ve lived happily ever after and I’m proud of them.

In that particular case, the way he was doing it, she was complaining constantly, telling him exactly what needed to be done and why she was upset, and he wouldn’t listen to her. Because he’s the man, he’s in the military, he’s kind of a jock alpha type used to getting his way.

So we went through things. It was obvious that she needed to take that back over again. It totally turned things around because he trusted my judgment and she trusted it. It’s like, I was able to just step in and was like, “Your wife is right,” in this case. He apologized to her and it just solved that problem. If he’d had been pigheaded like he was intending to be, then he would have probably kept driving the relationship into a wall to where she would have left him.

I mean, it could have gotten that bad because a lot of guys don’t listen. To his credit, he was willing to say, “You know what? You’re right. She is better at it, and I’m going to let her go back to doing those things,” because that was one of the gifts that she brought to the table. He was much stronger in other things. He was great at being a breadwinner, but he was just terrible managing his money and paying the bills. So it’s super important if you’re the head of the household, you got to make sure you pay your bills on time. If you lose your job, you go out and get a job. You don’t sit and play video games all day, drink beer, order pizza, have your buddies over and goof around. You got to handle that shit until you get a job.

There’s an article I wrote years ago “How To Get Any Job You Want.” All that stuff is laid out in Mastering Yourself. If you’re struggling in that area, especially now with the economy starting to go the other way, we’re going into a economic bust cycle, things are going to get harder and they’re going to get more difficult, and then there will be more competition for jobs. Therefore, you’ll have to do a better job in interviewing and searching for jobs and those kinds of things, especially if you find yourself out of work or laid off, because those things are going to happen. That’s life. Your industry gets decimated by the interest rate increases, whatever it happens to be.

So this is super important, as a man, that you handle this shit. You can’t just have her on pins and needles all the time because you can’t hold down a stable job and the bills aren’t paid. No woman is going to want to put up with that. That’s a minimum level of competency that you have to achieve.

You got to be able to pay your rent on time, pay your bills and not have your girl freaked out. Whether or not you know you’re going to get evicted from where you’re living, you just can’t do things like that if you want to stay in a relationship. She trusted you to handle these things. She gets into a relationship, moves in with you, and then you don’t handle them. Which is exactly what happened to my previous client. Those things were handled, and then he was pigheaded. He’s like, “Oh, let me take it over,” and he just completely fucked it all up. Then that created a problem with the sex life because she didn’t feel safe and comfortable.

That’s something that you got to fix. You can’t just let that linger. “Oh, I lost a job.” It’s like, you handle it. Go out there and get another job. Figure it out, dude. You just cannot provide an unstable household to a woman with kids. Whether they’re your kids or her kids. Doesn’t matter. You just cannot do that.

She has been communicating these issues with me, but I was not paying attention.

Yeah, most guys, they say the same. “I didn’t think she meant it. I didn’t think she was serious. I didn’t think it was that bad,” even though they say it over and over again. Women, they’re going to tap out at some point.

I mean, look at Gisele and Tom Brady. He wasn’t present. Did make her feel heard and understood. She’d been complaining about the same thing for years. He kept saying he was going to do something about it, he just never did. Eventually she’s like, “He’s not going to change.” So she left, and now she’s, I guess, dating a jiu jitsu instructor or something. Sounds like Tom Brady is going to struggle finding a hot younger woman. It’s sad that that ended.

She has been cold and distant these past couple of weeks so I have been mirroring her behavior and giving her space.

Hold on a second, dude. You’re not in no contact. You live together. She’s saying she wants to move out. You can’t just ignore her because you’ve already been ignoring her. So she needs to see that things are going to change. Number one, the first thing you should do when you walk in the door is, “Hey babe, how was your day?” Get her talking.

Just like when you’re on a date. Just like the book teaches, women should be doing 70%-80% of the talking. It’s obvious that he recognized that he hasn’t been doing that. You can’t just show up at home and, “Oh, I’m going to give her space and ignore.” It’s like, “Hey babe, how was your day?” You should come from the place of she’s still living with you. She hasn’t moved out yet. So there’s a chance that you can turn it around just by getting her to open up. “What else? Tell me more.”

Watch the video that I did years ago, “How To Communicate With Women Effectively,” and do that every day you come home. “Hey babe. How was your day?” That should be the first thing you ask her. Get her to talk. Get her to open up. You got to start that going. If you never ask, all you’re doing is coming home every day and continuing to make her feel like you don’t give a shit. All that’s going to continue to do is further cement her mind that she needs to leave the relationship.

I’ve been focusing on having a better relationship with the children as well since she had expressed that it needs work.

Yeah, back to Tom and Giselle. She just said he wasn’t present and that included her and the kids.

I want to retake the lead in our relationship but not sure how to go about doing that without pushing to hard.

Hang out, have fun, hook up. Your job in the courtship is to create an opportunity for sex to happen. Hang out, which is the first part. Have fun while you’re hanging out. Get her to talk. Get her to open up. Then the hook up part comes once she’s opened up.

Remember, when a woman feels heard and understood, the legs open, and when she doesn’t, the legs close. You always have to take the lead in the relationship. Taking the lead is coming home and, “Hey babe, how was your day?” After she’s done talking, she’s like, “Oh, I’m so glad we talked. Things are getting so much better.”

Spend some time with the kids, ask the kids questions, get them to talk. “How was your day? How was school? What’s new? What’s exciting?” Take a sincere, authentic interest in your girlfriend and her children. Don’t just come home and act like a roommate. That’s what’s leading to the end of your relationship.

At what point do I start going on dates or doing fun activities, etc.?

Thanks for your help!

Bob

As soon as she’s open to it, but first thing’s first is, “Hey, how was your day?” Then when you’re talking, you’re having a good time and you get her to talk about whatever she happens to be upset about, instead of you getting mad or upset, just listen to her. Try to understand where she’s coming from. Try to understand what it is that she needs from you, and just being present with her, getting her to talk and spending an hour or so when you get home.

Even though you’re tired, you might have other things you want to do, or you might want to catch up on sports, watch some TV, play some video games or whatever happens to be that you do, just focus on her. Get her to talk, get her to open up, because that’s going to make her feel like you care. If you actually sit there and listen and repeat some of it back to her as she’s sharing it, that’s going to make her feel like, “Wow, he’s actually listening to me. He actually seems to care.” Then when you’re having fun and you’re joking around, after the kids go to bed, you can have a glass of wine and just look for the signs that are in the book that she’s ready to be touched, ready to be kissed, just like you’re on a date.

Remember, hang out, have fun while you’re hanging out, and then hook up when the signs are there. The hook up comes at the end. Most of the guys in this situation are bitching and complaining because they’re not getting laid. We got to open her up. When you open her up, then the legs will open. If you don’t take the time to open her up, the legs are going to stay closed and eventually she’s going to tap out and give up.

You’re still living together. You should be acting, going no contact because she lives with you. So you have a chance to open her up. The date could be in the evening after the kids go to bed. Maybe have a glass of wine, some tea, coffee or whatever. Then you start screwing around, maybe dancing in the kitchen, slow dancing, put some music on. You just have fun.

I mean, the signs are clearly laid out in the book of what to look for when she’s ready to be touched. When you notice that, then you can seduce her. Ideally, I would try to go out on a date, maybe once a week. Maybe half the dates, the kids come with you and it’s a family thing, and the other half it’s just you and her and you get a babysitter.

You got to do fun things together. The family that plays together stays together, and it doesn’t sound like there’s been a lot of playing together. It just sounds like you come home and you’re all a bunch of roommates, and you kind of totally neglect her, and you neglect the kids, you don’t date her. She didn’t sign up for a roommate. She signed up for a lover, a teammate, somebody to help her co-parent, somebody that she trusted, somebody that she could admire and look up to and respect, follow his lead. You’ve been falling down on that. These are the basic things that you need to start doing right away and getting her to open up. As she opens up, she starts to feel like you care as she’s opened up and you start hooking up again, that that rekindles the intimacy.

Don’t focus on staying together or any of that. Just create an opportunity for sex to happen, just like the book says. Just like if you were starting to date, it’s like you stopped doing all the things that made you successful in the beginning, and you have to get back to doing those. The worst thing you can do, is what you’re doing now, is just basically come home, ignore her or pretend like you’re in no contact. You’re living there, she’s still in your home, so you have a chance to turn it around.

Just get her to talk. That’s the first thing that you need to do. Hang out, have fun while you’re hanging out, open her up and then hook up when the signs are there and she’s ready to be touched and ready to be kissed. Pretty simple, and obviously read the book 10-15 times.

I mean eight years dude, and you’re just finally getting around to it. Come on, man! Take yourself, your life, your success and your family seriously. If you don’t date your girlfriend, eventually some other guy is going to come along and date her for you.

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 and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.