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Even if you put in a grueling 40+ hour work week, cook dinner, change diapers, and coach your kid’s soccer team, guess what? You may still not get it right!

Despite your best attempts (and successes) at showing up for your family, it’s entirely possible you’re still coming home to an unhappy wife, feeling criticized and unappreciated.

To make matters worse, there seems to be no end in sight and nothing you can do to fix it. It feels like the bar keeps getting raised. Peace, it seems, is ever elusive and your partner increasingly impossible to please. Nothing you do or say seems to help, so you say nothing.

Men and Stonewalling

For many men in modern heterosexual marriages, the tendency to become quiet and withdraw during conflict is born out of a well-intended desire to focus on the positive, a propensity towards not wanting to escalate things further or increase the discord with their spouse. For others, it’s an involuntary reaction to stress, a logical form of damage control that nature has hardwired into you and Dr. Gottman’s research supports this.

Men in heterosexual relationships are consistently more likely to stonewall than their female partners.  In fact, 85% of Dr. Gottman’s stonewallers are male. Stonewalling occurs when a listener withdraws from an interaction, refusing to participate or engage, essentially becoming unresponsive.

Your Body’s Response

When it happens there’s a good chance your body has gone into diffuse physiological arousal, or DPA in the Gottman lexicon. The most immediate symptom you’ll notice is an accelerated heart rate, but DPA will also cause an increase in sweating, elevated stress hormone production, and as a result an impairment in your ability to think clearly and process information.

One of the hardest things about DPA and flooding is that the symptoms that it triggers in men tend to escalate women and their vulnerabilities.

Once entangled in this devil’s snare of gridlock and disrepair, your partner will perpetually come to you from a stance of desperation, growing increasingly critical and relentless with her complaints, and in turn, you will be vulnerable to shutting down or blowing up. Stonewalling and DPA breeds pursuit, which then fosters more stonewalling and DPA. Simply put, you get quiet, and she gets loud – it’s a vicious cycle and a lonely one.

Being largely on the receiving end of a litany of complaints can result in feeling like there is little room to bring your own experience, she’s always beating you to the punch, and so you go unseen.

The Code of Silence

In fact, I’d argue that to be a man in our society is in many ways an inherently lonely stance. A code of silence pervades male culture stating that it is not masculine to talk about feelings. Can you imagine what a different world it would be if you were given permission to express the passion and range you have for sports or politics in the context of an intimate relationship?

These very tendencies that can make you predisposed to closing yourself off from your partner are deeply rooted in our society, where boys and men are not encouraged or socialized to talk about their emotions or to display vulnerability. In fact, there is ample evidence to support that these emotions are beaten right out of you from a very young age.

So it seems, even if you are well-intentioned, you may very well miss the mark and find yourself on the outs with your partner and utterly at a loss.

When you come from a land where nobody utters the words of emotions, there can be no language. And with no language – connection will slowly erode. It’s a setup for both sexes. She is speaking in tongues, and you will feel that you have none.