Episode 110: Is Your Husband a Man-Child?

by | Last updated: Jan 11, 2025 | Podcast

Are the men in your life a “life-long project?”

In this episode, I’m talking about why it seems your husband is a “man-child” and what you can do to change this. I’ll dig into topics of co-dependency, the different expectations we have for men and women, and how this impacts our sons and daughters, too.

(If this episode speaks to you, I encourage you to pick up a copy of one of my favorite books: The Dance of Intimacy: A Woman’s Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships by Dr. Harriet Lerner.)

Listen to the Full Episode:

What You’ll Learn In This Episode:

3:25 – The expectations we have for men & women
5:58 – Why women overfunction… and men don’t change
11:07 – Why we’re still stuck in the same ‘ol conversation about men & women
13:22 – If this sounds like you… start here

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Welcome to the Loving Truth podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now your host, relationship expert and certified master life coach Sharon Pope. Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the Loving Truth. Today we're going to talk about whether or not your husband is a man child. Now, full disclosure, I'm using some provocative terms right now to get you to lean in a little bit.

All right? Now, I'm not talking to all men. I'm not talking about all men. I'm not talking to all women, nor am I speaking for all women. Okay? But let me just start this with a story, and then I promise I will bring it back to your marriage. Okay? So this morning, I went to Pilates like I always do, and I overhear two women talking about men in their lives.

Now, in this case, it was their brother. This woman said, my brother is a lifelong project. Interesting. And she said, my sister and I are always like, well, what's going on with him now? What's happening now? What do we need to help him with now? And then the other woman started to agree and say, yeah, my older brother is the same way. You know, when he needed to learn about credit and get his first credit card, he called me.

Even though he's the older brother, he had just always purchased everything on his debit card. And so they started talking about their brothers in what I felt was kind of a derogatory sense. But I very quickly could see what was really going on here and how we needed to start having more open, honest conversations. Now, I, of course, did not call these ladies out. They were not asking me, sharon Pope, what's your take on this?

And I don't coach people who aren't asking to be coached. So we're gonna let that go, and they're gonna live in their own little world. So, look, in these women's situation, they're probably not wrong about these adult men who aren't, I would say, fully functioning in their lives. However, I always go back to, what is the reason for it? What is the human behavior? What's the motivation to drive this human being to always be in a bit of disarray, to not really know what's going on, to not seek information for things that they don't actually know and instead wait for their sisters to sort of dive in and make it all better and fix it all.

And so if we're going to talk about that, we got to talk about the other side of the equation. And there's way More to it than just men need to step up, and he's a man child, and he doesn't know what's going on and all this. Right, ladies, we got to talk about our role in the creation of this experience. Yeah. Because we are part of the equation here, okay?

So let's just address it one by one. First, many women, and I suspect one of these women I was overhearing talking about this, we like to stay in other people's business. We like to be in other people's business telling them how they should live and what they should do. Because when we're in somebody else's business, we cannot simultaneously be in our own business, which means we don't have to look at how we are showing up in our lives, how we are showing up in our relationships, how we could be better.

No, we get to just focus on our brother, who seems to be a hot mess, and how we get to feel helpful, Right? We get to feel needed and necessary in his life, which only is creating codependency like, oh, my sister can do it. My wife can do it. My wife can plan the birthday parties and hold down a career and take care of all the family functioning.

She can do all those things, but I can't possibly do that. All we're doing is we're creating the very codependency that we kind of resent, okay? Now, the next thing is that what we expect from our men is not high enough. We expect scraps. Let's be honest, right? If you just show up and, you know, you don't screw up too much and, I don't know, unload the dishwasher once in a while, we're like, okay, okay, we're good.

As opposed to being a partner who's in who you both view each other as equals. And when there's a challenge in the family, a challenge in our relationship, a challenge with me personally. I've got my person that I can go to, that I trust that will tell me some good, some wisdom that can help me be a better person in my life, right? But when we don't treat our partners like an equal, they're not going to show up like an equal.

So I think our expectations of men, frankly, are way too low. And so then we survive on crumbs. The crumbs, my darling, in the words of Danielle laporte, will only keep you starving. So we resist it, we dislike it, we complain about it, but we are actually part of the problem because we're creating it. Another thing is that we over Function, Right? So think about this, ladies. We have.

We have an epidemic level of women over functioning, which then invites under functioning from our partners. Now think about why that is. Women have been trained and socialized that if you're going to get ahead in a man's world, you're going to learn to do it the man's way, which is a ton of masculine energy. You're going to have goals, you're going to move forward, you're going to get things done.

And in many ways, that serves us really well. Right. It's why we can do all the things. It's why we can over function. The problem is it doesn't invite our partner to meet us there. The image that I get is that it's almost like women sometimes can be like a tornado. We're moving so quickly, so fast, and we're doing 28 things. And I think sometimes men might just stand outside of that tornado and look at it and go, yeah, I don't know how to enter that.

And I'm not really sure if I want to enter that tornado. So maybe I'll just leave that to her. That's. In that way, we invite our partners to under function and then we resent them because we feel like we don't have an equal partner when all the while we've created it. Even my friends, from the very beginning. Right. So let me just. I'm going to read two paragraphs to you from one of my favorite books.

It's called the Dance of intimacy. It's by Dr. Harriet Lerner. And this is literally page seven. Right. So it's not like these are deep thoughts in the back of the book after you've, you know, explored all the angles of intimacy. This is page seven. Okay. And. And this is why these conversations are so important, is that until you understand what's really happening and why we do what we do, we can't actually solve the problem.

So here's two paragraphs from this book that I think are relevant to this conversation. She says men seldom become scholars on the subject of changing their intimate relationships because they do not yet need to. Women often demand surprisingly little in relationships with men. Whether the issue at hand is emotional nurturance or who cleans up in the kitchen. We may settle for small change with a lover or husband and tolerate behaviors and living arrangements that we would not accept or deem fair in a close female relationship.

Parents may expect less from their sons. Boys will be boys. They expect less than from their daughters. In the realm of communication and responsible connectedness. While children learn to expect less from their fathers, until we are able to expect more from men in order to stay with them or continue business as usual, it is unlikely that men will feel called upon to change or even pay attention in marriage.

The gap between men and women in their attunement to relationships often widens dramatically over time. Dad did not notice that little Sam has holes in his sneakers or even that his mother's birthday is coming up if his wife moves in to take up the slack and handle the problem. Nor need he put much emotional energy into his parents arrival for an extended visit if his spouse will plan their entertainment or make sure that there's toilet paper in the house.

As long as women function for men, men will have no need to change. Ladies, if that is not a mic drop moment, I don't know what is. So we've got to take some accountability, both as adult women in adult relationships and how we're showing up and whether or not we are creating for an equal partner and why we might avoid creating space for an equal partner. And we've also got to take some ownership in terms of our expectations of our sons versus what we're training our daughters, right?

We know we've got to train our daughters to do the things and be the things and work really hard and push really hard. But we also have to expect the same from our sons and we have to teach them a better way to be in relationship, right? Because what you came into this relationship with, there was no class you took, there was no graduate degree you got in intimate relationships.

You got what you saw your parents doing. And that is all your kids are going to get as well. So what are you showing them? This is how we are still in this decade, in this generation at this time, still having these conversations about women over functioning and doing all the things and men under functioning. And again, this is not all women and it's not all men. But you know if I'm talking to you or not.

Now, one of the reasons why we like to over function, ladies, is because we want to be in control. Let's just be honest about it. The reason we want to do all the things is because we know it will get done the way that we want it done if we're really honest with ourselves. That's why. Because when you hand it off to your partner, you gotta let them do it their way, right?

And then you don't have any control over how they're gonna do it. And very likely they are not going to do it the same way. That you would do it. And so this is why when your child has an eighth birthday party, they get to just show up to the party and everything seems to be magically done. People are here because you sent invitations. They come with gifts because you had an Amazon list going for the last six months of all the things that you thought your child might really enjoy for their birthday as a present.

There's their favorite birthday cake and their favorite ice cream. There's balloons and there's party hats and there's banners and streamers and all this stuff because you made it happen, because you had a vision, but you didn't include your partner in that vision, probably, nor did you give or have any expectations that they would do anything. But then, aren't you kind of a little bit salty that they didn't.

That they didn't just jump in to see, like, hey, you're kind of overwhelmed. There's a lot to do here. I could participate, like, once in a while that happens. But for the most part, human beings, we're kind of. We're kind of lazy sometimes, right? So if we don't have to, we're not going to. Like, I'm not going out looking for. Who needs my help. How can I do all the things that you might need me to do?

I'm not going out looking for new things to do because we all live very busy lives. Okay? So here's the things that I want you to consider, if any of this is resonating with you. One is that we need to raise our expectations of men in relationships. Ladies, we just do. And men, you need to raise your own expectations, too. Okay? And the second thing is, then we need to be able to communicate about what our expectations are.

We need to be able to have those conversations of. Here's all the things that we need to do as it relates to this challenge that we're facing or this opportunity that we're facing. What are you going to do? Where can we best use your skills? Where can we best use my skills? And then how do we just, like, you know, hold each other accountable to our choices and actions as we move through this?

And that can be anything from an investment to a child's birthday party to a challenge in your marriage. Right. It shouldn't just be you. We've got to increase our expectations, but then we've got to be able to communicate about those expectations and have very direct conversations. Conversations with our partners. Make space for an equal partner. Because a lot of women say they want an equal partner, but they don't act like they want an equal partner.

They act like they want to be in control. And so then what they choose is someone who's going to be an underperformer, who's never going to be an equal partner, because ultimately, that's not what they really want. They say one thing, but they actually want something else. And the choices they make indicate that they want something else. The last piece is, so if we raise our expectations and if we're able to communicate our expectations, and this isn't like telling someone what they should do, it's making space to have an equal partner and then holding them accountable to being the man or the woman, in this case, of, like, doing what you said you were going to do, being a person of your word.

The third piece, though, is we got to get out of the way, right? We got to let them do it their way. We got to get out of the way. We got to stop stepping in and doing it all and then going, oh, he's a lifelong project so that you can feel needed, right? That's really where it comes from, is that my value is in my doing for other people, which seems very noble.

But all it does is it keeps people stuck in their lives, because what they learn is that their big sister can do it, but that they can't do it, that their wife can do it. She can do all the things, but I can't actually do all the things. And then those are the very things that we resent about our partner that we then say, now, this marriage isn't fixable anymore.

They don't call this podcast the Loving Truth for nothing. And the last thing I will say is, just look, if you are triggered by this, what I would love to remind you of right now is that our triggers are really unhealed parts of ourselves that we don't want to own. So that means there's something here for you, right? I already said this isn't all all women, and it isn't all men, and it's certainly not male bashing, because I kind of feel like I'm being a little tougher on the ladies here than I might be on the men.

Maybe that has to do with me raising my expectations of men. But if you are triggered by this at all, I would invite you to just explore that for yourself, because it probably means there's something here for you to consider. All right, until next time, take really good care if you're listening to this podcast because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage. And you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a truth and clarity session with a member of my team.

On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and and your marriage. Go to clarity for my marriage.com to fill out an application. Now that's clarity for my marriage.com.