Why she can't answer "What do you want?"

Picture this:
 
Across the basketball court, your son dribbles and then passes the ball to a teammate. From the other side of the gymnasium, you catch your wife looking at you as she sits in the bleachers on the opposite side of the court. Several minutes later, you catch her eye again, and she quickly looks away.
 
It’s halftime and your son comes over to grab the extra gatorade you brought.  You watch him jog back to his team’s locker room and catch out of the corner of your eye your wife looking again in your direction.
 
Driving home alone, you are forced to play defense from your racing mind: seeing your wife floods you with confusion.
 
• Why does she keep looking at you?
• Is she regretting her decision to separate?
• Does she realize that she has made a mistake?
• What, for f*uck's sake, does she want?
 
Your wife’s behavior for the past year and a half has been confusing and painful.
 
Above all, her vagueness about her commitment to your marriage has been excruciating.
 
Starting when your youngest hit 8th grade, your wife, out of nowhere, started talking about wanting a divorce. "This isn’t working,” she would say, hands on her hips, demanding that “things have to change.”
 
“What?!” you would ask her repeatedly.  “What do you want?! Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it!”
 
Tight lipped and leaving the room, she would toss the ball angrily back into your court and say, “I shouldn’t have to tell you?”
 
Never anything helpful.
Never anything that made sense.
 
Just empty threats with no resolution until you moved out on a temporary separation agreement because she “just couldn’t take it anymore.”
 
Why she can’t tell you what she wants

Her in-this-moment "feeling" is crystal clear to her.
 
Her feelings are clear to her, they're just not logical. This means, she can't explain it to you.
 
This clarity exists underneath layers of competing emotions she finds herself dressing in each day, as if donning one after another, the different garments of a multi-themed costume party.
 
When your wife feels she must provide a singular and logical answer for her layered emotional experience, she is being forced to rely on her own poorly formed and wounded masculine energy.
 
• She may freeze for the lack of words.
• She may feel lost in her layered reality.
• She may be confused and angry that you don’t understand her unspoken communication.
• She may assume you “don’t understand" and “don’t care.”
 
If your wife is “pinned down” by logic, she will feel forced to fit what is emotionally overwhelming into a small and confined box. She will seek freedom like an animal acting on instinct and escaping a warm hearth to dash out into the night.
 
Your wife has stepped onto the court but won’t tell you what game she wants to play.
 
To be continued...

Watch this video to hear what your wife feels when you "treat her like a man”:

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