Marriage & Men · 2026

Pop the Hood

Twenty years of reading, two marriages I couldn’t save, and one very suspicious car dealer.

Jhöl Unger · New Westminster, BC · August 2026

Quick thing before we start. None of these numbers are mine. They’re the best ones I could find, I checked them all myself, and where one didn’t hold up I’ll tell you.

A hundred percent of divorces begin with marriage.

They don’t put that in the contract.

I’ve been reading about this stuff for over twenty years. Not because I’m desperate and not because I’m bitter. I’ve buried two marriages and a decent stack of relationships before those, and somewhere in there curiosity took over from grief. I wanted to know why this thing is so hard. Not why mine was hard. Why it’s hard for damn near everybody, including men who look from the outside like they’ve got it handled.

But before any of that I have to tell you about my dad, because we all start our view of marriage with whatever we saw growing up, whether we want to admit it or not. Nobody hands you a philosophy on this. You absorb the house you were raised in and then you go build one of your own out of the same lumber.

My dad never knew his real father. Didn’t remember him, never met him. He found out at thirteen that the man he’d thought was his dad wasn’t. So nothing got handed down to him. When I asked him about it years later he told me he figured he’d been a bad father, and that his whole goal had just been to do better than what he got. What he got was the belt buckle. He got that a lot.

So when it came to advice, my dad stuck to what he actually knew, and what he knew was cars. The man could take an entire engine apart. I watched him do it, every piece of it laid out on the garage floor, and then he’d put the whole thing back together and it would start.

If I had a car problem, my dad had great advice.

If I had a marriage problem, my dad had car advice.

So let me tell you what he did the day we went to buy my first car.

He got down on one knee at the front bumper and sighted straight down the side of it, and he held that for a while. He told me if it had ever been hit and repaired you could see the wiggle in the panel, because once a car gets bent it never sits quite straight again, no matter who fixes it. He put his ear on it while it idled. He got underneath and looked for anything leaking where nothing should leak. He grabbed it and shook it. Sometimes he’d have them put it up on a hoist and he’d stand under it with his hands in his pockets like he had all day.

And the best one. He’d say he wanted to take it for a test drive, and then he’d drive it to a completely different garage, walk in, hand a mechanic twenty bucks and say: look at this car, what do you think?

Twenty bucks for a stranger’s opinion. On a used Ford.

One more thing about my dad before we go on, because it’s the reason I’m quoting him at all. He stayed married to the same woman for fifty-five years.

So whatever he was doing, some of it worked.

Part One: The Coin Flip

Now here’s the number everybody knows. Half of marriages end in divorce. Fifty-fifty. I’ve been hearing that my whole adult life and it never bothered me much, because it matched the math I could see around me.

Then just recently I heard a version I’d never heard before, in a relationship video I had going while I got my day started......fifty percent of first marriages fail, sixty percent of second marriages, seventy percent of thirds.

Now, fresh off my second one, I’m looking harder at everything these days.

And I will tell you, I noticed that seventy percent.

So for the first time in twenty years of reading about this stuff, I went looking for where the number actually came from.

I can’t find it.

✱1 That ladder is everywhere. Magazines print a version of it, divorce lawyers copy it onto their blogs, everybody repeats it, yet nobody points at the data. I’m not saying whoever said it made it up. Numbers like that usually aren’t dishonest, they’re narrow. Somebody found the slice that made the point, and the slice was real, and then it got loose.

And it isn’t even one number. Mine was fifty, sixty, seventy. There’s another version out there running forty-one, sixty, seventy-three. The rungs move depending on who’s holding the ladder and what they’re selling.

My agents run on Claude. Core Brain AI is where I go to check my own team’s work......I bought it from JT Foxx at his seminar. You pick which engine answers. I picked ChatGPT.

So I asked it. Cold, no context, just the question.

Four seconds. Neat table. All three rungs.

Then it told me, unprompted, that the numbers weren’t tied to any primary source and that everybody citing them was citing each other. And then it suggested I could still use them if I called them commonly cited estimates.

That’s the machine doing what a man does in a bar. Says the number. Admits he doesn’t know where it came from. Says it anyway.

What is solid is less dramatic and more useful. ✱2 The U.S. Census tracks first marriages properly, and about seven in ten make it ten years. Closer to six in ten make twenty. That’s the men’s number. Women land a bit over half. ✱3a That’s a lifetime divorce risk around forty to forty-five percent, not fifty. Canada runs a little lower. ✱4 Statistics Canada puts it at well over a third before the thirtieth anniversary.

✱5a And the famous fifty percent was never wrong so much as stuck. It came from projections made in the early eighties, when divorce was at its all-time peak, about the people marrying right then. It was probably true for them. Then it got repeated for forty years about everybody else.

And that third above only counts the ones who signed something. Half the breakups in this country never had a contract to void, so nobody counted them at all.

And that’s not me being clever with numbers. ✱6 Statistics Canada says it straight out: common-law breakups don’t show up in the divorce statistics at all. Never have.

✱7 Meanwhile common-law went from about one Canadian couple in twenty back in the eighties to roughly one in four today. In Quebec it’s damn near half.

And here’s the one that got me. ✱8 Stats Can looked at two million Canadians who went through a breakup over a five year stretch. About half of those were ending a common-law relationship......even though there were far fewer of those couples to begin with.

Those ones lasted about four years on average.

The marriages lasted about fourteen.

Let me put it in my dad’s language.

The divorce rate is the warranty claim rate. It only counts cars that got registered, and only the breakdowns where somebody filed the paperwork.

A common-law relationship is a car nobody registered. Same road, same weather, same driver, same everything......it just never got plates. And when one of those dies on the shoulder, nothing gets logged anywhere. Officially it never happened.

Except we know those ones are dying faster. About four years, against fourteen.

So when somebody tells you a third of marriages end in divorce, what he’s really telling you is a third of the registered ones.

Nobody’s counting the rest of the lot.

And here’s the thing. I suspect that’s where the ladder came from in the first place. Somebody stood back and looked at the whole mess......marriages, common-law, second times around, third times around and came out with fifty, sixty, seventy.

Looked at that way, I don’t think they’re wrong.

Now that’s napkin math from me and my lead researcher, so don’t take it to court. But when the two of us sat down and actually tried to put a real number on how often these things end, we couldn’t find one. Nobody’s calculated it. Not because it’s hard.

Because half of it happens to people who never signed anything.

These aren’t my numbers. They’re the best ones I could find, and I went and checked every one of them myself.

Here’s what I found doing that. ✱3b The man I’d trust most on the lifetime risk says nobody can actually know it. ✱5b I went looking for the Statistics Canada figure everybody quotes and the page is gone. The famous fifty came out of projections made in 1984, about people marrying in 1984. ✱9a Depending on whether you finished school it runs anywhere from about a quarter to better than half. And half the breakups in this country were never counted at all.

Murky water on a big subject, and some of the experts are still guessing.

That doesn’t make it matter less. It makes it matter more.

Because if it lands somewhere around a coin flip no matter who’s holding the clipboard, then arguing about the number is the one thing that can’t possibly help you.

The job isn’t to win that argument. The job is to do what you can to end up heads and not tails.

Part Two: The Honest Dealer

Picture yourself walking onto a used car lot. The guy comes out with that smile they must teach somewhere. Only this time he doesn’t run the routine on you. This time he tells you the truth.

Half these cars are lemons. I don’t know which half. Nobody does. Good luck.

If you were my dad you’d already be on one knee at the front bumper, sighting down the side of it.

And I’ll be honest with you. To this day I don’t know if I can actually see that wiggle. All these years of looking and I’m not sure I’ve ever once spotted the thing he was talking about.

But I swear to you, I look every single time.

That’s the part I want you to hold onto, because it matters later. You don’t have to be your father. You don’t even have to know for certain what you’re looking at. You just have to be the kind of man who gets down there and looks.

And I’ll tell you exactly why I look.

I bought a lemon once. Didn’t inspect a thing. I needed a car for work so I bought it. And when it died on me I didn’t even know you could take a car back......I figured that was it, that’s what I get for being stupid.

So I told my dad where I’d bought it. He drove me straight over there, walked in, and told the man he was either fixing it or taking it back.

The dealer took it back.

And the part that still makes me laugh? it was a Ford station wagon.

I’m a Honda man now.

That’s me with a car. Every time. I get down there and I look, even when I’m not sure what I’m looking at.

And then a woman walks into the room.

She’s pretty. She laughs at the right stuff. She’s good in bed. And we call that love and we get married.

Probably saw the wiggle this time. Definitely not looking at the right things.

Same man. Same eyes. Completely different standard.

I’ve done exactly that. Twice.

The first time I did less checking on the woman I was about to build an entire life with than my father did on any car he ever looked at.

The second time I actually tried.

Here’s the true truth about that one. My second marriage was a better marriage than my first. Not a little better. Genuinely better.

And I did the thing. I actually did it. I brought her to my parents......that scene’s in my book......and I said, I didn’t listen to you the first time and we all know how that turned out. So here’s wife number two. What do you think?

That’s the twenty bucks. That’s driving it to a different garage and handing a man with nothing to gain a look under the hood.

So I married her.

And it worked. Better person, better match, I was a little older, we were both on our second time around.

It worked until it didn’t.

And when it ended it hit me sideways in a way the first one never did, because we’d done it right for most of it. Somewhere in the middle though I found out how much we both still had to learn, and I remember standing there thinking......I’m back at the starting line.

So when I found research saying second marriages actually do better than firsts, I believed it before I read a word of it. Because mine was. Better, not worse.

Then I kept reading.

✱9b And the more I read the less it held still. Depending on which slice of people you look at, second marriages come out better or worse. It flips.

So here’s my own two cents, worth what you paid for it. Most of us get better at things with age. But everything’s easier the second time round too......including getting divorced.

Which is the thing I’d say to any man about to go around again.

Take what didn’t work, try harder at it, point it at a new woman, and that isn’t a second chance. That’s a rerun.

But there’s another half to it, and it’s the thing my dad told me that I didn’t understand until I was living inside it.

Once a car’s been hit and repaired it never sits quite straight again. Doesn’t matter who fixed it or how good they were. The bend is in it now.

That’s me. That’s most men my age reading this. We took a hit in a relationship. We got repaired, more or less. And we don’t sit straight.

That’s not a reason to stay off the road. It’s a reason to know where your own bend is. Because if you don’t, you’ll drive the next one exactly the way you drove the last one and blame the car again.

The man who knows he pulls left can hold the wheel.

And I’ll tell you what that bend actually feels like, because I’ve had this conversation with myself more than once.

You don’t sit down and decide you’re scared. Nobody does that. Your body does it for you and it doesn’t ask permission.

It goes, “Hey Jhöl. Remember the last time we fell in love? Remember the side-swipe? Let’s just abort.”

Or worse, it gets clever. It says, “Fine, go ahead, have this one......but we are shutting down every conversation that goes anywhere near that road. Forever.”

And here’s the sneaky part. It never shows up as fear. It shows up as good judgment. It shows up as, “I’m just being careful this time.” As, “she doesn’t need to know that about me yet.” As, “why would I drag that up and wreck a good evening?”

That’s not caution. That’s a man driving with one hand because the other one’s holding a door shut.

And here’s what I’m actually doing about it, which is the thing I didn’t do the first time around.

I’ve been back in weekly sessions with my counsellor since February. Every week. Not because I fell apart.

But because I’d rather find the bend in the shop than discover it doing seventy on a wet road.

You can shine the tires and paint over the dent instead. Plenty of men do. Car looks great sitting in the driveway.

Ending a marriage is hard. Working on yourself and being honest about what you find is harder.

And I’ll tell you what it costs. My left knee feels about 127 some days, and I figure that’s from all the years of getting down on it.

It hurts to look sometimes. I’ve had to look a lot.

It helps a hell of a lot to have somebody there while you do.

So here’s what all of it finally taught me, and it’s where the rest of this thing lives.

The inspection tells you about the car. It doesn’t tell you a thing about the driving.

Part Three: The Driving

Now. If you’re still married, you’ve been reading all of this feeling pretty good about yourself. None of it’s landed on you. You didn’t buy the lemon. You’re not standing on a lot for round two. You’re sitting there with your coffee thinking, well, thank Christ that’s not me.

Good.

You’re the man I actually want to talk to.

Because the inspection’s over. You bought the car, it’s in your driveway, and nothing I’ve said so far is of any use to you at all.

Everything from here is about the driving.

Here’s what I’ve believed for a long time. The men who think there’s somebody better out there eventually go and find her. Not right away. But the belief comes first and the leaving comes later.

✱10 Back in the late nineties a psychologist named Rowland Miller tested almost exactly that.

He measured how much attention people paid to attractive strangers, men and women both, though they were mostly kids, university age.

He timed how long their eyes stayed on the photos. He measured the sweat on their skin while they looked. Then he came back two months later and asked who was still together.

About a third of them weren’t. And the looking predicted it better than anything those people had said about how committed they were.

Now I’ll be straight with you. Those were twenty-year-olds. I’d love to see somebody run that same test on a room full of forty-five-year-old married men before anybody bets the house on it.

But I’ll tell you why I believe it anyway.

The title of his paper is Inattentive and Contented.

Contented. That’s a fancy way of saying fine. No complaints. Nothing wrong at home.

Read it again.

The ones who left weren’t miserable. They were fine.

They were just looking.

✱11 Gottman’s work lands in the same place from the other direction. He’s got a whole body of work built around what he calls negative comparisons, and his sequence goes like this. A man stops cherishing his wife. Starts speaking negative about her in some way, in his own head and out loud in front of other people. Then he starts comparing her to somebody, real or imagined, who’d make him feel cherished. Then boundaries start getting crossed. Then it’s an affair.

The comparing comes before the affair. Not after it.

So here’s my take. The men whose marriages make it aren’t the ones with more willpower. They’re the ones who stopped shopping.

And you don’t need a lab coat and a stopwatch to work out which one you are.

You already know how long you look.

And so does she.

I was showing the rough draft of all this to a friend the other day over lunch. A woman, early forties. And that conversation turned out to be the funny part of the day and the sad part, both at once.

Women know. All of them. They know men look. It is not news to a single one of them and it never has been.

What most of them never say out loud is the next bit. She said it to me, and I promised her I’d put it in here.

Now these aren’t her words. This is me boiling it down as plain as I can get it, because I want every man reading this to actually hear it.

Hey bub, when you do that right in front of me, it hurts. It does damage.

And here’s what she is not saying, whatever you think you’re hearing. She’s not telling you to put your eyes out the day the ring goes on. She knows better than that.

She’s telling you, from somewhere she can’t name and doesn’t need to, exactly what that man measured with a stopwatch and a sweat monitor.

If you keep looking, there’s a good chance you go shopping. Then buying.

She’s been right the whole time. She just never had a lab.

Now hang in there, fellas. I’m that guy too. Stick with me for the ride. I promise you the research helps everybody win here. Us included.

Part Four: The See and The Saw Effect

There’s a way to go shopping without ever leaving the house.

And I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t want to write this part.

I’m not interested in running a shame session and I’m nobody’s priest. But I couldn’t leave it out, because it kept turning up in everything I read, and leaving it out would have been me deciding what you get to know.

So two things before I start.

The following effects of porn use isn’t a man problem. It went the same way for women in the research, harder if anything. We just do it more, so it lands on our side of the news more often.

And I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you what the studies found. Go look at it yourself in the research trail and make up your own mind.

That’s the whole point of my dad getting down on one knee. Nobody can see it for you.

So. ✱12 A group of researchers tracked just under three hundred people, every one of them in a committed relationship at the time. At the start they asked each person how much porn they were watching. Three months later they asked who had physically cheated. Not thought about it. Did it.

The more a person was watching pornography at the start, the more likely they’d cheated by the end. And it held even after they accounted for how much cheating had already gone on, how satisfied everybody was, and how long they’d been together.

Fine, you say. Unhappy guys watch more of it and unhappy guys cheat. Same guys.

That’s not what they found. And this is the part that stopped me cold.

Satisfaction with the current relationship did not drop. Not a bit. They didn’t come away thinking less of their partners.

They came away thinking more of everybody else.

Her end never went down. The other end went up. And a man sitting there on the low side is dead certain he’s the one who sank.

I call this the seesaw effect.

Now, those were students. And I’ll tell you what I assumed the second I read it......men my age are doing it at least as much. Probably more. The kids have got each other. A forty-five-year-old man has got a phone, a locked door, and a wife who went to bed an hour ago.

So we went and looked.

I was right, and I didn’t enjoy being right.

✱13 Men between thirty and fifty are the heaviest users in America. Nearly six in ten in the last month, against about four in ten of the young guys.

That’s their data, not ours, and nobody’s handed me a Canadian version. I’ve got no reason to think we’re built any different up here, but I’ll flag it rather than pretend.

So much for blaming the kids.

And it turns out somebody has studied grown married adults. Thousands of them, interviewed three separate times over about eight years. Not undergrads. Married people, tracked across most of a decade.

✱14 Married people who started watching porn between one interview and the next roughly doubled their chances of being divorced by the following one. For women it nearly tripled.

Then they split it by how happy people said the marriage was to begin with, and this is the one I can’t shake.

Among the ones who called their marriage very happy, it went from about three in a hundred divorced to twelve. Four times.

Among the ones who weren’t happy, it barely moved at all.

I read that twice to make sure. It was the good marriages that broke.

That’s now three separate pieces of research, from three completely different directions, all saying the same thing. The men who left in that stopwatch study weren’t miserable, they were contented. The people in the first study didn’t get less satisfied at home, the other end, the desire of options, just went up. And here, the marriages that collapsed were mostly the good ones.

This stuff doesn’t really seem to affect the miserable. It hits the guy saying my marriage is fine.

Two things I have to say straight, because I said I’d check my own work. The damage was actually worse for the younger couples, so older men use porn more but younger users get hurt worse by it. And this is people tracked over time, not an experiment. Starting to watch might be a symptom of something already going wrong rather than the whole cause. I can’t tell you which and neither can they.

And there’s another study on porn watching that’s worth considering, because it changes what this is actually about.

✱15 A group of researchers sorted about thirteen hundred people into three piles. Never watched it. Watched it alone. Watched it with their partner.

Then they asked how the relationship was doing. How satisfied people were. How committed. How they treated each other when they fought. How the sex was. And whether anybody had cheated.

Never came out best on everything. Alone came out worst on everything. And together? It landed nearly where never did.

So it was never really looking at the material. It’s a man doing it by himself, behind a door, and not mentioning it to his partner.

So here’s the only thing I’ve got to say about it, and it isn’t a should.

I’m not telling you it’s good. I’m not telling you it’s bad. I’m not telling you to stop and I’m not telling you to carry on.

I’m telling you to let her know.

Because the research on what happens when you don’t isn’t pretty.

Which is exactly why a guy can’t see it happening to him. Ask him if something’s wrong at home and he’ll tell you no, and he’s being honest. It doesn’t show up as not happy. It shows up as options.

And that’s the saw half of all this. What you looked at doesn’t leave when you shut the laptop. It stays in the room. It sits down next to you at dinner and it has opinions. For months after.

He thinks he isn’t doing anything.

He’s shopping.

And the receipt turns up two years later.

So before you decide none of this is about you......four questions. In your own head, nobody’s listening.

Do I actually need to be doing this?

How does it make her feel?

Does she even know?

And has my interest in my own partner dropped since I started watching regularly?

That’s all I’ve got. An invitation to take a look. What you do with it is your business.

It’s your car.

Part Five: Standard Issue

Let me take some weight off you, because I’m not calling any man broken for having eyes.

✱16 There’s a study out of fifty-two nations, six continents and thirteen islands, more than sixteen thousand people in it. The difference between men and women in wanting variety turned up in every single culture they measured.

Every one.

✱17 Other work says men respond harder to what they see. ✱18 Other work again says a good-looking face grabs attention automatically, in men and women both, before anybody’s decided a thing.

It’s standard issue. You didn’t order it and you can’t return it.

Noticing the pretty blonde is not the problem and it never was.

This next one’s my favourite study of the whole pile, because it’s the one that actually gives a man something he can do about all of this and can start today.

✱19 Some researchers took people who were already in relationships and got them thinking and feeling about their own partner. Not a lecture. Not a warning about cheating. They just put the person at home back in the front of everybody’s mind.

Then they showed them pictures of good-looking strangers and watched where the eyes went and how long they stayed there.

The looking got shorter.

Not because anybody told them to look away. It happened underneath the decision, down where your eyes just go wherever they go before you’ve had a thought about it. And it only happened with the attractive ones, which is how you know it was the mating part of the brain settling down and not just people getting bored.

That’s not willpower.

Willpower happens after you’ve already looked.

The first glance is reflex. How long you look is choice.

And I’ll tell you something that surprised me, because the Bible’s been making that exact split for two thousand years and I’d been reading it wrong my whole life.

Matthew doesn’t say a man sins when he looks at a woman.

✱20 Go back to the language it was actually written in and the words are looking in order to desire her. In order to. That’s intent, not eyeballs.

✱21 And that word up there, the old Greek one......it’s also the same word that the tenth commandment uses for coveting your neighbour’s wife. Same word, both places.

✱22 John Chrysostom drew this line sixteen hundred years ago, writing about what Christ meant here.

He said not simply, whosoever shall desire, since it is possible for one to desire even when sitting in the mountains, but whosoever shall look to lust. That is to say, he who gathers in lust unto himself. For this comes no longer of nature, but of self-indulgence.

It was never about the glance. It was always about deciding to stay there.

Notice her? Normal.

Leer at her? Ask for her Instagram? Problem.

The affair rarely starts in the bar. It starts at home. With a man making a shopping list of what he thinks he might be missing.

Part Six: Full Men Don’t Eat

I say this all the time and I mean it literally.

Full men don’t eat.

A full man will absolutely open the fridge. He’ll stand there with the door open and stare at that last slice of pie for a good long while.

And then he shuts the door.

Not because he’s disciplined. Because he isn’t hungry.

That’s the same finding I just walked you through, only standing in a kitchen. The fullness does the work the discipline can’t reach.

And it explains the other thing too. It doesn’t touch how you feel about your marriage. It touches how you look at your wife.

You still love her. You just want her a little less.

Makes a man wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze.

And let me be straight about what I’m actually saying, because it’s easy to hear the wrong thing here.

I’m not saying porn makes men cheat.

I’m saying this. A man sees something desirable. That’s the reflex.

Then he chooses to keep looking. That’s a decision, and it’s the first one he makes.

And then he starts the list. What she’s got. What I haven’t got. What I’m missing. What it’d be like.

That’s the shopping. That’s the part that does the damage, and it doesn’t care one bit where the looking came from. A screen. Somebody at work. An ex who texts at eleven at night. A woman at the gym. The delivery doesn’t matter.

The list is the list.

The neck turns the head. And the oldest part of a man, the part that runs on appetite and never asks permission, is doing the turning long before he’s told himself a story about why he’s looking.

So if a man’s grazing, he’s hungry.

Which means the useful question was never how do I stop looking.

It’s what am I not getting fed at home.

Now let me push back on my own question, because it isn’t quite right.

Sometimes he is starving. But go back to what they actually found. Those men weren’t unsatisfied. They were being fed.

So here’s the other half of it.

He isn’t comparing her to another woman. He’s comparing his average day to a stranger’s best day. A woman he doesn’t know, at her best, showing him nothing but the good part, asking nothing of him, disappointing him in no way at all......because she can’t. She isn’t fully there.

That’s not a meal. That’s a snapshot of a meal.

And here’s what he doesn’t see, which his partener feels the second it happens. He isn’t only being disrespectful. He’s quietly writing off everything she actually does. Because all of it......the showing up, the remembering, the staying when it got hard, the thousand small things nobody ever thanked her for......all of that is love.

It just stopped shining the way it did on the lot.

Nothing does. They buff them up for the showroom and then you drive it home and it never looks like that again.

Doesn’t mean you bought the wrong car.

New wears off. It wears off every time, on everybody. Nobody stays shiny.

But loyal doesn’t age.

Thoughtful doesn’t age.

Kind never once got old.

And there’s a second half to the question too, and it’s the half many skip.

It’s also:

what am I not feeding her?

Because if you only run the first half, what you’ve built isn’t insight. It’s a threat with a nice metaphor wrapped around it. Fill me or I’ll wander.

Fullness gets built by two people, and a man is on the hook for both ends of it. Trust. Safety. Feeling actually loved. If those aren’t in the house then nobody’s full, and a hungry man eventually eats. So do women by the way.

And that was my premise before I looked up a single thing.

No trust means no safety. No safety means you never really feel loved. And you can’t get close to somebody you don’t feel safe with, so that marriage was probably never going to make it no matter how many anniversaries it collected.

Everything I found just told me why.

So here’s the whole thing, as short as I can get it.

Get down on one knee before you buy. Spend the twenty bucks on that outside opinion.

And if you’ve already bought, the inspection’s over. So shut the fridge and go feed her.

Because if you’ve got a woman who’s loyal and good to you, why the hell do you want the cute blonde’s Instagram anyway?

But before you go, one more important thing, because I know what some of us guys will do with all of this.

We’ll go home and do more of the same stuff, harder and louder. The stuff she never asked for in the first place.

So here’s what I’ve worked out, and the women can correct me if I’ve got it wrong.

She wants to be seen. Heard. Valued. Appreciated. She wants to know that everything she’s been doing was worth doing.

And here’s the story we tell ourselves so we don’t have to. Well, she’s never complained. She’s fine.

She’s not fine.

She’s choosing peace.

That’s not the same thing and it never was.

So if you were lucky enough to win the coin flip, and smart enough to have picked a good one, then go feed her what she actually needs.

Tell her you appreciate her.

Tell her one true thing and make it specific to her. Not to women. Not to wives. To her.

That’s the whole meal.

You’re going to have to explain all this to your partner one day regardless.

It goes a whole lot better if you get there before her lawyer does.

Last Thing About My Dad

He and I were different men born into different worlds. He never met his own father. I’m fifty-one, and the world is changing again and likely faster than ever before.

So I took what he handed over and added what actually worked for me, and I’m giving the whole grease-covered playbook to both my sons. Not so they’ll do it our way. So they’ve got something to start from, which is more than my old man got.

And somewhere in there I quit trying to be my father and just went and found a mechanic who’d teach me.

Thirty years later, that’s what this is. My dad walked a used car into a stranger’s garage and paid twenty bucks for an honest look at it. Nobody made him do that. He just knew a second set of eyes was worth more than a good feeling about the paint.

I’m the stranger in the other garage now. You didn’t pay me and I’ve got nothing to sell you. But you’re here, so here’s what I’m seeing.

My dad really did stay married to my mother for all those years. He never strayed once.

The last words he ever said on this earth, were to her.

He said I love you......Three times.

He couldn’t explain a whole lot about marriage. He just did it in front of me for five and a half decades and hoped I was watching.

I was. I think I even see now what to look out for.

So try the inspection thing and remember the fridge door.

And if my boys read this in thirty years and none of it’s any use because we’ve all got hover cars by then? Good. That’ll mean they worked out something I couldn’t.

AI Use

Voice-first authorship. It starts on my phone. I talk, and what comes out is the wire......the shape of the thing, bent by hand. My agents pack the clay onto it. Then I work every inch of it back down myself, and nothing goes out that I haven’t. The thinking is mine and so is the last pass on every line. Full session records on request.

Jhöl Unger  ·  themensdateproject.org