Hey brother,
Brené Brown (renowned expert on shame and vulnerability) relates what a man said to her after a lecture:
“I like what you had to say…but my wife and daughters? They’d rather see me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall off. You say you want us to be vulnerable and real, but c’mon. You can’t stand
it. It makes you sick to see us like that.”
This email is bound to tick off those who believe “it shouldn’t be like that”.
Sorry…but for scads of married men, it is like that.
The cold, hard truth is millions of “openly vulnerable husbands” face the anger, disgust, and withdrawal of their wives every day. Even in our age of “conscious men and women”, there are still more questions than answers to the modern marriage and the husbands we help.
Can You be Both Masculine and Vulnerable at the Same Time?
Of course, you can. Men have equal rights and access to their fears, tears, uncertainty, insecurity and unbridled emotional expression. And exercising those rights does not make a man less “masculine”. Masculinity always contains the full range of human emotion. That’s not remotely debatable in our book.
The
question is:
“Can a husband reasonably expect to sustain his masculine attractiveness to his wife if his emotional vulnerability is unchecked, uncontrolled and unregulated?”
In most cases, I
believe the answer is no.
*****
The Consequences of Becoming a “Hummingbird Husband”
Masculine vulnerability is NOT
neediness.
Neediness is collapsing into helplessness while handing your power over to another person, expecting that it is their responsibility to “fix” things for you and make you feel okay.
When a man loses confidence in himself and begins to look to his wife for constant validation and
reassurance, the passionate sexual attraction begins to drain out the relationship for her.
It’s when his energy becomes more nervous, unbalanced, unstable, and “needy” that she begins to freeze up and pull away. And the more she pulls away, the more insecure and pursuing he becomes. It's a familiar downward spiral, isn't it?
I call this the Hummingbird Husband Syndrome. And the results can be disastrous.
As she loses more and more respect and attraction, many men suddenly hear their wives say something like,
“I will always love you, but I’m not IN love with you anymore.”
And the next thing you know, separation and even divorce are on the table.
This tipping point is the time most of the men we work with show up in free-fall with their hair on fire trying to figure out what just
happened.
We created our online course, How to Defuse the Divorce Bomb to
specifically help men whose marriages are teetering on the brink or even gone over the edge.
Click HERE to watch a sneak peek module about the difference between a Hummingbird Husband and a Mountain Lion 
