Episode #356
How did you get into a position where you have to ask your wife’s permission for everything?
And how can you regain leadership in your relationship?
Being in a position where you have to ask your wife’s permission is a major red flag.
Men often think they are doing the right thing. They think they are asking their wife for permission as a show of respect. They are terrified because maybe the marriage isn’t going too well or the connection isn’t there or there are “warning shots” of separation.
Stop asking for permission to live your life. Stop asking permission to lead your family. Stop asking for permission to be you. If you know that your decision is right for you and your family, just step into it.
In this episode, we are going to talk about how you may have gotten into this position where you have to ask your wife’s permission – and how to regain leadership in your relationship, take control, and prove yourself in your decisions.
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Episode Transcript
Tim Matthews 0:00
How they ended up in this situation because I think they’re doing the right thing for a lot of guys. They think that they are asking the wife for permission as a respectful thing, and I often disagree with that. I disagree because often, a lot of the guys do it. After all, they’re terrified of making the wrong move. Maybe the marriage isn’t going too well. Maybe the connection isn’t there. Maybe there have been some warning shots of separation and the terrified of putting the wrong foot down.
Doug Holt 0:28
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Powerful Man show. I am your host, Doug Holt, with my co-host Tim The Powerful Man Matthews. What’s going down, brother?
Tim Matthews 0:42
Yeah, I’m doing well. I’ve got a haircut. Oh, my God. First time. Second haircut in a year. COVID. COVID got me good with my hair.
Doug Holt 0:54
I know that’s important to you.
Tim Matthews 0:58
When I know I’ve seen some of the replays back, I’m like, Oh my god, I look like shit.
Doug Holt 1:02
Ah, yeah. None of the men here listening to us are watching us on YouTube. or watching us for our looks. That’s something I’ve come to know. Maybe for you.
Tim Matthews 1:13
I’m still in denial. I’m like, show I’m holding out for it.
Doug Holt 1:17
Yeah, yeah. One of our guys said you have the best hair in the coaching business.
Tim Matthews 1:26
Yeah, that was quite a funny comment.
Doug Holt 1:30
It was.
Tim Matthews 1:32
So I’ve got something I want to bring to the table.
Doug Holt 1:36
Cool.
Tim Matthews 1:38
So we’ve seen a bit of a trend over the past. I guess it’s been coming up for a while on and off. And it’s one man, no one’s going to a different podcast on this right now about how to talk to your wife about how you want to invest in yourself and how to approach that conversation. But there’s a bigger piece to that, and that is how you ended up there in the first place. How you end up in the position where you’ve got to ask your wife’s permission, maybe it’s whether it’s to invest into your growth, whether it’s to buy something else for yourself, maybe it’s a toy you want to buy, maybe it’s somewhere you want to go, maybe whatever it is it’s the fact that you’re in a position where you have to ask your wife for permission is a major red flag. So what I want to bring to the table, Doug, is how guys end up in this position. Maybe guys are listening on what to do when you’re in it, how to regain the lead so that you can start to naturally lead yourself in the relationship in a way that, quite frankly, your wife wants you to lead.
Doug Holt 2:52
This is a great topic. I can remember Tim when my wife and I were going through a rough time in our marriage, and I remember feeling as if everything was a struggle, and I remember I’ve talked about this in previous episodes. I remember when it came to finances, that’s where it showed up the most for me, but it showed up in other areas, especially around finances, that my wife stopped trusting me all of a sudden. She started to stop trusting me with the money she stopped, and she questioned my purchases. She questioned where I was, my asset allocation strategies, and what I was doing to build wealth for us. It was neutered. I’ll use the word neutering felt like my balls were cut off, so to speak. Of course, I had my business account. I did everything I wanted to do with my business account, and then we had our accounts. When it came to withdrawing or spending or investing money in our account, whether it be a trip or coaching or a program or a new car, or whatever it was, I always had to run it by my wife and always met with resistance. It was never a question of you’re the leader of the household you get to choose. It wasn’t that at all, and I remember just feeling like a lack of control. And having to run it by her and kind of get her decision. I felt almost like an employee asking my boss if I could make a purchase, and was this the right idea?
And then eventually I found myself second-guessing my own decisions, non-business like a business that was good, but second-guessing my own decisions like Gosh, I get this I don’t know it’s a lot of its as much money and rather than looking at as an investment for myself and what that does is it started to bleed over into business. I started second-guessing myself and being less decisive in my business, and I started being less decisive without friends. The few times I would go out with friends, I found myself doing this more and more. Now fast forward this to just the other day as I dropped five-six grand on a sauna right Getting a new Infrared Sauna here for my man cave and going through, never had to do anything, never had to bring it up to my wife, that part of my life is so in the past. She trusts every decision I make financially and otherwise to lead our family. My wife doesn’t want to know. Yeah, she wants to know, I guess, in the form of communication. But you look at it today, our love life, sex life, and everything are on point, and she doesn’t need to know. She just trusts that I’m taking care of things. So if I want to buy a sauna, or I want to book a trip, you are there, and I will be going scotch tasting in Scotland coming up and going on an epic trip for three, four days together and doing adventures. I didn’t need to check on the dates, and I didn’t need to say, hey, is it okay? If I do this, that time period is long behind me, and there’s a way to get out of it. Guys. There’s a methodology here to get above and beyond that, and there’s a reason that your wife now requires you to run these decisions by her and what it does. This way did for me, Tim we see as the other guys are. It further cements your role as the beta in the relationship. When I had to ask my wife for permission to buy things, it further cemented her as the alpha and me as the beta. Whereas if I would have just done it, maybe we would have argued. We were freaking arguing. Anyway, maybe we would have argued. However, it would have further cemented me as the leader of the family. Right as the actual alpha in the relationship, I think that’s a critical distinction for many guys, especially today.
Tim Matthews 6:53
Hmm. So I think two things. One is how these guys get out of it. Right. But I think what’s also important is to touch on how they end up in a situation because I think they think they’re doing the right thing for a lot of guys. Don’t they? They think that they are asking the wife for permission. As a respect thing, I’m doing it because it’s respectful, and often, I would disagree with that, and the reason why I disagree is often that a lot of the guys do it because they’re terrified of making the wrong move. Maybe the marriage isn’t going too well, maybe the connection isn’t there, maybe there’ve been some warning shots of separation, and they’re terrified of putting a wrong foot down. So instead of doing something that might rock the boat further, like finances, which we all know is a symptom of, like you just said a moment ago, a lack of connection and trust, instead of being decisive and doing what the field called to do that place safe thinking it’s been respectful and what the wife wants. But in fact, it just creates more distrust and more breakdowns of the relationship.
Doug Holt 8:05
And it’s completely true. You’re trying to be a nice guy here, at least I was. You’re trying to make things you’re trying to right the ship of your relationship, and again, you’re further cementing yourself in that position that’s got you there in the first place. You’re further diving down that rabbit hole of problems and this, just the way we were taught as guys okay, that’s conflict, I was arguing. We’re arguing, we’re fighting, we’re not having sex, I want to fix this, I’m going to hire a coach, or I’m going to get help. And now I have to ask my wife for permission to invest the money and the time to do that, and we’re doing that right. When you’re asking her permission. You’re also essentially saying, I don’t trust myself to make this decision, and I need you to validate or tell me that I’m making the right decision or the wrong decision. But I need you to tell me, and that’s where we get into many problems as men. Because your wife is going to go, okay, you’re unsure. So I’m going to be unsure too. Why would I have you spend that money when we’re in a bad place? I’m going to keep that money in our pocket. So I can spend it or so I can get half of it. If we go through a divorce, or whatever it is, I no longer trust you to do that and lead us, and again, you’re further cementing yourself into beta, or what we call deer. Deer start defending, explaining, excusing, and reacting to the situation rather than just leading the situation.
Tim Matthews 9:39
I think that’s it. When you’re in this spot, you’re in a place of distrust and distrust in yourself.
Doug Holt 9:46
Yeah.
Tim Matthews 9:47
Naturally, why would your wife trust you? Hey, I’m going to do this thing. I’m going to take a risk, and she’s not going to say To be fair, some wives have said I think it is a great idea. Yeah, do it. But it’s very rare. Very rarely, the wives say that because she wants to see you take control and say, Hey, what? This matters to me, you matter to me, our relationship matters to me, and I want to do whatever it takes to fix this, just to see and feel that level of decisiveness and direction from you, for her to start to trust you again. So, in some respects, it could even be a shit test, asking first of all the sky, but if you do, and she’s saying no, it could even be a test, what’s he going to do is he’s still going to go and do what he thinks he should do.
Doug Holt 10:42
Hey, sorry to interrupt the show. But I wanted to ask you a question. Do you ever feel like something’s just missing, like, there’s something more out there, and you just can’t put your finger on it. I get it. Go over right now to ThePowerfulMan.com/Bonus to discover the system that other businessmen just like you are using. We’ve included 10 case studies, ten men, just like you, who have found the solution and found their way on their path. But we want to share that with you. Go over to ThePowerfulMan.com/Bonus right away. Now, let’s get back to the show. Yep, I think definitely, and I think this is, so they always talk about you hear this in spirituality, coaching, etc. In my journeys over the 20 years of being a coach and mentor, you hear about how your finances, as an example, are related to your bedroom. It’s commonly talked about, and like, there’s a link there, and so just like in the bedroom, your wife doesn’t want you to say, hey, do you want me to flip you over and put my finger in your button? Or hey, do you want to do this? Or golly gee, how is that feeling?
They don’t want to, and she wants you to take control. You can look at r&b songs, country songs, hip hop songs, songs by women artists, and a lot of those songs when it talks, it talks about the man taking control, or there’s even a song with the courses, I want you to take control. That’s a whole song. It’s like the chorus of the song, and I hear it in my head right now. The woman wants you to take control in the bedroom, and in the other areas of your life, including finances in your schedule. She wants you to do it now; she wants you to include her. She wants you to do it out of love and respect, of course. But she wants you to take control, and against the same thing in the bedroom, I can guarantee you that your woman wants you to take ownership in the bedroom and the finances and all the other areas because there’s a direct linkage here, guys. There was a video I did Tim when I came down here with my wife, we’re working on a woman’s coaching program right with her I was just brainstorming with her, and she I said, what is it that when the women you coach, what is it they want, and she filled the whole whiteboard and I filmed it? Well, most of it was, do women want their men to take control? Right in the bedroom, they want to be a well-fucked woman, and they want to be taken control, taken By like almost like a predator and prey.
That’s what The Powerful Man with the wolf, you don’t want to be the deer guys. You don’t want to be the beta. But they also want you to take control of the financial decisions. They want you to take control and prove yourself in the decisions on where you’re going to live. Right, where your family will do what you’re going to do on holiday, all those things, they want you to take ownership, then they’ll work out the details. They’ll decorate it; they’ll do all those things. But they need that content to be safe and free and to be in their feminine energy. We take them out of their feminine energy. So asking for permission is one thing that takes them out of their feminine—doing it and asking them to take ownership of something. So maybe it’s in the bedroom? A What do you want to do tonight? What kind of sex Do you have? That’s not what they want. They don’t want to be in the feminine energy isn’t decisive masculine energy is decisive. So to get into your masculine energy more, which is what most of us men need to do, we need to start being decisive and making decisions, and sticking to them.
Tim Matthews 14:16
This leads them to my next point. So how can men who find themselves in this position start to realize, wow, I’ve given up asking my wife for permission to go to the gym, whether it is big or small, it doesn’t matter. By the way, guys, this will be showing up in other areas of your life. You may still be doing well in business, and you’ll show up in second-guessing it’ll show up. You feel it when you have that decisiveness, and it’s like a fire that’s inside of you. But anyway, let’s say that some guys are listening. Yeah, and they relate to finding themselves in this position. What can they do to get out of it and always speak about saying to be decisive? It’s kind of a little bit vague to a degree. What can they start to do?
Doug Holt 15:01
Well, what can they start to do? Great question. Be decisive. Draw a line in the sand and make a decision. So, okay, let’s just say I’ll use the territories. So we have five territories; we focus on The Powerful Man, self, health, wealth, relationships in business. So be decisive in the area of yourself. How are you going to take better care of yourself? Pick something, do it healthily, are you going to work out or not? Don’t hem and haw, I might do 75 hard, or maybe I’ll do CrossFit. Or maybe I’m going to go running in the morning. You’re not decisive. You’re in feminine energy, and at that point, make a decision, but going to the gym five in the morning, I’m going to go three days a week, move on, decide, move on wherever it is, relationships. Hey, I’m in a sexless marriage, or I’m in a crappy marriage. This doesn’t work. I’m no longer going to accept this. So I’m going to get help. I’m going to join a program, and I’m going to invest some money and invest some time, book the time in your calendar.
This is a nonnegotiable time. Make the investment and go into your business. Same thing. If your business is stagnant or not growing or hemming and hawing around a partnership, or whatever it is, make a decision and move on. Stop hemming and hawing, so to speak, or going back and forth. On the possibilities of Should I do it? Should I ask? Just do it? Want that new car to make a decision? What does that new car going to get you? Is it worth it? If the answer is yes, and you can afford it, buy it, move on. But when you’re stuck in that neutral zone, you’re just stuck. You’re stuck in limbo, and you’re stuck on the fence is what we talked about at The Powerful Man get off the fence, we tell the guys, Get off the fence, step to the line. We use that terminology a lot when we’re coaching the men, and we’re not saying which side of the fence you need to get off upon. Hey, I’m not going to work on my marriage. Cool, done. Move on, rest with the fact that you’re in a sexless marriage. Rest with the fact that you’re in a marriage that’s not good. Separate, do whatever you need, get rest with that. Or I’m going to go and join a program, invest in myself in the marriage, and I’m going to make this. I’m going to do everything I can to make this work cool. But either way, get off the fence. Let’s step to the line. It’s really about owning things like being the best you possible is the best way to summarize it in the short podcast. Still, you need to step to the line. Are your standards there are you stepping up in this situation; are you stepping out, and I think it’s really important also for guys to do.
Tim Matthews 17:38
I’m just reminding the guys I’m in a circle called before this. Guys, get off the fence, be off it one way or another, just be off. It uses so much energy just being on the fence, and it’s so much easier to be off it one way or another. So I think you raise a great point. Make clear where you have been indecisive. So I think an action step you guys could take, make a list of where you have been indecisive in your life. Make a list where the open loops things that you haven’t decided on personally or professionally, maybe thinking about working out again, maybe thinking about where to go on vacation, maybe you’re thinking about, make a list of everything you were thinking about, and knock it out. Just take an afternoon and just make decisions on it and close those loops and from that make a commitment to be decisive and the thing with these guys is you’ve got to risk getting it wrong. Perfection will kill your decisiveness if you want it to be perfect. It’s going to kill it. There’s a risk that you get to take with being indecisive, being decisive rather, and that you might get it wrong. But the strength that you’ll get and the confidence gained from being decisive will strengthen the trust you have in yourself that if you do get it wrong, you’ll be able to handle whatever happens.
Doug Holt 19:03
Yeah, and so true, and you gotta do it. It’s like working on muscle, guys. I got to like working on muscle examples. We’re talking about needing your wife’s permission; just stop asking for it. Right, and I’m not saying you exclude your wife from every decision at all. But stop asking for permission to live your life. Stop asking for permission to lead your family. Stop asking for permission to be you.
Tim Matthews 19:30
Hmm, that’s a great one.
Doug Holt 19:32
You don’t need to ask someone’s permission to be you. You don’t even make a decision that is right for you and your family. You just step into it. Simple as that. You just step into it. So you want to stop doing it, guys, and stop now. Make this day the death of needing your wife’s permission.
Tim Matthews 19:50
Validation has to go hand in hand. They were asking for permission, and the chances are you’re also looking for validation from her. You don’t need either of them at all.
Doug Holt 20:00
And here’s the thing, if you’re going to make today the death of needing your wife’s permission, guess what you need to be decisive about that. Don’t say, Well, sometimes I will run Tuesdays or after your happy hour. No, boom, I’m moving forward. This is what we’re going to do. If you can push back, that’s great. You can have a conversation about it. But at least you’re leading, and that’s the key here, guys. That’s what we want you to take away more than anything. Today is the death of your wife’s permission. Today is the day that you lead your wife, your family on your drive. Tim, great topic.
Tim Matthews 20:37
Well said.
Doug Holt 20:38
Yep. All gentlemen, that’s a wrap for us at The Powerful Man show. As always, go to ThePowerfulMan.com/Bonus, where you get your free bonus training. That’s ThePowerfulMan.com/Bonus, and if you can, go ahead and leave us a review wherever you’re catching us. It just allows other guys just like you to find this show that Tim and I put on and the guests that we bring in. We have some exciting news to bring to you guys. We’re expanding in so many different ways. We’ll bring to that shortly. But if you can leave us a review, it does help us out. Gentlemen. Have an amazing day. Remember today is the death of your wife’s permission. Make it a great one, guys. We’ll see you next time at The Powerful Man Show.
